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October 30, 2015, Friday

Please forgive me, your excellence, if I’ve bowed backwards

Turgut Özal was one of those prime ministers who loved to intervene in the press.

And I often ended up self-censoring many of my pieces for the Tercüman newspaper to avoid his wrath. I later wrote a book about that era. Recently, I took that book off the shelf, and riffled through it; what I realized was that much of what I wrote still applies today.

Here's a column from 1990, for example: “Özal says the Prophet Muhammad advises Muslims not to be like poplar trees but to be more like ears of wheat because although poplar trees stand strong in the fierce winds and storms, they can be knocked over. But ears of wheat tend to bend in the direction the wind is blowing, and so they don't break. I think a Turkey composed of ears of wheat will see the struggle come to a close. Can you actually make any progress with a nation of people who bend with the wind? Here is what a notable business figure said recently: ‘I'm like the captain of a sail-ship. Sails billow out in the direction of the winds, and I head the boat in that direction. As soon as the wind changes direction, though, I steer my boat into a new course.'

“And then there are those plane trees that live for centuries. They have deep roots. They do not bend with the wind, but they don't get toppled over in a storm either. Nature allows so many forms of life, all different from one another, to live. Which is why we have chameleons, those creatures whose colors can shift, echoing anything, from an ear of wheat to the leaves of a plane tree, to the field beneath them.

“In Turkey, we will always have ears of wheat as well as poplar trees that get uprooted in storms. But perhaps one day, in the empty spots where those poplar trees once stood, we'll see tall, strong and deep-rooted plane trees rising up -- strong trees, with strong roots. Democracy plane trees, trees in whose shadows people can take shelter from injustice, trees that can withstand even the cruelest of winds.”

It's painful to think that that column -- from a quarter of a century ago -- is still relevant to Turkey. We're all still waiting for a democracy plane tree to take root, one in whose shadow we can take shelter from injustice. And we still have interventions into the freedom of our press, and notably, they are worse than ever! What we have never before witnessed in this country is those caught in the act of stealing trying to make people believe it was nothing more than a “coup” attempt. This is new. Not only do they serve up claims of a coup, they then declare the police and prosecutors involved in pursuing corruption “coup supporters.”

Riffling through some more of the columns I had self-censored during the Özal era, I found one titled “A democracy without people, an unfair democracy.”

This headline was a reference to the outcome of the 1989 regional elections, in which Özal's ANAVATAN party picked up just 29 percent of the vote but after which, carefully manipulating the majority in Parliament, he had himself elected president of the country. Which is why the column had this headline -- a democracy without people, in other words, without the will of the people. As you may recall, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was also elected president with just 52 percent of the vote, a fact which brings about similar thoughts of a “democracy without the people.”

To wit, 1) when you note the total number of voters, this percentage rate reflects a true minority. 2) More importantly, in democracies, a vote majority decides not how the country is going to be ruled but rather WHO is going to rule it. So when you are elected, you are bound to comply with the universal rules of democracy. And if you don't, that's when your people face something you could call an unfair democracy, or even a straight up non-democratic regime.

In another column, published on Jan. 30, 1990, I wrote: “Here is how the popular uprisings that broke out in 1848 were interpreted by historian and novelist Max Gallo: ‘The trust felt in leadership begins with depressions that lead to revolutions against blindness, stubbornness and lack of action. The reason for the lack of sensitivity in a country's leadership has to do with the protection lent by the political structure. The walls that separate the political leaders from the people grow higher and sharper the further the regime in question gets removed from democracy. A skewed election system hands over a comfortable majority in parliament to whoever is in power. Government officials, who bow their necks to the leadership, start to say only that which the government wishes to hear -- which is why the leadership carries on, as though nothing was amiss. At the same time, though, this leadership becomes a little more isolated every day, while also angering its people more and more every day. As the people of the country see that they are failing to get their voices heard, they become sharper and sharper in their criticism and discontent, and the whole situation becomes more and more extreme.'

