With some spices added by the media, the end result is, understandably, a cacophony out of which it has become more and more difficult to make any sense.
The attention is, of course, focused on Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He looks at ease, finding every reason to launch salvoes in every direction, “lecturing” the media, mocking whomever he sees as his antagonizer, and asserting an authoritative tone with rhetoric that has caused great concern. “How can he find such a time to attack everyone?” was an oft-repeated question in Turkey’s utterly vital twitter domain yesterday, to which my response was, “it is because of the vacuum of a proper opposition.”
It would be right to link Erdoğan’s visible over-confidence to the more-than-50-percent vote that his party still enjoys (the latest surveys shows around 53 percent) and seemingly unconditional support from the Obama Administration. But the true explanation for his rise as the invincible orator should be sought entirely from the depths of the opposition and the media -- both in severe identity crises.
It is natural to whine, cry and express fear when one is completely helpless. Now, sadly, it is the only reasonable explanation for the path taken by the leadership of the CHP and some (mainly leftist) journalists who claim they are living in fear. Take the CHP. Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu wrote an op-ed piece that was printed the other day by the Washington Post. His adversaries in the Justice and Development Party (AKP) were quick to jump on the bandwagon and declare that he was “filing a complaint” to foreign powers.
Surely this was a sheer nonsense, in the age of the global village. Kılıçdaroğlu exercised his natural right to express himself. The problem was what he wrote to express himself. “Today Turkey is a country where people live in fear and are divided politically, economically and socially,” he argued. “Never in history has a government succeeded in permanently ruling through authoritarian measures,” he concluded.
Those who have basic information about the painful history of Turkey, before and during the Cold War, would certainly dismiss Kılıçdaroğlu’s conclusion as another piece of heavy exaggeration, if not a lie, and question the definition of “which people live in fear.” But this is not the question at hand either.
Apart from having been written as a rather elegant piece of propaganda for the CHP, the article depicted the main opposition. It was a whining piece that expressed a whole political movement, saying, “we have no alternative and we have no way of knowing what to do.”
It said: “Our party stands for democracy, secularism, the rule of law, human rights and freedoms.” Very well. Yet, there was not a single mention of Kurds. That is enough to explain the sort of identity crisis in which the party has found itself. Kılıçdaroğlu complained -- mostly with justification -- about the oppression of free speech in Turkey, but he is the one who banned Kurdish and Alevi party members from discussing the atrocities committed against their kin. A party leader who even refrains from mentioning Kurds or minority rights in an important op-ed reveals his flaws.
In today’s Turkey, which urgently needs an efficient, popular and modern opposition, the CHP only follows, not leads. It only picks up bits and pieces in the footsteps of a party leader, whom it cannot challenge. This is the main problem, which leads to confusion abroad. Instead of crying wolf, you should be equipped to challenge the wolf.
There is another flaw to be noted in the continuous cries of “we are afraid” that can be heard in the media. One spectacular example of this contradictive behavior was recently published in an article in the Guardian. The writer exclaimed that “Turkish journalists are very frightened” because of government oppression. But this was the very same journalist who left no critical word unsaid a week or so before about the same government, in the Doha Debates (aired on the BBC), which were broadcast from İstanbul, the very heart of Turkey -- supposedly the “republic of fear”! Still, one must be attentive and try to understand. Erdoğan finds time to loudly intimidate the media, and he goes on. This is also mainly because the opposition has nothing substantive to keep him busy on the defensive. Let me end with a final note to describe the misery of the Turkish media. This country is home to the Platform for Media Freedom, which monitors the oppression of journalists in Turkey. It is an umbrella organization for 86 local associations. A week ago it elected a chairman, Orhan Birgit, who openly confessed one year ago that he had been one of those in late 1940s who torched a leftist newspaper (Tan) in İstanbul and acted as one of the leaders of the Turkish Cypriot organizations that took part in the pogroms against the Greeks in 1955.
There comes a point where you have to rest your case.
