FAIT ACCOMPLI STRATEGY AGAINST NON-MUSLIMS
Today’s Zaman
Nov 20 2009
Turkey
Michel Foucault says you can understand a society from what it
excludes. We generally tend to look at what a society includes,
what they are willing to embrace.
But Foucault draws our attention to a different angle. I agree with
him. When it comes to Turkey, I believe, not only what it excludes
but also how it does this are important factors to look at in order
to have a better understanding of this country.
What does Turkey exclude? Without any doubt it excludes non-Muslims.
This non-Muslim identity is rejected by secular state elites who
are the founders of the Turkish republic. This is another tricky
part which confuses outsiders and they have a serious difficulty
to understand. In Turkey so called "secular people" have a much
stronger allergy towards non-Muslims than devout Muslims have towards
non-Muslims. This is important to understand because of the complex
policy towards non-Muslims developed by the secular elites and so
called secular state apparatuses. Today’s so called "secular elites"
are just the inheritors of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP)
which orchestrated massacres against Armenians. If devout Muslims
could play a quite dynamic reformist role in Turkey, they can do that
because they do not have any historical linkage with this political
movement. On the contrary, the same political movement has always
oppressed them in Turkey.
While the Ottoman Empire was collapsing, the CUP decided that
they should create a homogenous society in the remaining part of
the empire. Because they believed if they did not do that they
would have lost more territory, even Anatolia would be broken into
smaller pieces. On the orders of Talat Pasha, in 1915, Armenians
were forcefully expelled to the Syrian deserts, massacred and all
their belongings were seized. Turkey’s history of getting rid of
non-Muslims is also the history of the Turkification of capital. It
is not a coincidence that the richest Turkish families in Turkey
are from the cities and regions in which the biggest massacres were
carried out; Adana, Kayseri and so on. This may also explain why we
have such an obedient bourgeoisie in Turkey.
After this initial and brutal blow, a certain policy was vigorously
and relentlessly applied towards non-Muslims during the Republican
era in Turkey. If you look at the history of non-Muslims, you can
clearly see the repetition of certain patterns. Sudden and unexpected
attacks followed certain periods of inaction and after a while, another
unexpected attack followed this inactive period. This is called a
‘fait accompli’ strategy. A fait accompli strategy works like this:
You want to get something. You take it without discussion or warning
and you give your enemy/opponent a choice, they will either fight back
or accept the loss. You also act upon the conservative attitudes of
your opponent; you know that they will act to protect what is left
to them rather than fighting for what has been taken from them. After
a while what you have taken becomes a part of the status quo. Sooner
or later you take something else from your opponent, but again they
do not react believing that they have a lot to lose if they fight back.
These actions and waiting periods follow each other; after a while your
opponents start to see the pattern, but this time, if they react, they
would have lost most of their material possessions and freedoms when
you set out for a new attack; they think it will not be worth fighting
back because they did not fight while most things were taken from them.
This is exactly what happened to non-Muslims during the republican
era. They were scared away with pogroms. They were condemned to poverty
by wealth taxes. Their properties, their foundations were taken from
them one-by-one by carefully calculated legal tricks. They were never
given any legal status and they suffered from this ambiguity. Their
schools were closed and so on. Attacks followed inaction. Inaction
was followed by new attacks. The so called Lausanne minorities
suffered from these policies a lot and they have come to the verge
of extinction. I have already explained the plight of the ecumenical
patriarchate in this column before. And as I said earlier, minority
groups are also a part of this game with their submissive and passive
attitude. They never sufficiently use and benefit from existing
remedies; they have never developed any strategic litigation to gain
new rights to loosen the noose around their necks. This fait accompli
strategy has been applied on automatic pilot since the republic was
established. Its aim is obvious. It will be repeated until non-Muslims
completely vanish. This strategy is one of the biggest stumbling
blocks to democracy in this country. We need to develop awareness,
an understanding of it first and then a serious struggle for its
eradication can be started. There is no place for fait accompli in
any democracy!