“As Max Gallo saw it, French Prime Minister [François] Guizot was sure of the accuracy of his conservative policies when it came to bringing about financial stability, economic development, order and peace. Blocking his ears to all criticism of these policies, shutting his eyes to the growing poverty everywhere in France, he also ignored the corruption and scandals that had infected the government cadres and leading circles in France. And so, in the end, the 1848 popular uprising of the people saw both the implementing of a new oppressive era in France -- with Napoleon as the emperor -- as well as the final end of Prime Minister Guizot.”

Indeed, my column above was never published by Tercüman that day, due to objections voiced by Altemur Kılıç, one of the paper's directors. In fact, Kılıç asked me, “The French Prime Minister Guizot that you talk about in that column, did he really resemble Özal that much?” It appeared we were literally toying with changing the course of history -- or at least the account of how history had gone -- so that Özal would not be offended.

So, 1990… or 2015… Our democracy is ill once again. Very ill in fact. It seems we're actually in the position of longing for those Özal days.

Another one of my self-censored columns bore the headline “The sardine's scales.” It was about two stories from the theater play “In One Country,” written by Aziz Nesin and acted by Dilek Türker. In one of these stories, called “Glass eye” (which happens to be an extremely aggressive kind of shark), a glass-eyed shark eats a sardine that swims in front of him. The shark is relentless in fact, eating as many sardines as he can find. Finally, one wise sardine steps before his friends and warns them: “Friends, let's come together and create a wall of fish in front of this glass eye. Then let's shake our scales as hard as we can. Sooner or later, one of those scales will get into his eye, and blind him -- which will make him easier for others to hunt.”

So the sardines pull together and do what their friend suggested. The glass-eyed shark is unable to make it through the wall of fish they create. And a scale does get into his eye. Blinded, he gets confused, and a fisherman winds up catching him.

It's fairly obvious that these sardines represent strong, energized people unwilling to bow their necks to something that others might call fate. Rather than just waiting to become food for the glass-eyed shark, they move together to take charge of their own lives.

Here is how I described the second story in the play: “In a country far off, there was a man who was powerful, who did anything he liked. Everyone would do their best to show off in front of him; everybody tried to become his favorite. Except for one wandering bard. For whatever reason, the powerful man was not able to get the wandering poet to bow down to him. So the man had his assistants come together and present a mean and dastardly game meant to entrap the poet. The leaders' people designed an extremely low door through which someone could only get through by leaning down. The calculation was that when the poet was called to have an audience with the powerful man, he would have to double over when he came through the door, and would thus appear like that before the leader. The poet arrived for his audience with the powerful man, but when he saw the door was so low-slung, he immediately turned around, and passed through the door backwards. When he entered the room like this, he said to the powerful man, sitting there so small but with such a large vision of himself in the chair: ‘Please forgive me, your excellence, if I've bowed backwards… Because, after all, every honorable citizen of our country is obliged to bow like that to a leader who represents tyranny.”

My aim with this column is not to show that nothing has changed in the past 25 years. There's no reason to become hopeless. After all, when Süleyman Demirel and Erdal İnönü created their coalition in 1991, Özal lost all his power and influence. People were called to account for their actions.

Nov. 1 sits before us on the calendar, promising great hope. If there's one thing I've learned through the long years of my profession, no injustice lasts forever. So I'm really not that worried. Our tomorrows will be brighter, that much is certain.

*Nazlı Ilıcak is a columnist for the Bugün daily. Today's Zaman is publishing her column today as the Bugün daily, which has been taken over by government-appointed trustees, no longer publishes columns critical of the government.


Editor’s note: This column was supposed to appear in the Bugün newspaper on Oct. 30 but was not published after the daily's management was taken over by a trustee and its editors were fired. Today's Zaman publishes this column in solidarity with Bugün.

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