No winner in the developments in the Middle East

For the Western countries, the administrations established on borders drawn on the basis of the Sykes-Picot Agreement never had a priority of representing the people of these regions. On the contrary, the basic priority was that the administrations be loyal to them. This loyalty was sought through the establishment and support of typical Baath regimes.

The Baath regime may have many features, but its most important feature here is that it is a minority rule that makes it possible to control and govern the majority through a minority. This method was achieved to a degree owing to the particular conditions of the post-colonial period.

This success, of course, had a cost that the peoples were made to pay. The beliefs, values and personality of the peoples were disregarded; those who objected were suppressed by being massacred, imprisoned, or kept away from every center of power in society. For this form of rule to stand, a tight mukhabarat control was necessary.

In Iraq, the Sunni minority's control over the majority made up of Shiites and Kurds was secured through this Baathist method. In Syria, the Nusayris, an even smaller minority, exercised a complete iron-curtain rule by this method over the Sunnis, who make up more than 70 percent of society. In Bahrain, the Sunni minority ruling the Shiite majority needed a different combination of monarchy and Baathism.

In Egypt, although there was no sectarian or ethnic preference, the military forces that came to power from 1952 onward, by controlling all economic resources, created new strata in society that were wholly fed by the state and loyal to themselves. This stratum formed the actual practice of an Egypt-specific Baathism. The way to keep this rule standing, too, was nothing other than a strong mukhabarat regime.

In fact, Turkey's practice of Kemalism was not to be considered different from this. The long rule of a minority alien to society, built on the typology of the approved citizen that was created, set out a model of a kind of Turkish Baathism. This was a rule that especially excluded the devout Turkish and Kurdish person and exercised a complete despotism over him.

The Arab Spring was an uprising of the identities suppressed by these Mukhabarat regimes. It is quite natural that this uprising emerged with a different timing and story in each country, because each country had its own experiences and dynamics. In Turkey, this uprising, which had taken place long before through democratic means, brought the country to a certain balance.

The collapse of the mukhabarat regimes and the establishment in their place of more democratic regimes with a higher capacity to represent the people, it seems, does not please the countries that appear to care a great deal about democracy. For them the priority is not that the regimes established there represent their peoples but that they be loyal to them. That being so, not only is it impossible for the Middle East to calm down, but it is also out of the question that the regimes established or maintained will ultimately be useful to them.

Turkey follows a policy that respects the will of the peoples in the region. This policy naturally requires confronting the existing status quo in the region. There is not even a demand or effort of specifically changing anyone's regime, but Turkey does not remain silent against the human rights violations of the existing regimes either.

The Middle East, where the peoples these days voice more their discontent against their own oppressive, tyrannical mukhabarat regimes, is in complete turmoil. This turmoil ultimately expresses a search for a new order in the Middle East. None of the pictures we see by looking at today's events is lasting. Everything is changing rapidly.

During this turmoil there is in fact no clear criterion for calculating who gains what and who loses what. But the appetite of those who immediately start a grocer's-style profit-and-loss calculation at every event that develops is strange. Of course, all the calculations they make show the losses, even the bankruptcy, of our foreign policy in the Middle East

We have said it before. None of the events developing in Iraq and Syria, and even in Egypt, are events that Turkey wanted or was involved in. The incidents developing in these countries are a trial for everyone. If there is to be a gain in these events, it should be sought in where one stands and to what extent that stance is consistent with human values. These regimes, which are murderous, sectarian, coup-making and have committed every kind of immorality, have no place in the world of the future. Therefore, being distant from these regimes is not counted as a loss.

In essence, to suppose that the countries that support these regimes or do not keep their distance from them have also come out profitable from this process is the work of unprincipled greedy people who find the sound of the drum pleasant from afar. Those in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries who support the coup-making Egyptian regime, do you suppose they are gaining something? Are Russia and Iran gaining much with the scheming politics they display today in Syria and Iraq? Their reputations are razed to the ground every day.

And what about the US? It is at its wits' end trying to ward off the troubles that came out of the Pandora's box it opened. Every step it takes is more costly than the last, and the step it does not take is more costly than the one it will take.

Fine, what is going on in the Middle East is not at all encouraging for Turkey, but be assured there is no one who can be said to have ultimately come out profitable from what is happening. What is happening shows the incapacity of the world's current order, and this incapacity forces a search for a new order.