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LALE SARIİBRAHİMOĞLU [email protected] Columnists Former diplomat’s confession of deception
20 August 2009, Thursday
The Turkish Republic's state ideology was based and is still based to a certain extent on the denial of facts regarding events that have taken place in the past. Created on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, the decision makers of the Turkish Republic, set up 86 years ago in 1923, sought to erase the tragic events of the past from the minds of Turks, instead of encouraging them to face those events bravely.
The Turkish education system has long been based on this mentality, which discouraged students from discussing topics freely and instead encouraged them to memorize whatever textbooks say. This system has prevented Turks from gaining self-confidence, while hindering them from openly discussing their opinions.
If Turkey has been going through a traumatic and unstable period for decades, the underlying reason stems from the fact that contentious issues such as the Kurdish question and the Cyprus and Armenian disputes have been swept under the rug and were treated as non-existent.
But this mentality could not have gone on forever. The more Turkey has become an open society, the more contentious issues, once swept under the rug and haunting us, have begun to surface. For Turkey, Pandora's box was opened when it began taking concrete steps to become a member of the European Union, generally regarded as a union that embraces democratic standards as its reason d'etre. Paradoxically, it was as a result of a Turkish policy to adhere to democratic standards that Turkey and the EU began membership talks in 2005, though since then neither Ankara nor Brussels have been enthusiastic about doing their homework properly to facilitate a final Turkish membership.
Still, Turkey made several military and civilian reforms that have marked certain progress in Turkey's democratization move despite many shortcomings. But old habits die hard.
As the problematic issues, which had once been swept under the rug, are waiting to be solved, internal conflicts have surfaced bitterly, causing serious polarization within society.
This polarization is the natural result of a state ideology that is based on hiding the facts, and now some Turkish intellectuals have begun to confess that they had long been deceived.
“For decades, we have been deceived. First, the education system deceived us and later the Cold War years. ... The curtains put before our eyes have begun to be lifted quite late compared with the preceding generations … My generation has lived in a ‘non-problematic' Turkey for a long period. There was not a Kurdish problem ... [the] Armenian genocide issue even did not exist ... Our biggest fear has been extreme fundamentalism and communism. …,” said retired Turkish Ambassador Temel İskit in his column published in Taraf last Tuesday.
“But once the curtains put before us began to be lifted, though quite late, we began to sense that some things were kept secret from us. But we did not know what had been kept secret from us. It has taken time for us [his generation] to understand that Turkey has many problems contrary to what we have thought for decades -- that this country did not have any problems. While some of us are angry, now realizing that we have been deceived, most others from my generation are hiding behind the comfort of the denial of the existence of many problems. Unlike what we have been taught, we have observed that being a Muslim is not a threat but a common value of our society. We realized that secularism is not something that we will lose, while witnessing that we did not become another Iran despite the fact that a party branded as ‘Islamist' has been ruling Turkey for seven years. We also noticed how the fight against Islamic fundamentalism was used as a pretext to limit freedoms,” added 72-year-old-former Ambassador İskit, who also served as one of the deputies in the Undersecretariat of the Foreign Ministry.
İskit's confessions were important, among other things, in order to display how the Turkish public was deceived for centuries over facts about Turkey hidden from them through indoctrination.
I, myself, have also realized, as I matured, that we are all deceived by the state over realities and over problems facing Turkey. I feel sorry for the years that we lost in vain due to the state ideology based using deception.
But we have to look forward, and for the first time, as former Ambassador İskit stressed in his column, a light is seen at the end of the tunnel concerning a solution to the Kurdish question as the government has launched a new initiative toward this end.
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