Today’s Zaman, Turkey
April 21 2007
How many Turkeys are there?
by
MUMTAZ’ER TURKONE
The comment that "there are now two Turkeys," made by The New York
Times after the "Republic Rally" held in Ankara on April 14, is
misleading as it implies that the enthusiastic people who gathered in
Tandoðan Square and those in power have two different visions of
Turkey.
The misleading element of the commentary stems from the fact that
there are more than two Turkeys. In fact, there are a great number of
Turkeys in Turkey. Without mentioning a number, it is not right to
reduce them merely to two. One should be able to portray different
visions of Turkey as vivid paintings. However, the existence of many
countries in a single country is not something peculiar only to us.
There are different visions of America in America and different
visions of France in France as well. Democracy and pluralism unify
these different perspectives, resolving them into different visions
of a single country. There is a working democracy and a culture of
democracy that sustain democracy in Turkey. For this reason, there is
ultimately only one Turkey.
The horrendous murders committed on Wednesday in Malatya are, sadly,
a part of this vision. The political competition that came to notice
in Ankara’s Tandoðan Square and that erupted into a regime debate
between the government and the opposition, along with the killings of
Hrant Dink and three people in Malatya, the unemployment and poverty
despite the record-high export rates in March, all belong to this
same world. This world is negatively affected by the Iraq fire
burning right next to it and is disturbed by being subjected to
disgraceful behavior in the EU process.
Multicultural traditions
It is understood that the horrific murders of the three people
engaged in missionary activities in Malatya, one of whom was German,
as well as the previous murders of priest Santoro in Trabzon and
Hrant Dink, are all fed from the same dreadful climate. There is a
great number of Turkish youth who are like mines adrift at sea,
looking for places to hit and explode. These young people, who are
unable to attach a simple cause-and-effect reasoning to the events
they see in the country or to the developments in the world, commit
murders that send cold shudders down our spine. Those who infer by
looking at these murders that Turks have a savage and barbaric nature
and who attribute the dark and gloomy world behind the murders to the
society as a whole don’t understand anything. Turkish society has a
very rich tradition, rarely seen in history, of living together with
respect for differences. And these murders are the results of the
pains brought on by modernization, not of the exemplary traditions
that were recorded by history.
A French traveler who traversed Anatolia from one end to the other at
the beginning of the 19th century recorded in astonishment how
harmoniously members of different religions live together. And he
even notes an example of jokes commonly made by Turks and Christians:
A Muslim Turk jokingly tells his Christian neighbor, "What if I
participate in the Easter service and you fast for 10 days in the
month of Ramadan, so that we’d do away with the differences between
us?" The Ottoman Empire had Christian communities that made up 40
percent of its population. The state had formed very sound
administrative and judicial structures in order to allow different
religions and faiths to live together in peace and granted large
autonomy to non-Muslims. The existence of different faiths was based
on the integration of the Roman tradition with Islamic rules. Every
religious community was totally independent in its internal affairs.
The church courts would settle disagreements within the Christian
community. The representative of the state, namely the governor, was
obliged to implement the verdicts reached by those church courts.
Similarly, every Christian congregation had the right to open schools
and orphanages and to run them independently. The Church would even
collect taxes with direct support from the state. The legitimacy of
this tradition, which existed for centuries, among the Muslims was
strengthened by religious rules. A non-Muslim living under Muslim
rule was accordingly under the protection of each and every Muslim
citizen. The word used to refer to non-Muslims, dhimmi,
etymologically and socially meant that the protection of the lives,
properties and honor of non-Muslims was incumbent on Muslims. If a
non-Muslim resident was also the citizen of another country, he would
be called mustemin, that is, "a person entrusted to Muslims." Such a
delicate tradition doesn’t create savagery. In fact, it was nearly
unknown during the six centuries of Ottoman rule.
