Gülen paranoid

Abdülhamit Bilici

Reading some Turkey-originated media articles demonizing the Gülen movement and spreading the paranoia that people associated with the movement are turning a highly democratic country into an empire of fear, I start to realize that I have been very naive, unaware, disloyal and ungrateful.

It appears that I am not aware of the fact that our democracy has been smoothly functioning like clockwork for many decades, that our courts have been administering justice at the speed of light and that our prisons are filled only with people who are convicted by courts. I feel that I am too blind to see that the popular saying “Don’t hire a lawyer; instead hire a judge” was invented to depict the status of the judiciary in Patagonia, so I didn’t know that the country where members of the Supreme Court of Appeals, as the highest legal authority, asked some influential people, “Do you want us to quash or uphold it?” was Uganda. And no one from our country has ever applied to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) with complaints about human rights violations. The members of the judiciary who would diligently hail every coup and rush to attend every briefing invitation from the junta members were actually the citizens of Papua New Guinea. I did not know that Fethullah Gülen had to live in self-imposed exile for 13 years now with the accusation of treason by the same judiciary.

Clearly, I am heedless for not seeing that civilian-military relations are perfect in this country and that dates such as May 27, March 12, Sept. 12, Feb. 28 and April 27 are just here to remind us of the severe blowing of the southeasterly wind, while a democratically elected prime minister and two of his ministers were executed before the very eyes of the nation in Honduras, but not in this country.

Apparently, our theory and practice of freedom of the press is better than in Sweden and Abdi İpekçi, Uğur Mumcu, Musa Anter, Çetin Emeç, Taner Kışlalı, Hrant Dink and many other journalists died a natural death at an advanced age. Mumcu’s car exploded because of a natural gas leak, not during his investigation into the link between the deep state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Ahmet Kaya and Dink were declared heroes of freedom by those journalists who today fervently cry about the “loss of freedom,” while Metin Göktepe died skiing in Uludağ. I must admit that I have failed to see that the coup plot undersigned by Dursun Çiçek, who suggested that the government should be overthrown and innocent people be treated like terrorists through plans to plant guns in their homes, had actually emerged in Argentina. And it was the Argentinean chief of General Staff who first scorned this plot as a mere “piece of paper” even before waiting for the court’s verdict, then ordered the military prosecutor to prepare a “proper” indictment.

I was unable to realize that it was in Yemen that a mayor was imprisoned for reading a poem, and that it was Russian intelligence that played a role in the creation of a network that used a variation of hogtying to strangle their victims and that the villagers whose homes were burned down and were forced to eat excrement were the citizens of Rwanda.

Obviously, I was foolish to believe that journalists held meetings with subversive generals during the Feb. 28 process, blacklisted their own colleagues on the instructions of these generals, ran bold headlines based on the lie that cadets had been killed in chopping machines and the threat that the military may “resort to violence if needed,” attempting to intimidate the civilian government.

And I didn’t know that groups with Islamic inclinations spread the paranoid claim that the country was being sold and that many people were converting to Christianity under the influence of missionaries and that they held meetings not in churches, but in the Süleymaniye Mosque.

Apparently I didn’t know that the General Staff had not confessed that they had established fake websites in order to spread misinformation or that they blacklisted many civil society organizations (CSOs), including the Turkish Industrialists and Businessmen’s Association (TÜSİAD) and the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation (TESEV). I was unaware that the leader of the main opposition party had been ousted with an unresolved videotape operation in Ukraine and that thousands of people had not been wiretapped and blacklisted without a court order.

So as I understand it, it was the Çemişgezek district governor who, referring to the two petty officers who were caught red-handed as they planted a bomb by a bookstore in Şemdinli, said “I know them; they are good boys,” and that a statue of the prosecutor who prepared the indictment in this incident was erected in the gendarmerie barracks out of respect.

And I failed to see that a former chief columnist who today promotes freedom had criticized the midnight military memorandum of April 27, saying, “Such a thing is a disgrace to democracy,” while the columnist who today writes articles for İlhan Selçuk had then said the memorandum was a disgrace.

So it follows that the Ergenekon case is a big problem for the country, as it threatens our smoothly functioning democracy. It discredits the military by trying junta members. It undermines civilian-military relations. What do they want from marginal politicians, rectors, businessmen and journalists who are frustrated with elections but seek help from military coups instead? You, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party), the (Fethullah) Gülen movement and the masses accounting for 58 percent of the vote in the last referendum. What is this trouble you are giving us? Why are you turning our democracy into an empire of fear?

Those inside and outside, please spare yourself from this hypnosis. There is no “empire of fear” in the making in Turkey. Rather an empire of fear is being demolished and Gülen movement is one of the many dynamics that plays a role in that positive transformation. The most legitimate question an objective observer should ask is what is the correlation between those who are unhappy with the democratic transformation and those who hate the Gülen movement?

Published on Today's Zaman, 29 April 2011, Friday