Yet those who have led us to believe these lies never explained why so many other nations and peoples who were subjects of the empire we take pride in founding are accusing us of past wrongdoings. Another subject that is evaded is why such a talented and multi-dimensional nation is still not fully developed and democratic.Questioning these inconsistencies has been a cardinal sin and demanding better legal, political and economic standards has been held equal to treason. For this meant questioning the system and the rulers that oversee it. Given these facts, the system we are run by couldn’t be a full-fledged democracy, anyway.
The educational system conditioned republican generations to the illusion that change meant decadence and acculturation meant deviation. Hence the system remained relatively “protected” from foreign influence. Any pace of change that was not regulated by the ruling cadres was halted by military coups, and the putchists found enough civilian cronies to serve them.
This “protected” system under a tutelary bureaucracy, at the center of which stood the army, produced a sundry of illusions, delusions and blatant lies. But, more importantly, it produced many crimes due to unaccountability. These crimes sought three ends: (1) purity and homogeneity of the nation; (2) to preserve the tutelage of the bureaucracy over the regime and the nation; and (3) to subdue all demands for plurality and cultural diversity and a full-fledged deliberative democracy that would be born out of reconciliation.
All of these were denied to the citizens of Turkey by telling them many lies. Crimes were committed to stifle their desire “for the better.” However, this cruel and inefficient system has come close to a grinding halt. There is internal strife that is gradually evolving into a civil war. All of the institutions of the system are at odds with each other and the nation is divided along religious, political and ethnic lines. Now is the time for reconciliation. But in order to reconcile we need to know the truth that has been denied to us by officialdom. We have been turned against each other as enemies and allowed to do injustice for the sake and safety of the country. Now we need to know the truth regarding how we were misled, pitted against each other and severed from the rest of the world with the spurious pretense that we were better.
Since the mid-1990s, the phrase “truth and reconciliation” has become a part of the global lexicon of peace and conflict resolution. The two concepts seem to have synergy, and yet there is lots of work required to do justice to these complementary concepts at the following levels:
a- Nation-building: Building or rebuilding a divided society into a single nation in which different ethnicities and races can agree to live and work together and consider themselves constituent parts of a single nation.
b- Building mutual respect and peace between communities: Conflicting sides have to learn to coexist with each other and respect each other’s cultures.
c- Forgetting: There is need for selective forgetting in order to leave an unsavory past behind and build a mutual future.
c- Political cooperation: Political elites or representatives learn to work together in a political system.
d- Post-conflict reconstruction: New institutions need to be created for reconstruction after a conflict. The ability to work together to form public and civic institutions and to establish rule of law and transparent or democratic decision-making bodies is imperative for reconciliation.
It is time to ask ourselves which of these are we doing to brig peace and foster reconciliation in our beleaguered country.
