There is no other nation like the Turkish nation, which has fallen down so many times but eventually learned to stand again, and which valiantly rose when presumed dead. If the spirit of Çanakkale is exciting us again as people living on this land, this is because we are standing once again upon the base of our own values. The spirit of Çanakkale is our national spirit, molded in our beliefs and values. It is understandable only to those who can see that the voices of the Koran were the theme to a bloody war fought on the slopes of the Dardanelles and on the hills of Gallipoli. Our national spirit is the outstanding structure of the last religion, molded in the fine characteristics of our people living on Anatolian soil. This national spirit has today fallen to a new generation when the people of love, with no time to waste on animosity, bring their inspirations to the four corners of the world. This love is the same as the transcendent excitement: to let live. To suffer, not to live but to let others live. Those who cannot understand this highest sentiment of mankind, cannot understand the march toward death the last-year students of the İstanbul Erkek Lisesi (İstanbul Boys College) made in Çanakkale, all of whom died as martyrs. This expresses precisely what was said by the companion of the Prophet, Khalid bin Walid, “Wait, there will come into being an army longing far more for the afterlife than you long for the worldly life.”
The Çanakkale victory prevented the victories of the naval forces of both Britain and France. It augmented our determination to exist, and it stopped our enemy from fragmenting us. It allowed the Bolshevik revolution to happen in Russia and thus prevented the Russian Czar from occupying eastern Anatolia. But what Çanakkale told us was a different thing. For one thing, the sons and daughters of the nation were lying shoulder to shoulder in our territory, though they all came from different linguistic, racial and ethnic backgrounds. For another thing, a great deal of the 250,000 casualties (including the martyrs, injured, ill, lost) were a young and intellectual generation. That is, we lost the generation that could have resurrected this nation. Today, our resurrection depends on our correct understanding of what Çanakkale tells us.
We cannot become brothers without taking a fresh look at our language, race and ethnicity. If it was our feelings that guided us in this yesterday, today our reason and logic should be our guide. Today, reason refers to democratization and the rule of law; that is, where there are human rights, liberty, freedoms of opinion and expression, freedoms of faith and religious practices; that is, where there is respect for the individual, and where there is transparency, accountability and responsibility, where everyone is answerable for their actions. This, in other words, tells of our convergence in universal humanitarian values, after we depended on our own values to get to our feet. Yesterday, Britain and France were our enemies in Çanakkale, today however, they are the two countries with whom our full membership to the European Union has been a matter of state policy. We need to have a correct reading of the course the world is taking, we should not pursue vengeance by using Çanakkale as an excuse, and we should work to make Turkey a country of security, wealth and freedom by keeping the national spirit known through Çanakkale alive. We can be proud of Çanakkale, since it is our right to do so. However, we cannot deny that it is a shame that in terms of scientific credentials, our universities rank poorly among the world’s universities, that our country ranks quite low in terms of human rights, and that the situation with the country’s national per capita income is not very bright.
In Çanakkale, we lost the generation that would have breathed new life into this nation. Now, that generation is arising afresh in a new spring the hills, gardens, prairies of our future. Those who fell to the soil in Çanakkale have now been resurrected to live again in all four corners of the world.
That is the spirit of Çanakkale.
