The AK Party or its successor, if it is closed, should be ready for victory this time and start engaging in dialogue with the Kemalist 20 percent of the population who are sincerely or ostensibly suspicious of the AK Party and who vote for the Republican People's Party (CHP).This 20 percent comprises well-educated and in many cases affluent sections of society. They are disproportionably represented in the elite circles of media, business, art, academia and bureaucracy. (There are also many Alevis among the 20 percent, but this is a matter for another analysis.) Turkey cannot afford to ignore these people, who seem to be misguided missiles, as the developments in recent years have shown. There might be many insincere and negative true believers in the Eric Hoffer sense among them, but the overwhelming majority of them must be sincere and the AK Party should enter into dialogue with them. I know that it is not easy to engage with them, but it is the AK Party's duty to try innumerable times. The AK Party leaders' cognitive schemata should be full of good examples of this.
If the Kemalist section of society cannot be convinced that Turkey will never distance itself from human rights and democracy even if its majority becomes more observant Muslims, we will never have domestic peace in the country and Ergenekons will always flourish. If we analyze very carefully what happened during the Feb. 28 process, we will see that there will always be external and power or wealth-hungry domestic players who will manipulate the sincere fears of the 20 percent. It is very easy but irresponsible for the AK Party to point to these elite abusers in media, business, political and bureaucratic circles and then say dialogue is impossible with this Kemalist section. The AK Party should also stop trying to benefit from the unproductive tension created between itself and this Kemalist population as this fatal cleavage within society could become permanent if allowed to continue for another decade.
It is of course not only the AK Party's duty to empathize with the Kemalists and enter into dialogue with them; all other sections of society -- chiefly the 47 percent who voted for the AK Party -- should also proactively and dynamically work toward the "Abantization" of the country. Remember, before 1980 more than 5,000 of our youth killed each other over accusations of being communist or fascist, paving the way for the Sept. 12, 1980, coup, whose leaders imprisoned and tortured many of the remaining leftist and rightist youth. Later it emerged that the country would never become a communist or fascist one, but the sensitivities of these youths were abused by domestic and international players. The same gun killed a rightist in the morning and a leftist in the evening.
After many years, in the early 1990s Fethullah Gülen's Abant platform managed to get many leftist and rightist intellectuals on the same platform, and these people who had never spoken to each other up until that time have continued to debate and discuss several sensitive issues. Today, the chairman of the platform is an atheist, intellectuals from all parts of the political spectrum join its events and the Gülen movement continues to fund it. I am sure that 20 years from now, the people who accuse each other of being either despotic Shariah regime lovers or Kemalist dictatorship seekers will come together in "Abantized" environments and will laugh at today's childish threat perceptions. But why shouldn't we take lessons from our history and engage in the dialogue process without falling into the traps of pseudo-Kemalists, Ergenekonians and pseudo-democracy fighters, as we know that they care only for money and/or power?
