Turkey: Vision versus Suppression, "What a difference a day makes", as Turkey Celebrates its "Victory Day" over invading Allied Troops 96 years ago

Turkey's visionary leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

Turkey commemorated the 96th anniversary of the War of Independence today Aug. 30 Victory Day with celebrations, as politicians marked the day’s importance and stressed their determination in protecting Turkey’s independence.

Throughout his presidency, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk diligently implemented his visions of a modern nation.

For over 600 years, Turks had only known Sultans as absolute monarchic rulers, a system to be obeyed.

But to bring his nation into a new era, Atatürk knew he needed to expedite Turkey’s social, political, and technological standards to those of Europe. He also understood that encouragement was needed for the citizens who were war-shocked, exhausted, near poverty, and confused about this new way of governing.

He was also quite aware that progress meant a struggle with those who advocated the return of ancient traditions and the religious Ottoman Sultanate dynasty.

Atatürk scrapped the archaic, convoluted Ottoman form of government and replaced it with policies and principles based on Swiss and other European laws. More than just trading one system for another, Atatürk dedicated himself to his people, believed in them, and knew that they would value the reformations as deeply as he did. As a result, Turkey was transformed into a secular nation with westernized legal, economic, social, educational, and cultural programs.

The following highlights the most prominent aspects of Atatürk’s reforms:

• Abolished the Ottoman Sultanate (late 1922).
• Declared the Turkish Republic (29 October 1923).
• Formed the office of Prime Minister, President, and a democratically-elected National Assembly (1923).
• Adopted a new constitution (1924).
• Abolished the Caliphate (leadership of the Muslim religion) and restricted its theocratic institutions (early 1924).
• Replaced the religious education system with a national education system (1924).
• Adopted the Gregorian calendar and western time zone system, including defining the workweek as Monday to Friday (1925).
• Prohibited the veil and other religious-based clothing but only encouraged western-style clothing for women. Atatürk believed that women would follow fashions according to their free will.
• Enacted a revised legal system, including the Civil Code, Penal Statute Law, and Trade Law, based on Swiss and Italian civil law (1924-1937).
• Replaced the Arabic script with the Latin alphabet, which was mandated to be taught in schools (1928). Atatürk believed that the Latin alphabet would be easier to teach to a largely (90%) illiterate population, easier to learn, and therefore would immediately impact the literacy rate.
• Promoted construction of thousands of new schools, made literacy reform a priority, and made primary education compulsory and free.
• Accelerated Turkey’s post-war economic development by establishing state-owned factories for textile and agricultural industries.
• Supported construction of the national Turkish State Railways (1927).
• Modernized state banking systems.
• Promoted advancement in the fields of science, health and medicine, law, and education.
• Adopted the international numeric system (1928).
• Supported Turkey’s culture by establishing a Turkish Historical Society (1931), a Turkish Language Association (1932).
• Adopted the International System of Units to standardize national measurements (1933)
• Changed the tax code to reduce the tax burden on peasants.
• Enacted women’s suffrage rights (1934).
• Legalized gender equality and women’s emancipation rights (1926-1934). 
• Passed a law to require that everyone have a surname instead of surnames based on titles of honor (1934).
• Developed foreign policies of neutrality and cultivated friendly international relationships.
• Replaced a provincial legal system (called millet) that allowed every minority community to govern themselves with a unified, secular constitution.
• Established the Directorate for Religious Affairs, which affirmed the new Republic of Turkey’s protection and equality of all religions, including Islam.
• Encouraged reform of the Turkish language by establishing a Language Commission that replaced foreign words with Turkish ones with standardized spelling and phonetics.
• Declared that “Culture is the foundation of the Turkish Republic.” Strongly supported the arts, such as opera, theatre, literature, and music; opened museums; encouraged interest in Turkey’s indigenous Anatolian heritage, eg, naming the state-owned banks Sümerbank after the Sumerians and Etibank after the Hittites; and encouraged the importance of Turkish folk Art.

Today on August 30, 96 years later, Turkish present President,  Recep Tayip Erdogan, wrote in the guest book at Anıtkabir, the mausoleum of the founder of modern Turkey Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, without mentioning Turkey's greatest leader Ataturk by name, the following comment.
 
