ENGLISH
Some dates
and names are grafted onto the national consciousness. They are essential
ingredients of the colective memory!
If you are an
American, the 4th of July means something to you. It is Independence Day, when
“in the course of human events”, as Thomas Jefferson put it, the people of the
American colonies decided to severe political bonds with Britain. It is an
important date for every U.S. citizen, even for those who have later joined the
American family.
Likewise
Valley Forge, Alamo (there is an expression “Remember the Alamo”), Gettysburg
(Lincoln’s address is required reading at schools), Pearl Harbor (F.D.R.’s “Day
of Infamy”) Iwo Jima (a powerful sculpture in Washington celebrates it), and
even Vietnam and the World Trade Centre- tragic occurences that nevertheless
bolster the sense of nationhood!
Every
Frenchman and Frenchwoman knows Quatorze
Juillet, Bastille is a symbol of oppression, as well of rising against such
oppression, that resonates in every French heart. The “Lions of Belfort” are
celebrated with a monumental stone lion- in Belfort. The French Resistance
enjoys almost mythic status.
The British are proud of their victory in
Waterloo (they named a railway terminal after it), of their heroism in defeat
at Dunkirk, of their foolhardiness in the Crimea (Tennyson’s “Light Brigade”), their victory over the “Invincible Armada” in
1588, and the RAF’s courageous stand against the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain (Chuchill’s speech: “Never in
the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few”). All
Russians are aware of what it cost to stop Napoleon in Moscow and, later on,
Hitler in Stalingrad.
The Australians and New Zealanders trace the
forging of their national identities to the Gallipoli Campaign (against the
Turks).
Even the
Germans, whose great defeat in World War II is compounded with shame, would
be loathe to forget their own trials in the conflict. I am a witness to the
pride with which they resurrected the devastated city of of Dresden.
And you would be hard pressed to find anybody
in these countries foolish enough to suggest the removal of these resonant
names and dates from the national consciousness.
Now, about
May 19th. Every Turkish schoolboy and schoolgirl knows that date. Along with
the three other national holidays: 23rd of April, 30th of August, and 29th of October.
We are at
present ruled by a democratically elected goverrment- assuming the elections
were not rigged- that is sytematically undermining its own national celebrations.
First prime minister Erdoğan managed to be “otherwise engaged” during
celebrations, then in the last year the 30th of August and the 29th of October were cancelled, the pretext for the former
being the earthquake in Van, the latter the killing of a number of Turkish
soldiers by PKK insurgents. The public took the banner and, in areas unsympathetic
to the government, celebrated anyway. As for the 23rd of April, observed as a children’s holiday, that was
celebrated in a sort of “sanitized” fashion.
The Ministry
of Education recently decreed the annulment of all but the barest
commemorations of May 19th. Reaction was swift, some areas- notably Izmir-
annonced full scale celebrations for a week. Some citizens took the initiative
so far as to take the decree to court, and happily, the court overruled it.
Full scale celebrations are now allowed, and the government’s opponents seem
determined to rub in their legal victory with a big turnup.
One outcome
of our government’s latest faux pas was to get me to start this blog.
What happened on May 19, 1919?
Turkey, then
still the Ottoman Empire, was allied to Germany- the losing side- during the First World War. You may be
familiar with the Versailles treaty that imposed heavy conditions on defeated
Germany; it is mentioned in Western media a lot because it is believed the
resultant bitterness gave rise to Nazism. Less known in the Western popular
media, but very much part of the national consciousness in Turkey, was the
similarly damning treaty of Sèvres (August 10th, 1920) imposed on the Ottoman
state, bringing partition and turning the Sultan into a powerless figurehead in
the occupied capital of a truncated country with hardly a pretence of
independence.
The
occupation and partition was in full swing well before the signing of the
treaty. A general named Mustafa Kemal, with an impressive military record that
even then brought him hero status, decided on resistance. He and a group of
like-minded comrades set out for Anatolia on ship and set foot at the Black Sea
port of Samsun on May 19th, 1919 (the
first national holiday).
That “one small step” is considered the start of the
Turkish struggle for independence. Mustafa Kemal later said he considered that
day “his birthday”, so it is (was) also celebrated as a day for remembering him .
By 1920
Mustafa Kemal managed to create a united front centered in Ankara and
independent of the Sultan’s puppet government in occupied Istanbul. On 23rd of April, 1920 (the second
national holiday), a Grand National Assembly was created as a kind of government in
exile in the Turkish hinterland.
The new
assembly in Ankara created an organized army, bolstered by volunteers fleeing
from Istanbul. The war was fought on many fronts, but the decisive victory was
won over the Greeks at Dumlupınar in central Anatolia on August
30th, 1922 (the third national holiday), after which the Turks moved swiftly to
the Aegean coast.
It was
Mustafa Kemal’s new government in Ankara, and not the Sultan’s government in
Istanbul, that negotiated the ensuing peace treaty and wrested full indepence
from the Western powers (Lausanne, Juıy 24th1923).