Growing pains from modernization
Examples of brutality which are sometimes encountered in today’s
Turkey are the results of modernization and the pains suffered
through the process of modernization, not of our tradition, which
had, so to say, worked itself into the tissues of society and the
history shaped by such a tradition.
We know very well today that the racist brutality that developed and
settled in Germany in the 1930s was not the return of humanity to its
primitive and wild era. Brutality brought along by naturalness could
never be as scary and devastating as modern brutality. Assessing the
cases encountered in Turkey as symptoms peculiar to this society is
tantamount to playing down the side-effects of modernization.
Turkey is undergoing change very quickly, which in turn makes it
extremely difficult for youths who are feeling the pressure of change
to find ways to keep with their traditions. On one hand, a seductive
social life is offered through the artificial glare of the mass
media, which alters even the limits of dreams. And meanwhile the gap
between this false life which mocks their dreams and the difficulties
of their daily lives is widening. Young people struggle to surmount
this gap by wrestling with the ghosts created in a schizophrenic
world and by foaming at and directing their hatred at the "enemies."
While modernization fails to meet the increasingly high standard of
these young people’s needs, the traditional also fails to help them
re-establish their balances since they are crushed under its
devastation.
And the result is blood-curdling scenes of brutality that this
country and this society don’t deserve. The ferocity perpetrated in
Malatya should be seen as the latest example of this psychological
aberration. It should certainly be taken into account that it is the
expression not of murderous feelings but of a state of frenzy of
insanity. Malatya had previously produced Mehmet Ali Aðca, the
would-be assassin of Pope John Paul II. But the same Malatya was also
the birthplace of Hrant Dink. The same Malatya also gave Turkey two
presidents who directed the Turkish Republic. Hence what we must
focus on is the change continuing deep down inside and the growing
pains caused by this change instead of putting forward that there are
two or more than two Turkeys.
A unitary Turkey
In this case, it would be more proper to see the crowd that gathered
on April 14 in Tandoðan Square not as one of the two Turkeys but as
an indicator of a working democracy and an asset of the single-piece
Turkey, as this demonstration provides us with the democratic
reaction of a civilized and mature society, just the opposite of what
happened in Malatya. Turkey is now giving up its long-time habit of
resolving problems with extra-democratic methods. People are now able
to express their objections democratically, without necessarily
giving in to their anger. The opposition has proven to be weak
because of the AK Party’s dominance in Parliament. The weakness of
the opposition was making it more attractive to resort to
anti-democratic methods since it was the sharing of the power that
was in question. With the post of the presidency, those legally
elected in power want a bigger share of the state’s power, which is
always superior to political power, and the dynamics of the market
economy were legitimizing this demand.
The opposition, for the first time, preferred to make its opposition
felt through a democratic mass demonstration rather than going in
search of a coup d’etat. And they succeeded in doing so. Even though
Prime Minister Erdoðan underestimated the crowd that gathered in the
square, he seems affected by the current scene. Now the president of
Turkey will have to take into account the people’s democratic
reactions, along with the balances within the state. From moment he
is elected, the president will be representing the whole of the
Turkish nation. Tandoðan will turn this constitutional obligation
into a de facto situation. The president will also be representing
those crowds who, through their democratic reactions, demonstrated
that they did not want him.
The recent brutality is the work of an extreme modernism. A mature
democracy is the work of modernism fed by tradition. Hooliganism,
xenophobia and cultural racism, which are also on an upward trend in
Europe, are all generated in the dark corners of modernism and easily
find proponents. In the same way, a sense of responsibility, devotion
to human values and the instinct to protect the future world are also
fed by the same source. Everywhere in the world, every country has
more than one face. Hrant Dink’s murder upset all of Turkey. And
likewise, the society is evincing a very harsh reaction to the
ferocity in Malatya. And on the other hand, the demonstration in
Tandoðan Square was the democratic face of Turkey. But describing
that demonstration as a different Turkey would be an injustice to
Turkish democracy and the democratic culture.
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