Commentary: An Explosive Book

Özkoray even goes back in history, to the very founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923 by Ataturk, who supposedly established a lay governing system, eliminating the role of the clergy, reforming the language and even setting dress codes. Özkoray finds that when the present Republic of Turkey was being founded, democracy, as we know it, was not popular. There were dictators all around: Horthy in Hungary, Pilsudski in Poland, Metaxas in Greece, Franco in Spain and Salazar in Portugal. There were also three totalitarian regimes devising the law in Europe: Musolini in Italy, Stalin in the USSR and Hitler in Germany. Therefore, Ataturk founded Turkey in the spirit of fascism, which by an expert Pierre Milza is called a “fascism of the left” and which another specialist, Maurice Duverger, calls a “benevolent despotism.”

The author also takes issue with Ataturk’s population engineering, which portrayed the population of Turkey as 99 percent Turk and Sunni, regardless of the 15 million Kurds and 22 million Alevis. Greeks, Armenians and Jews were pushed to the margins, their destinies to be defined whimsically by the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923. A process of forced homogenation of population was executed. [Gen. Kenan Evren is compared to the bloody ruler of Chile, General Pinochet. Indeed, as recently as a year ago, the Turkish general came out of retirement to announce that “his hands did not tremble in signing the death warrants of politicians, and that he would do the same today, if he had to.”]

Now that Erdogan’s new constitution won the right to bring the Putschists to justice, we have to wait and see — the proof of the pudding will be in its eating.

Özkoray enumerates seven attempted coup d’etats between 2002 and 2009 against the Kurds, Alevis, Armenians, Islamists, Socialists, liberals and the partisans of the European Union. All these groups are considered “internal enemies” by the military and they constitute 50 million people out of 72 million total population, meaning 70 percent are on the watch list of “enemies.”

To justify its grip on power, the military triggers artificial crises; the occupation of Cyprus, the sovereignty over the Aegean islands, the Turkish minority in Greece, the status of the ecumenical Greek Patriarch in Istanbul, etc.

From time to time, the civilian government makes some overtures on different issues, but the problems are never solved because the National Security Council has set guidelines establishing taboos on the following issues: to contain the Kurdish population, to avoid fragmentation of the country; never compromise on the Cyprus problem; preserve the government’s lay status untouchable; fight against the Orthodox Church in the country and never accept the use of the term “genocide.”

These are the political parameters within which any civilian government has to operate, hiding the “deep state” in the background.

The system set up by the military is such that the individual is crushed under the perceived interest of the state. This perception is promoted systematically by the Dogan group, which own several influential newspapers and TV stations.

Since the establishment of the military rule, 2,330,000 people have been arrested and tortured.

Under the systematic brain washing, people are programmed to think in a pattern, which will never lead to democracy.

Thus, Özkoray gives certain amazing statistics, which are very indicative insights, into the system which can never correct itself and adhere to democratic rule: only 11 percent of Turks believe that freedom of expression is important; 73 percent don’t trust strangers, they are xenophobic; 74 percent believe in the rule of the military; 55 percent refuse to have Jews as their neighbors and 90 percent are happy that they are Turks.

This last statistic justifies Ataturk’s racist motto, which is posted everywhere in Turkey: “Happy is he who says he is a Turk.”

With the recent Erdogan victory approving the new constitution, the Islamist government believes that a new dawn is breaking in Turkey and that democracy is on the March.

But those who read Özkoray’s book are convinced that in its present set-up, its restless minorities, internal contradictions between Islamists and Kemalists, the country is a ticking time bomb waiting to explode at any moment.