February 20, 2015

Sacrificing Sümeyye Erdoğan

İhsan Yılmaz

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan seems to be so desperate that he is using his own daughter's name in a terrible, horrendous and monstrous psychological campaign by possibly risking her life. He is willing to risk her life. He is trying to target, criminalize and demonize the opposition and the Hizmet movement by claiming they will assassinate his daughter Sümeyye Erdoğan.

The media, which is mostly under his despotic control, ran the fabricated story in their headlines on Friday. He is acting like an eternal Küçük Emrah, a Turkish arabesque singer who often wept when singing and always presented himself as the victim, the wronged and the oppressed to influence the emotions of the Turkish public.

Seeing as he will have difficulty in getting two-thirds of the votes and rigging elections may not so easily achieve this, Erdoğan is trying to manipulate voters' feelings by risking and sacrificing his own daughter. He seems to have lost his mind. Why do I say this? This is not a game. What would he do if a third party who hates and wants both Erdoğan and the Hizmet movement to suffer tries to assassinate Miss Erdoğan? God forbid. Such things have happened in the past. Ergenekon killed people from their own camp purely to “show” how cruel, monstrous and criminal “the Islamo-fascist” Justice and Development Party (AKP) was.

Erdoğan keeps talking about international dark forces and the foreign spies in operation in Turkey. If he is sincere about these allegations, why is he not worried about this possibility and why is he risking his own daughter's life by making her a visible target? As his former friend of many decades, Abdüllatif Şener, said a few years ago, Erdoğan is ready to burn Turkey to keep power. This is what I have termed “Assadization.”

He is so desperate to remain in power and hide from the justice system because of his serial crimes, he seems ready to do whatever it takes. If he believes that a civil war is the last resort to keep him in power, he will ask his personal toy, the National Intelligence Organization (MİT), to organize one. Remember, the former head of MİT, Hakan Fidan, allegedly speaking in the illegally wiretapped conversation with then-Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu and the army general about launching missiles towards Turkey to justify a probable Turkish army advance into Syrian territory.

He is ready to legislate a draconian, Hitlerian law to make Turkey a total police state. Look at how the AKP deputies are attacking and physically injuring opposition deputies in Parliament to pass a security bill that would have the Turkish police resemble Judge Dredd, a cartoon character who dispenses justice as a policeman, judge and executioner. Even before this terrible law may come to pass, the police have already killed more than 180 people in the streets in the last decade, seven of them during the Gezi Park protests. Can you imagine what would they do with these extra powers?

If the bill is not passed, perhaps Erdoğan will ask MİT to provoke the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) into re-igniting its terror campaign so that he may blame the bloodshed on the opposition and the Hizmet movement to win over the Turkish nationalist vote. The new draft bill and the dictatorial presidential system offered by Erdoğan are so horrific and terrifying that even former President Abdullah Gül broke his long silence to openly criticized them. Gül has been totally silent on many illegalities, great problems, terrible injustices and chaos in the country but he felt that he had to speak out on the draft security bill and Erdoğan's presidential system. This is telling.

Erdoğan will also resort to his old tactic of blackening his opponents by serving up their extramarital sex tapes to the Internet. He has been announcing them and will try to repeat this old trick. He will serve the video recordings to the pro-government media and they will use them. He will keep using them for electoral gain in every election rally in every city but he will blame the Hizmet movement for producing such illegal tapes. This has worked in the past and he thinks that at least the half the electorate he is addressing is ready to swallow it again.

He is aware that the only important issue his voters are concerned about is that their own economic wellbeing is being eroded. His voters are slowly becoming unemployed and facing difficulties in buying food. That will ultimately lead them to realize Erdoğan's corruption. In desperation, he will make many mistakes.

Published on Today's Zaman, 20 February 2015, Friday

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