The truths exposed by the Egypt analogy

The speech that CHP Chairman Özgür Özel gave, with all his belligerence and bluster, to defend the mayors detained on the charge of bribery, established as a crime caught in the act, was a speech that deserves to go down in the history of Turkish political rhetoric.

The most fitting stance for the head of a political party toward a member of his party arrested on charges of bribery and corruption is to say "Whoever did this cannot be from our party," and, even if he does not convict him himself before the judiciary, to leave it to the ruling of the judiciary. Of course, even if a person has been caught in the act, no extrajudicial execution is carried out on him. But no extrajudicial acquittal and defense is made either. Least of all if you are the chairman of Turkey's largest party, which claims to be a candidate for power.

What deserves to go down in the history of political rhetoric in Özgür Özel's speech is the absolute innocence he attributes to his own party members, and his standing by them, whatever they may have done, by politicizing the police and the judiciary that touch them. This attitude will give Özgür Özel a great deal of trouble. But there is another side to his speech that will not merely give him trouble but will end all his legitimacy and his very existence in the field of democracy.

With all his belligerence and aggressiveness, he attributes the corruption and bribery operations against his own municipalities entirely to the President's arbitrary practices and speaks of rising the masses against him. While threatening, with "These are only rehearsals," about the rallies he has held at Saraçhane since March 19, he loses the thread so badly that these words spill from his mouth:

"I know the day I will invite to the street. Do not make me invite this nation to the street. After that you will watch it like you watched the square in Egypt."

Is this what the CHP is going to do in the face of corruption and bribery allegations that, with videos, confessions and documents, can no longer be brushed aside without a serious judicial process? How has corruption come to be so widespread as to become the habitus of nearly the great majority of CHP politicians? Was what they would offer this country against a government that has ruled it for 23 years and has carried it, undeniably, somewhere, to be corruption and bribery as a style of politics? Instead of facing this question, what is it to put forward the square in Egypt as a threat and intimidation?

LET US THEN REMEMBER WHAT HAPPENED IN EGYPT

Exactly 12 years ago, in these days, a coup was carried out against the first president in Egypt's history elected in a truly genuine election, and the masses who opposed this coup and stood up for their votes and their will gathered in Rabia al-Adawiya Square to voice their protest against the coup plotters. But even there, their leader representing the masses, Muhammad Badie, declared that their protest had no intention of violence, saying "our peaceful stance is stronger than their bullets." Despite this, the coup plotters opened fire on the people defending Muhammad Morsi, who had been elected only a year before, and massacred around three thousand people.

In the analogy of the Egyptian square, what role could Özgür Özel be assigning himself? Is he identifying himself with the coup plotters who stole the elected government from the people, and in return assigning Erdoğan the role of Morsi, who represents the will of the people and for whose defense the people poured into the squares?

If you are waging a struggle for democracy, the last people you would identify yourself with are the coup plotters in Egypt. They are the ones who carried out the massacre there, who unjustly stole the elected government, and who, since the day they came to power, have impoverished the country even further while ruling it against the will of the people.

Twelve years ago in these days in Egypt, the Tamarod movement, which the coup plotters organized with Baltaji-type gangs, was occupying Tahrir Square, the symbol of freedom. Simultaneously, the Gezi incident was being organized here. We saw, watching both squares at the same time, that both were being cooked in the same place and made to flow toward the same place. In fact both were aimed at the same purpose in those days. The winds of democratization in the Arab world were thought to blow largely from Turkey.

Democratization, in turn, was a development that threatened the Zionist Camp David order of the Middle East. In the places where the Arab Spring occurred, this wind was to be stopped with coups, but these counter-revolutions had to be, to some extent, coups with a democratic appearance. At first it was important to arrange the legitimacy of the coups; in later cases the despotism already established would provide the necessary steam. But it would not be enough to strangle the Arab Spring; in Turkey, which inspired it, the elected government would also have to be brought down by a coup again in the guise of a democratic popular movement.

THE OCCUPYING ORIGINS OF CORRUPTION AS A STYLE OF POLITICS

In Egypt, and later in Libya, Yemen, Syria and most recently Tunisia, they did what they were going to do. Thus the order of occupation, maintained for one hundred and fifty years over the Ottoman geography and faced with a great threat by the Arab Spring, was re-established. What it has cost Muslims you can understand today by looking at the situation in each country. Only in Turkey were they unable to do what they wanted, and this troubled them. After the Gezi incident in 2013, they tried again with December 17/25, later in the 2015 elections with coalitions funded by the international centers of the same order, and most recently on July 15, 2016, this time by means of a direct military coup. This time they found before them a people who defended their own state and their independence. Indeed, perhaps they awakened that people, opened up a great space for that people on the road to becoming a nation.

Against the corruption accusations attributed to CHP municipalities, without even needing to wait for the ruling of the judiciary, they show that this much corruption can be carried out only with the logic of an occupier foreign to this nation. Otherwise corruption too has its limits. A corruption that has become so widespread a disposition can only be carried out with hostile feelings against a public with which you are at war. Only if the administration is perceived not as a trust but as booty can such reckless corruption be encountered.

It is no coincidence that İmamoğlu and Özgür Özel, who say they have been waging a struggle for democracy for one hundred and fifty years, take the history of the coup plotters precisely as their reference. This is the history with which they identify themselves. Whatever it is that they are struggling for, it tore apart our great state (the Ottoman Empire), handed it over to the enemy, and then made the new state founded after it into booty.

All the bluster stems from being reminded that the state is not booty for them.