“Increasing threats, violations and attacks against our country’s independence will not withhold us from our ideals and aims. The Turkish nation is defending its independence as it did 96 years ago with the inspiration from its thousands of years of historic values,” 

Parliamentary Speaker Binali Yıldırım, Vice President Fuat Oktay, Chief of General Staff Gen. Yaşar Güler, main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) leader Devlet Bahçeli, high judicial authorities, ministers and top soldiers were among guests who visited Anıtkabir as a part of official celebrations.

So far, President Recep Tayip Erdogan,  now the sole ruler of Turkey, major claim to success has been the elimination of all opposition forces against his regime, which included: 

1) Some 160,000 people were detained for questioning, of which over 77,000 were formally arrested for alleged links to terror organizations, including Gulen’s network and outlawed Kurdish rebels. Those arrested include military personnel, police, journalists, lawmakers, judges and prosecutors.

2) According to Justice Ministry figures, close to 35,000 people put on trial for links to Gulen’s network have been convicted so far. Around 14,000 others were acquitted.

3) More than 130,000 people have been purged from the public service through emergency government decrees. Those dismissed include tens of thousands of teachers and close to 6,000 academics. Around 1,300 people were re-instated to jobs by a commission that was set up to review cases but 18,000 other appeals were rejected.

4) Some 170 generals and around 7,000 other senior military officers were arrested as part of the crackdown. At least 58 generals and 629 senior officers have been convicted to life terms in prison so far in trials against military officers, according to Justice Ministry figures. Eight generals were acquitted.

5) At least 143 journalists or media workers are currently behind bars, most accused of links to Gulen or Kurdish rebels, according to the Turkish Journalists Syndicate. Using emergency decrees, the government closed down around 200 media organizations, including newspapers, periodicals, radio stations and television channels.

6) Ten legislators from Turkey’s pro-Kurdish political party, including former co-chairs Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag, are in prison on terror charges for alleged links to Kurdish militants. Enis Berberoglu, a legislator from the main opposition Republican People’s Party, is in prison convicted of espionage for giving an opposition newspaper images allegedly showing Turkey’s intelligence agency trucking weapons into Syria.

7) Human rights activist and businessman Osman Kavala is in jail pending trial, accused of seeking to overthrow the government and having alleged links to Gulen. Eleven prominent activists were arrested last year at their hotel on an island off of Istanbul while on training. They were eventually released from jail pending the outcome of their trial for supporting terror groups. Among them was Taner Kilic, Amnesty International’s former Turkey chairman, who was released earlier this month.

“Authenticity is the language of visionaries" wrote  Andrena Sawyer - Unfortunately Turkey today lacks that vision, so brilliantly carried out by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and is turning back the clock towards pre-Atatürk days. 

A  report from the Canadian AP  Global News  
and EU-Digest

Turkey: Absolute Power: Erdogan’s Self-Made Trap - by Stephan Richter

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan would do well, for his own sake, to consider Lord Acton’s famous dictum. The 19th century English historian and politician is famous for his insight, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Mr. Erdogan is certainly succeeding with his effort to remove the few remaining obstacles to his near-totalitarian rule. The irony of it all is that the more he succeeds, the worse it becomes for his country — and, eventually, for himself.

Ultimately, Erdogan has but one ambition – a nation in total subservience to its fatherly leader. For that to become reality, he must root out any public display of Atatürk, the country’s predominant leader in its entire 20th century history. If Erdogan had his druthers, he would even eliminate the memory of him.

In a nutshell, Mr. Erdogan wants to be the new Atatürk, albeit in complete reverse. Erdogan stands against everything that Atatürk stood for.

Read more: Absolute Power: Erdogan’s Self-Made Trap - The Globalist

Turkey: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk:banished Islam from the public arena - Recep Tayip Erdogan: established modern Sultanate

That is the question ?

The Nigerian newspaper The Cable on the occasion of Erdogan's visit to Turkey recently wrote the following editorial;

"The Turkey Erdogan inherited in 2003 was a republic Mustafa Kemal, universally acknowledged as father of modern day Turkey (hence his Turkish sobriquet, Atatürk) had forged out of the Ottoman Empire defeated by Western Allied forces in World War I and which the Allies subsequently dismantled in 1918. Kemal was an active soldier-member of the Young Turks, a revolutionary group of intellectuals who eventually deposed the last sultan of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire in 1909, ahead of First World War. In time he became the country’s first president in 1923.

Two key elements in Kemal’s attempt to forge a modern Turkey were his banishment of Islam from the public arena and the imposition of Turk as the national language. The first was symbolized by a ban on women wearing hijab in public and on men wearing long beards. This was in a country where nearly eighty per cent of the population was Sunni Muslim.

