The state restores itself!

Ali Bulaç

The state restores itself periodically. The coups and military interventions of April 27, March 12, Sept. 12 and Feb. 28 were operations of this kind.

Many believed that Feb. 28 was the last of these operations, but they were wrong. In Turkey, restoration of the state implies a reduction of democracy. This is because this restoration is performed not by the public, but by the state itself. Our state has reflexes to protect itself against the public.The state always sees a threat against itself. In the 1970s, this threat came from anarchists and communists. The coup of Sept. 12, 1980 purged them in a bloody manner. In the 1990s, the National Vision (Milli Görüş) supporters and religious people penetrated the state. They were trodden down by the postmodern coup of Feb. 28, 1997.

With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, communists were no longer a threat to the state. Kurdish nationalists and separatists seem to be relatively at ease as they are part of and party to the settlement process since 2009. The coup of Feb. 28, 1997 saw reactionaryism as its primary threat, but the state lacked the possibility of restoring itself with other groups and it chose to submit itself to the conservative religious groups who were hungry for power and had domesticated themselves. In the early 21st century, the global powers' plans for the region overlapped with the religious groups' quest for power. They kicked off a new period by making an agreement, explicitly or implicitly.

In 2002, the state was sandwiched between external reform pressures and internal social dynamics for change and had no place to go. It delivered itself to the Justice and Development Party (AK Party), which had declared its divorce from political Islamism. The ruling AK Party emerged as a coalition of all religious groups. Currently, however, both global powers and the central core inside Turkey concluded that the religious groups have gone beyond the limits and scope set for them and that the state organs have started to exhibit a religious character. The new threat was coded as the Hizmet movement that encourages Turkey's democratization.

The external and internal powers see three threat categories: (a) the Hizmet movement, (b) the AK Party and (c) other religious congregations, groups and organizations. Although the state is focused on the Hizmet movement, it targets not only this movement but also all religious communities.

To summarize, the state restores itself. It uses the previous victim as its tool before discarding it later after having used it for its purposes. The victims of the Sept. 12 coup were the leftists, and the state used them as a tool in the postmodern coup of Feb. 28, 1997. The Workers' Party (İP), the leading actor of this coup, had rallied in İstanbul with placards reading, "Let the laws of Atatürk's revolutions be implemented [against religious groups]" in January 1997, but they were later imprisoned. They were released from prison only recently. The victims of Feb. 28 were Islamists and religious people. Some of them abandoned the "Islamism" ideology to adopt a conservative identity and they purged the actors and juntas of the Feb. 28 coup. In this way, the state was restored.

Someone is making the groups -- which are believed to add an extra, unwanted religious character to the state affairs -- clash with each other. Those who are scared of the specter of a "parallel state" are advised to ally with the coup-perpetrators who are assumed to have become domesticated. There is a delicate engineering effort going on. If this plan works, first the Hizmet movement, then the AK Party and finally all religious communities will be purged. There is only one way to rectify the state: To make it abide by the rule of law, not to take over the state.

Published on Today's Zaman, 05 May 2014, Monday