The Bangladesh Conference in Turkey and the Spirit of the July Revolution

In July of last year, a people's revolution took place in Bangladesh that ended the Hasina dictatorship, which had ruled for 15 years like a kind of February 28 regime. The student protests and broad-based popular marches, which resulted in Sheikh Hasina, who over 15 years had built a complete regime of fear especially over Muslims, fleeing Bangladesh on August 5, produced one of the most hopeful developments of recent years. In assessing the year 2024, together with the people's revolution in Syria on December 8 and the ceasefire reached on December 15 at the end of the year-and-a-half-long Zionist crime of genocide, the July Revolution in Bangladesh was one of the great developments that made it possible to describe 2024 as the herald of a new spring for the Islamic world.

The year 2011 was also a year of the Arab Revolutions. In a domino effect, the revolutions that took place one after another, beginning in Tunisia and moving through Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, were halted by a harsh international conspiratorial resistance in Syria. Then, through the counter-revolutions that followed, the masses who demanded "freedom, dignity, and bread" were made to regret bitterly what they had asked for. In Syria, the existing regime was stopped before the revolution could take place, through hypocritical practices. The US, which claimed to Syria that it was coming to overthrow Assad, giving more weight to the threats a regime change might pose to Israel, ensured, through its hypocritical support for Assad, that his bloody and criminal regime survived for at least 12 more years. These days some people are still consoling themselves, and trying to console others, with the tales that the US conspiracy has put out to present the matter to us as exactly the opposite. Anyway, now let us go to Bangladesh.

The international powers that sustained Bangladesh's 15-year Hasina regime could no longer hold out against the anger it had incurred and accumulated among the people. On July 16, the courageous stand of the Bangladeshi student Abu Sayeed against Hasina's police, which ended in martyrdom, brought down the empire of fear that had been built over 15 years among the Bangladeshi people, and it took only 20 days for the blow it struck to bring down the Hasina regime. Abu Sayeed's martyrdom is seen as very parallel to the martyrdom of Bouazizi, who lit the spark of the Tunisian revolution.

In place of this dictatorship brought down by a popular uprising, a transitional government was formed under the leadership of the Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, in which all segments of society are represented. The first signs of this process, which aims to keep all segments of society at peace with one another, are extremely positive. Bangladesh, founded in 1971 by separating from Pakistan, is a very important country geopolitically as well, with a population approaching 200 million. It has an extremely hardworking and long-suffering people, but equally moral and disciplined. Now, freed from the restrictive and suppressive chains of dictatorship, it is seeking to reach its own potential and above all to build good governance and life for itself, but also ways of existing as itself on the world stage.

The International Conference on Bangladesh Studies, organized at Istanbul Ticaret University by the Bangladesh-based Centre for Political and Social Research (CPSR), brought together academics, policymakers, and diplomats to examine Bangladesh's political transformation and its policy development and reform initiatives. The international conference titled "Building Bangladesh 2.0 in the Spirit of the July Revolution" was, I can say, the most professionally organized conference I have attended so far, though in an amateur spirit. Nearly 200 participants presented papers on many subjects, such as governance policies on governance, economic resilience and geopolitical strategy, political transformation, institutional reform initiatives, accountability in prosecuting mass killings, protecting freedom of speech and expression, and ways of building a functioning democracy.

CPSR Chair Dr. Hafizur Rahman stressed the event's role in creating "a new Bangladesh based on the spirit of the July uprising" as well as its role in strengthening bilateral intellectual and diplomatic cooperation. It is admirable that the University's Rector, Prof. Dr. Necip Şimşek, hosted this conference with his opening remarks and contributions in subsequent sessions. Besides this university of ours, which has quite a few Bangladeshi students, the conference also presented an interesting and fine scene of how the many Bangladeshi students in Türkiye are contributing to Türkiye's international standing. Frankly, the meticulousness, hard work, and aptness in this organization carried out by Bangladeshi students in Türkiye made me especially hopeful about Bangladesh. What I saw was a strong sign of where the rise of Asia will come from.

The conference's opening session was held with the keynote addresses of Dr. Mahmudur Rahman, editor of Bangladesh's Daily Amar Desh newspaper, "The Political Philosophy of the July Revolution," and mine, "The July Revolution and Lessons from the Arab Spring: Comparisons." In my talk, in which I attempted a deconstruction of some of the mythic discourses surrounding the Arab Spring, I addressed in particular those among these mythic discourses who stipulate a conspiracy behind the Revolutions.

The Arab Revolutions were popular uprisings, social explosions. To think they were under control is to say that peoples had no will and no existence whatsoever. Yet the peoples made the revolutions, but conspiracies entered the scene like devils after these revolutions and tried, through coups against the revolutions, to restore their former state, the Zionist imperialist order.

Let no power claim the revolution in Bangladesh as its own, either. This was clearly a people's revolution, but one must guard against the devils entering the scene precisely now. For this, of course, the lessons to be drawn from the fate of the Arab Revolutions must not be neglected.