The treasonous blows that open the door from within to the occupiers

Of course it is far more important to see 15 July less as the anniversary of a coup attempt than as the anniversary of an epic resistance against coups. The history, politics and economic regime of Turkey have been woven since 1876 with coups and balance adjustments. Coups did not constitute exceptional situations for Turkey. The rule was coups, and the centers that carried out the coups and made balance adjustments to the country through them.

All the other elements and institutions of society had to conform to this regime. Saying popular sovereignty, they carried out every kind of imposition in spite of the people, with the claim that it was for the people. They claimed an identity between their own minority and foreign-occupier will and the people. In fact they knew very well that they were foreign to the people. Had they asked the people, they would not have been able to do any of the things they had imposed on the people for 150 years. Whenever they put a real option before this nation, they saw very well that the people would turn straight to that option and topple them from power.

The Free Republican Party was conceived as a party under control, a satellite to the Republican People's Party, but the people placed far greater expectations on it than had been calculated. These expectations were going to push things off the rails and, as a party that had slipped out of control, it was heading within a short time toward forming an overwhelming majority in the elections. It was dissolved on only the 99th day of its founding, and in this way the people were shown that they were within the limits of a Jacobin power and had nowhere to flee from it. In any case, this power was not one formed by the will of the people, that is, by election. It was the logic of a power that the coup tradition, begun in 1876, had reached by 1909.

The policies imposed in spite of the people were foreign policies, policies foreign to this people, this nation, this land. For that reason it was not possible for them to be accepted by free will.

The regime that was established agreed, from 1946 onward, under the compulsion of the conditions the country was in and of international commitments, to a democracy game that it thought it could manage. It thought it could manage it but suffered much trouble. The first attempt (1946) had been very easy and was promising that a controlled democracy might be possible for later applications. Yet from 1950 on the situation changed. The democracy game was accustoming the people more than necessary to declaring their will. The nation's declaration of will also led it to act independently. Yet there were those who regarded themselves as the owners of Turkey, and there was the possibility that a people with free will might take the country out of their control. After that, it is an inevitable result that all the coups were made in the name of those so-called "owners," with their support, approval and in regard to their interests. Coup-makers therefore cannot be native, have not been native, and have always allocated both the resources and the direction of the country to the powers whose agents they were. Even Turkish foreign policy always operated under mortgage during the coup years; Turkey could not have a policy of its own.

Özgür Özel and Ekrem İmamoğlu's occasional references to the 150-year so-called "democracy struggle" show both history and their belonging to this network of relations. Özgür Özel, who says he belongs to the Young Turk movement, is in fact also confessing the affiliation we can trace from his politics.

The regime of coups was also the regime of Turkey's dependence on the outside, and it was a regime that tried to determine Turkey's identity, its belongings, its friends and enemies. It was also the source of the terror problem woven around Turkey's neck. Although those who attempted the 15 July coup attempt, and before it the 12 February, Gezi, and 17-25 December coups, appear to be different actors, they were working toward the same place. Had any of the coups succeeded, a balance adjustment would also have been made on Turkey in the name of the Zionist world status quo. Because that balance has been disrupted in favor of Turkey and against Zionism. On 28 February they made that intervention for the same balance. 15 July set out toward the same aim, but it found a nation before it. In fact a nation they had suppressed and destroyed; a nation with its Turk, its Kurd, its Arab, its Circassian, its poor and its rich.

Before 15 July, against 27 April, Gezi, and 17-25 December, the President, as the elected representative of the nation, stood very firmly with his unparalleled leadership and repelled these coups. But on 15 July the nation itself proved itself to hold its own will. For that reason 15 July needs to be seen as one of the most real and effective victories in our 150-year history. This victory revealed all the components of a nation's real awakening and formation.

After 15 July, Turkey began to move toward a completely different place at an unparalleled speed, both in the field of development and in the field of international relations. Industrial development leaps in defense and other fields that have not been recorded in the history of the Republic were put forth. The fight against terror was waged for the first time this effectively, and terror was pushed back within the country's borders almost to the zero point. The "weapons burning" event taking place today, precisely on the eve of the 9th anniversary of 15 July, has been a giant step toward a wider horizon, simplifying the goal of a terror-free Turkey in the face of a greater goal.

The horizon laid out by the President in his speech on this event was a manifesto that carries Turkey much further ahead and shows the possibility of becoming one and together again for the entire Islamic world.

Only such an opening would suit the anniversary of 15 July. An opening in which Turkey has secured its unity and togetherness on a wider horizon, one more prosperous, more just, and which will constitute a hope for Muslims all over the world.

There will of course be those who try to darken this horizon. Those who say "Where did ummahism come from!" are those who try to preserve and defend the regime of coups that worked for 150 years of Crusader-Zionist dependence. From this hour on, they have no existence other than the mere names that the imaginary fortresses they defend have made up and magnified with their words.

On 15 July Turkey reached the consciousness of being a nation (this nation, however it comes about, means the same as the ummah, with its Turk, its Kurd, its Arab, its Laz, its Circassian, its Albanian), lived its experience, and set out on its inevitable path.