The main target of the second element of Kemal’s modernization of Turkey were the country’s largest minority group, the Kurds who lived mostly in the Southeast border of the country and who, like the Turks, were Muslims, but who, unlike other minorities, refused to abandon their language and culture. Today the Turks number about 20 million.

With time the military as the institution on whose back Kemal rode to power and to national and international fame, saw itself as the custodian of Kemal’s attempt to make Turkey a modern, secular nation. Several times it intervened in politics whenever it thought his legacy was under threat. The man died in 1938 but his legacy has survived him almost to date.

Erdogan’s great achievement was to have proved that it is possible to keep his country modern and make it democratic and prosperous without banishing Islam from the public arena and without imposing language and cultural uniformity on it.

His vehicle was the so-called “mildly Islamic” Justice and Development Party (AK, in Turkish) which he co-founded in 2001 after a short spell in prison for reciting a poem in public which the authorities judged as “inciting hatred based on religious differences.”

Barely a year after its founding, AK won the next general election in 2002 and he became prime minister.

The party won the election with more than a little help from Hizmet Movement, founded by Fethullah Gulen, the 74-year Muslim cleric described by The Economist as “a charismatic prayer-leader who preaches a mild, Sufism-inspired and public-service-oriented form of Islam.” Gulen has lived in "self-exile" in the US for decades.

AK has remained in power since 2002, but under Erdogan’s firm grip even after he had stepped aside from partisan politics in 2014 to become nominal president, the party seems to have fallen out with not just the Gulenists.

 It seems to have done so with just about every other group – the media, civil society organisations, Islamist modernizers, socially conservative businessmen, secular reformists and even Kurds – that had supported it, especially in permanently neutralizing the hitherto all-powerful, meddlesome Kemalist military and forcing it to retreat, for good, back to its barracks where it belonged.

The sore point seems to have been the man’s ambition to recreate Turkey as a sultanate after his self-image as an imperial president. In June last year he took a gamble down this perilous path when, in spite of his putative role as a neutral head of state, he campaigned vigorously for AK to win enough seats in that year’s parliamentary elections – 400 out of 550 – to allow it amend the country’s 1982 Constitution to make him the country’s first executive president.

The gamble failed. For the first time since 2002, AK lost its majority in the parliament although it remained the single biggest party in the legislature. He blamed everyone else but himself and his party for the failure.

Since then hundreds of journalists, for example, have been fired or arrested for violating an obscure ill-defined law that penalizes “insulting” the president, and business interests of opposition figures have similarly been attacked.

When AK stumbled in last year’s June election, Erdogan as president had a choice between inviting the leading opposition party to form a coalition government and forcing a re-run in November. Predictably, he chose the latter.

This time his gamble paid off – somewhat; AK regained more than its old majority in the legislature but still did not get enough to allow it amend the constitution as it wished. Between June and November events in the Middle East that had sucked in Europe, America, Iran and Russia, strengthened his hands enough locally and internationally to give him the victory he had wanted, albeit a limited victory.

It is this triumphant Erdogan that has been our August visitor since yesterday. As president of one of the most important countries in the world, our guest must have come with a list of mutual interest for business discussions. Possibly top of the list is the Turkish presence in Nigeria, not all of which he may be happy with.

Notable among those he may be unhappy with is the widespread presence in our educational, medical, business and religious sectors of Hismet Movement that he has come to regard as traitors and saboteurs at home and abroad. A wise Erdogan would eschew his unhappiness with his perceived enemies at home and not request his hosts to close them down because his hosts are not likely to see his enemies as necessarily their own too.

Instead, a wise Erdogan would see his short visit as an opportunity to reduce his country’s almost complete dependence on Russia for his energy needs by striking a mutually beneficial deal with Nigeria for the supply of gas and oil to his country, especially now that Russia has become hostile to his country over the Islamic State debacle in their region.

As someone who has visited Turkey twice, first in 2007 during that year’s International Press Institutes’ annual congress, and second, last year on a private visit, I can testify to the description of the country by The Economist pullout as one “packed with cultural treasures, natural beauty, energy and talent.”

Erdogan has done more than almost any other Turkish leader in its modern history to turn the country’s potentialities into realities.  

He owes himself not to allow his wish to recreate his country as a Sultanate under his thumb to undo what should be his great legacy at home and abroad."