After seeing that our generals are also mere mortals, the people will know they are not super-humans and that in some exceptional cases, quite the contrary may also be true. In addition to my abovementioned strange undemocratic offer, here is the second one: Our prime minister should speak less, for the sake of our democracy and for the well-being and prosperity of our country and nation.All right, I loved “one minute,” and I still do, but when it comes to spontaneous reactions, our prime minister is very rarely that lucky. I can list here several examples of how he inflicted himself and democratic forces in society harm by his spontaneous and definitely unnecessary reactions. That is why, knowing this weakness of the prime minister, his opponents everywhere try to provoke him.
The last incident is his unfortunate -- maybe misunderstood -- remark on illegal Armenians immigrants who have been working in Turkey illegally, numbering up to 20,000 people. To date, the Turkish state has turned a blind eye to their existence as a good gesture and sign of goodwill. It is also known that Turkey has helped Armenia when they had food shortages, etc. The prime minister warned Armenia last week that Turkey may send these illegal workers back. Speaking to journalists in Africa, President Abdullah Gül said the prime minister was misunderstood and so on. Even this sufficiently shows that there is something troubling in the remarks of the prime minister.
As a sovereign state, it is Turkey’s legitimate right to do so, but what happened to our self-declared morality, tolerance, understanding, loving the creature because of the created characteristics? It seems that politics pollute everything they touch. We may have issues with the Armenian state, the Armenian diaspora and Machiavellian and opportunistic American politicians, but threatening people who sought refuge and shelter in Turkey because they were starving back in their country as a result of their politicians’ mistakes and unjust and illegal occupation of areas surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh that resulted in 1 million Azerbaijanis being forcefully exiled from these areas is out of line. Should we not as Turks show first to ourselves and then the outside world that politics can sometimes, if very rarely, take into account morality, ethics and compassion?
I have been thinking about the classic Turkish counterattack of threatening the US with the closure of the US military base in İncirlik, Turkey, as a reaction to the US congressmen’s annual threats to pass a resolution to condemn Turkey because of what happened back in 1915 that have never arrived at a conclusion. But I think if politics pollutes everything it touches, if these canny American politicians touch anything, they pollute it twice. No, I will not mention the redskins, the forefathers of the American Indians! But, the US politicians can start with the massacres in Iraq, Afghanistan, Bush, neocons, etc., and then continue going back. When the buck stops at 1915, they can question Turkey.
But, saying this does not negate the ultimate truth that Turkey has to face what happened in 1915. And we should do this without any foreign pressure. I am not saying that we are guilty and am perfectly aware of the Turkish claims that many Turkish villagers were massacred by some Armenian terrorists who thought that embattled Ottomans could not fight on all fronts and that it was a good opportunity to establish an independent Armenian state. But it is obvious that the social Darwinist, crudely positivist, negative nationalist Young Turk leaders of the state who came to power after staging a coup and silenced everyone paved the way for the death of hundreds of thousands of innocent Armenians. It is equally obvious that they -- at least -- could not protect these civilians. It is also equally obvious that everything these wronged people left -- farms, houses, everything -- was illegally captured by others. I would not be surprised if many of those capturers are the ultranationalists of today. Anyway.
Instead of constantly speaking, can we not simply declare that Turkey is ready to give everything back to their rightful and legal owners if they can produce documents or the state is able to find the records in the archives? Doing this does not mean that our politicians accept the genocide claims of Armenia or the Armenian diaspora, but it would simply substantiate our claims to morality, ethics and, above all, humanity.
