Support your republic!

The organizers of the meeting were the Kemalist Thought Association (ADD) and the Retired Army Officers Association. The head of the first organization is retired Gen. Şener Eruygur, former commander of the Gendarmerie forces whose name has recently surfaced among the top officers who contrived to stage a coup against the incumbent government in 2004.

The main reason for the demonstration was declared to be “protesting against attrition of the basic values of the republic beyond acceptable boundaries.” The timing is convenient because soon candidates for the presidential contest will be declared and the most likely candidate is present Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose credentials as a secular and modern personality are seen as wanting by the organizers of the meeting.

When asked by observing journalists, female participants aired their concern for a candidate who they see as a religious fundamentalist and husband of a wife whose hair is covered in a way that symbolizes obscurantism. However the headscarf is more than that. For a section of political secularists it is the symbol of the hidden agenda of the present prime minister and his entourage, who are suspected of aiming to establish a Shariah state at their earliest convenience. Secularist women are more concerned than men because they see this symbolic tug of war going on for the control of their body (the degree of freedom to exercise their gender role and the modality of their public appearance-dress code).

Participants often expressed their worry over the character of the next president should Mr. Erdoğan declare his candidacy because it will not merely be the loss of a castle they held until now but also a violation of the basic tenets of the republic -- hence a matter of life and death for the secular regime.

Speakers, among them nationalist-statist academics, delivered speeches along lines of the alarming statement by President Ahmet Necdet Sezer publicized at the Military Academies in İstanbul earlier in the week, warning the people that the regime and the country were under severe danger of dissolution, unmatched in the history of the republic.

While those who were there and those who hung flags on their windows agreed, others thought differently. There were rebuttals that could be summed up as “They are not protecting the republic but defending the status quo.” Indeed many people in Turkey disassociate the election of the next president from the legitimacy of the regime. What they are more worried by is the obstruction of the election of a civilian president just because official circles and pseudo-democratic (statist) urban cohorts want to protect the regime that is the product of the last military coup (1980).

A liberal academic interprets the reaction of the forces behind the demonstration with the following words: “This is the death knell of a 1930s model ideology that has succeeded in transforming [traditional] Turkey but has failed to transform itself. … Kemalism had injected self-confidence to a devastated Turkey, but now it inculcates fear and defeatism” (Baskin Oran).

Indeed no one heard any reference to democracy, human rights, minority rights, expansion of basic freedoms or adoption of more universal values that would make Turkey more at home on the international scene. On the contrary, the West is viewed as the “home of the imperialists.” This introverted stance is the source of growing xenophobia and pseudo-nationalism built on the artificial feeling of victimhood. Such feelings are neither healthy for the promotion of a democratic environment within nor for the generation of incentives toward being a respected member of the international community of nations.

These two different climates of opinion and feelings manifest how Turkey is still distant from a national consensus of what to be and what to do.