Mustafa Kemal
and supporters passed a motion to abolish the ineffectual Sultanate and
declared the founding of the new Turkish Republic on October 29th, 1923 (the fourth national holiday). The Sultan retained
only his spiritual powers as Caliph- something like a Muslim Pope, a hereditary
office Ottoman sultans have claimed
since Selim I acquired it by force in 1517. The Caliphate was in turn
abolished (March 3rd, 1924), and the Turkish constitution declared the young republic to be a “secular”, i.e. no longer a theocracy, no longer subject to the
“Sharia”, or Islamic law. Faith was henceforth left to the individualal conscience.
Mustafa Kemal
was given the surname “Atatürk”- “father of the Turks”- by the Grand National
Assembly on November 24th, 1934. It is by that name that the world knows him.
Mustafa Kemal, later Atatürk
For all-round information on Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his importance, you can check out:
Now, given
the meanings of the national holidays, which have been regularly celebrated for
close to a century,
Given the
essentially fundamentalist Islamist viewpoint of the ruling party, and their
voters,
Why do you
think the present Turkish Government would be taking such pains to remove these
milestones of the history of the Turkish Republic from the nation’s
consciousness?
Conspiracy Theories?
Many people
are sceptical of conspiracy theories, and rightly so! But in my country, you
can’t avoid them; either you believe the government, which claims to have
unveiled several wide-ranging conspiracies against itself, and has been
conducting a string of razzias for
the last four years, or you believe the suspects who claim they are victims of
an intricate frame-up! First vast stockpiles
of hidden arms were unearthed, allegedly in preperation of a great armed
insurrection against the government, attributed to a terrorist organization
called Ergenekon. After four years of
inconclusive trials no one has admitted to being member of such an
organization, which has no terrorist act to its name and is apparently a
fictitious organization dreamed up to bring a sizeable chunk of intelligent
resistance behind bars, and intimidate the rest. The detainees, whose numbers
reach the hundreds, are composed of the secular elite; journalists,
academicians, and officers- both retired and active, compose the bulk. They are
of different backgrounds and convinctions, united only in their opposition to
the fundamentalist Islamic slant of the government. The trials are inconclusive
and drag on an on! The Silivri prison
outside Istanbul has become notorious as the oubliette where these people are incarcerated. Hasdal is the first
of a steadily increasing number of prisons for military men.
Then in 2010,
a pro-government newspaper claimed to have unearthed a military plot to
undermine the government (allegedly dating from 2003), a covert operation called
Balyoz (“Sledgehammer”). This served
as the excuse for a fresh string of arrests- this time concentrating more
intensely on the military. The latest news holds the figure at 364 officers,
including generals and admirals. 250 of which have been detained for close on
15 months without verdict. (This does not
include officers held for various other alleged conspiracies!)
These are the
biggest “conspiracy trials”, but the governments’ arrests are by no means
restricted to these. Being an animator, I have my own frame of reference! Do
you remember the trial scene in Disney’s “Alice in Wonderland?” (“Sentence first, verdict afterwards!”)
"Sentence first, verdict afterwards."
Dr. Mehmet Haberal, one high-profile victim
On April
13th, 2009, in a fresh Ergenekon
roundup, Dr. Mehmet Haberal, a
transplant surgeon, founder and rector of the Başkent university in Ankara, was
arrested. As yet, he has not been charged with anything definite.
Prof. Dr. Mehmet Haberal
By then I was already full of the frustration and anger from the farce of supposed justice going on around me. I hung up a flag outside our window- the same one that accompanied me during my professional life abroad. (Was beside me on my desk through my Disney years!) I said “I won’t take this down until they release this man!” I figured on a few weeks, months at most. It has been more than three years! Dr. Haberal still does not know what he is in for.
What is it all in aid of?
The present
ruling party is dismantling Atatürk’s secular republic by slow, hypnotizingly
slow, yet terribly efficient steps. The discrediting of the Republican era, its
founders and ideals, and the glorification of the Ottoman past point in one
direction: the resurrection of a theocratic Turkey ruled by the Sharia. Recent
"reforms" in education have been, to my eyes, the most dangerous of all blows,
the target now being the impressionable young minds that are our most precious
reserve for the future.
People more
intelligent than I (some of whom have been arrested as “Ergenekon" members) have pointed the finger at a Turkish Islamic
guru named Fethullah Gülen living in the United States (Saylorsburgh, Pennsylvania)
whose sect has slowly, almost imperceptibly infiltrated the Turkish police and
judicial system. With the discrediting and eventual paralyzing of the Turkish
military, traditional “guardians of the secular Republic”, a fundamentalist
Islamist government holding parliamentary majority has all the power it needs
to effect a full transformation of the state.
The same
intelligent people also see the United States as the protector of this Islamic
sect, and see the whole setup as a part of the America’s new Middle East project.
It apparently all boils down to this : NATO ally Turkey may have been useful as
secular state with Western pretensions when the great threat was the Soviets,
but with the cold war over and political Islam a new danger, a “moderate
Islamic” model at the beck and call of the U.S. would be more preferable as a
role model to bring the other Muslim countries in line. If they
can reinstate the Caliph as well, so much the better The
big fuss Time magazine made over Prime Minister Erdoğan’s enthusiastic
reception in Egypt seems to confirm this view of U.S. strategy. To me it
appears no more sound a tactic as supporting Hitler against the Communists, or the Taliban against the Russians. If there is
truth to these allegations, I wish the U.S would re-evaluate this policy and
desist from throwing the secular Turkish republic to the wolves.
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