However, in almost every society, instinctive participation is visible only in the case of religious and traditional celebrations. For this reason, it is not surprising to witness that the celebration of national days often requires state support and sponsorship. On the other hand, it is not possible to deal with the weakened and poor status of the national day vis-à-vis traditions. You would not start celebrating a national day for no reason because this would require either a recently fought war or a great transformation. However, such a transformation may make previous national days insignificant.
Turkey is a lucky country in this respect because the regime has remained strong for a long time and keeps inventing new national days. If we consider the official discourse, the reason for this is that the regime in Turkey is still so strong and is constantly under construction. The regime is strong because it was created by Atatürk and is protected by the military. Almost every national day, the chiefs of general staff recall this by penning their remarks in a journal dedicated to the memory of the founder of the republic at Anıtkabir (the mausoleum of Atatürk). However, this strong republic also faces a constant threat that will never end. It is argued that this precious regime should be protected against non-Turks as well as the traitorous attacks of non-secularists. When these threats intensify, the regime is re-established based on the same fundamentals.
Every 10 to 15 years, the regime is re-established and fortified in Turkey, which makes this matter pretty stable and predictable. Military coups and interventions are actually moments when Atatürkist restoration takes place. Naturally, this first happened after the transition to the multiparty experience, and the first military coup was experienced in 1960. The very next day, it was announced that the day the coup was staged would be a national day. However, because there have been military coups every 10 years in the aftermath, it became evident that it would not be proper to celebrate these coups via invented national days. For this reason, the previously declared national day in commemoration of the military coup in 1960 was abandoned.
On the other hand, a different line of politics emerged within society after the military coup in 1980. Many preferred recalling the coups relying on a critical approach. Today, the coups are kept alive in the minds of people as bad memories despite official attempts to make sure they are forgotten.
One of the leading examples of this was the postmodern military coup on Feb. 28, 1997. It was significant because this time the military relied on its soft power. This coup, carried out under the sponsorship of the media, which relied on distortion of the facts and attempts at misinformation, was justified by the declared objective of protecting the regime against the fundamentalist Shariah threat. The strategy employed was twofold: Emphasis and attention was placed on the most radical and marginal members of the ruling Welfare Party (RP) to create the impression that these figures represented this party. Afterwards, the same was done with religious people to make them look radicals and fundamentalists. In this way, they were trying to prove that all Muslims in Turkey actually favored a Shariah regime based on a single example. The second strategy was dedicated to creating fake piety. Out of the blue, there were television broadcasts about some strange people who called themselves Aczmendi and who were never known before. Later it would become obvious that they became involved in the project in return for a large amount of money and that they had contributed to the protection of the regime.
The Feb. 28 intervention is the coup that the state wants to forget the most because we are experiencing roughly the same political and ideological atmosphere, and just like before, parallel strategies are needed for the preservation of the regime. The only difference is that the soft power of the military is not enough. Even though the media is playing the same role, it is no longer possible to convince Turkish people that Turkey is dealing with a Shariah threat. In a Turkey where the only party supporting the European Union bid relies on the support of religious voters, where Anatolian cities are undergoing a transformation sponsored by the nascent bourgeoisie and where conservative minds are becoming familiar with secularization, it is not logical or rational to talk about a threat posed by Shariah.
For this reason, hard power is included in the equation this time. The facts revealed during the Ergenekon trial give some tangible clues about the scope of this initiative, which seeks to mobilize civil society to raise awareness with respect to laicism, exploiting this to overthrow the government and relying on turmoil in an attempt to justify a military coup.
The Feb. 28 coup was a successful one because it easily fooled the people. Conversely, Ergenekon is a coup attempt by those who inevitably rely on visibly illegal activities in the presence of a society that can no longer be fooled.
Our state may not be very happy about it, but we still hold the moment of Feb. 28 as an unforgettable memory in our minds because this incident proved the illegality of coup attempts and their downsides.
