Caught unprepared

Kerim Balcı

I have always admired my nation’s solution-oriented creativity in times of crisis. Whenever a problem emerges, a brilliant touch of genius comes out and finds a way either to bypass or to solve, or at least to internalize and make peace with, the problem.

This is, I believe, one of the human sides of my nation, as opposed to the systemic successes of the Western mind. There, the system assures that the people should not make mistakes; here, the people find ways to cope with the mistakes and even turn them into success stories.

In the early 1990s, when the Soviet bloc collapsed and the Turkic and largely Muslim republics of Central Asia gained their independence, Turkey passed through a euphoria of presenting itself as the “elder brother” of the new republics. But it was not well prepared to do that. There was no institutional preparation to engage the peoples of these republics and to a large extent decision makers in Turkey were ignorant of the feelings, mindsets and traditions of these nations-in-the-making. The end result is this: 20 years have passed, and none of the Central Asian republics are truly democratic. Some did quite well economy wise thanks to their natural resources, but quite similar to the oil-rich Arab states, petro-dollars didn’t translate into egalitarian distribution of wealth or scientific development. Countries like China and Iran tried to penetrate these newly emerging markets with relative success.

Fethullah Gulen

Seeing that the state was in no position to lead the transformation in the Central Asian republics, one man proposed a brilliant idea: Let us educate the future intellectuals of these countries, so that these countries can all be leaders in their geographies instead of being led by Turkey or by any other country. This genius touch came from Fethullah Gülen Hocaefendi, who advised his sympathizers to go and open schools in those countries. Twenty years on, we see that the countries with the largest number of Turkish schools are doing best by means of rebuilding their futures. The more Turkish schools a country has today, the better democratic standards they will have in 10 to 20 years. This is a simple observation looking at the transformation of the Turkic republics in Central Asia. Kazakhstan is at one end of this observation and Uzbekistan at the other.

Today, the Arab world is passing through its own “collapse of the Berlin Wall.” With their interest-ridden understandings of democratization, capitalists of the West may have preferred to work with a “friendly dictator” instead of a fluctuating and uncontrollable Arab street. If the future transformation of the Arab nations is left to the appetites of these insincere capitalists, the best result will be the establishment of new dictatorships in place of the collapsed ones. And Turkey is in no way prepared to help -- let alone to lead -- these countries in reconstructing their futures along democratic lines. I am watching TV discussions of our so-called Middle East experts about the future of Egypt and Libya and in the end I find myself not enlightened about “what will happen there tomorrow,” but perplexed about “what will happen here the day after.” Our unpreparedness to “pave the way of democratization” in these countries pushes me to be pessimistic about our own democracy.

But I have faith in the creativity of my nation. One man will come out and say: “Let’s open new schools in Egypt, in Libya, in Tunisia and in other Arab countries of sawra [revolution in Arabic]. Let’s invite more and more Arab youngsters to come and join Turkish universities. Let’s establish discussion channels, intellectual forums and websites where the historical productivity of the Arab mind is reintroduced through a Turkish touch.”

Ten to 20 years from now, we will see better standards of living, more established democracies, higher levels of human rights records in Arab countries where there are more Turkish schools. We won’t teach them. No! We will find the truth together…

Publised on Today's Zaman, 24 February 2011, Thursday