Ertugrul Ozkok: Prime Minister Erdogan's "us" and "them"

As I have been saying for days, Turkey is all of these people. Maybe as the general leader of the AKP, you don't see the people at the Kocatepe Mosque "from your people." But still, as Prime Minister of this country, when you look at them, they must be "people from this country." I mean, they are all citizens of the Turkish Republic. And so I insist that if you don't count alleviating these peoples' worrues and fears as one of your duties, then it follows that they will not count you as their prime minister.
Maybe in your youth you divided the people of Turkey into "those who believe" and "those who don't believe." Others like you may have split the country (in their minds) into divisions like "the retireds," "the bourgeouisie," "the nationalists," and "the communists." We know that mature people accept this sort of thinking and dividing as a classic "youthful affliction" of ideologues.
 
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The other day, I was speaking to a reasonable member of the AKP. A person from the Prime Minister's inner circles was saying this about the attack on the Council of State:
 
"This event was an attempt at destroying our side. But you will see, it will become clear that it did not eminate from our side."
 
Some people in the Prime Minister's inner group still look at last Wednesday's event through the lens of 'our side.' In other words, as long as the murderer doesn't turn out to have come from 'their side,' there is no problem. The Prime Minister, with an amazing level of carelessness, can say "The target of this murder was not the regime (the government itself) but the ruling party." But I wonder, what does he think of when he says 'regime'? For him, does it symbolize only those people with a sensitivity towards secularity? Isn't the name of this regime democracy? And in the end, wasn't this attack aimed at the democratic regime? Clearly, the Prime Minister sees his own entity as a separate thing. Let's say that the real target of the Council of State attack was the administration. Will the Prime Minister really be able to put his head comfortably on his pillow every night knowing that "the attackers were not from our side"?

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If someone were to step forward and say to the Prime Minister "They (the attackers) may not have come from 'your side,' but they used reasons that 'your side' provided" would they be wrong? The man arrested for the attack says "I killed because of the 'turban' decision from the court."
 
The statement from the Prime Minister earlier this week to reporters on a plane heading for Egypt made no sense. When he said "the target of this murder was not the regime itself, but the ruling party," it was a historical gaffe. Because if a legitimately elected Prime Minister of this country does not see himself as a part of the official regime, then we are really in trouble. In the end, whomever it was that carried out the attack, it hit straight at the heart of the regime.
 
Here is how the Council of State incident has reflected itself onto the rest of the world:
A member of a secular court who signed a decision on a "turban" decision was killed by a religious fanatic. If I were the head of the AKP, I would ask myself the following question:
 
"Where have we gone wrong in Turkey that the foreign press is now seeing as an 'Islamic' party?"

In any case, the time to examine these events with a cool head and clear eyes has really arrived. If the Prime Minister continues to view certain people as "others," before long, these "others" will come together and, pointing their fingers close to his eyes, will ask him "Well then Prime Minister, if that is so, who are you?"
 
And in the end, the PM will see that those people he refers to as 'from our side' turn out to only make up around 25% of the country. That is, if there are even that many left on his 'side.'