No offence but ‘Muslim brotherhood’ isn’t sufficient

No offence. I do not trust the “the brotherhood of Muslims.”

Even if I trust the Muslims, I do not trust their brotherhood.

When I have covered so much distance and gathered so much experience, and when I have accumulated the science of sociology in my luggage, I cannot possibly entrust either myself or my country to the “brotherhood of Muslims.”

I cannot take the phrase “the brotherhood of Muslims” that Öcalan gave us in his Nevruz address as an assurance and put it in my pocket.

Three meters across our border, it’s Muslims against Muslims. It is a Muslim who kills hundreds of people by sending a suicide bomber against Muslims walking on the street. The world’s most dangerous region is the Middle East, where Muslim is fighting Muslim. It is also Muslims who have partitioned a whole geography as Sunni-Alevi-Shiite, which puts them at each other’s throat.

It was Muslims who attacked the young people at Dicle University recently, while the ones on the other side were also Muslims. The war in our country that has caused the death of 40,000 people in 30 years was also between Muslims.

For this reason, when somebody comes up and mentions “Muslim brotherhood” to me, it sounds good to my ears and my heart, but my logic does not take it.

I want more than this.

- I want a true democracy.

- I long for a democracy where artists are not sent to jail because of a retweet.

- I don’t want my right to live, my lifestyle to be based on what comes out of the lips of two leaders.

- I want the system to protect me, not the “father” president. I see the regulations, laws and a real Constitution as assurances of this.

- The affection of the “father president” and his fatherly attitude do not appeal to me.

- I desire the presence of balancing institutions that are capable of stopping the arbitrariness of the powerful, the presence of the rule of law and an impartial state. I want an order where powers are separated not united.

History writes the powerful

One of the scenes engraved in my memory from the 1990s is the breakfast we held at Tansu Çiller’s mansion with Margaret Thatcher. No other female politician in the world has affected me so much.

She was a true “iron lady.” For me, she was the United Kingdom’s most successful prime minister after Churchill. In foreign policy she was powerful, not just leaving the Falkland Islands to Argentina. In domestic politics, she was a master, bringing down the most powerful trade union of coal miners. In the economy, she was successful, making the U.K. go through a liberal revolution after the industrial revolution.

She was admired not only by the British but by all of us.

But, look at her funeral. The U.K. is divided. Almost half the people find the 10 million pounds spent on her funeral as unnecessary. It looks as though there are as many haters of her as lovers.

Time has wiped away the memories of her achievements and in their place her tough stance, her arbitrary behavior, her injustices and disproportional use of force have been highlighted.

History acts in this way.

The authoritarian and arbitrary power is able to silence everybody in their time. They assume that they write history. But when their time passes, history takes the stage. Then it is not the powerful writing history, but rather history writing about the powerful.

Ertuğrul Özkök is a columnist for daily Hürriyet in which this piece was published on April 18. It was translated into English by the Daily News staff.