Drying up FETÖ’s human resources

You may argue that human resources for the Fethullah Gülen movement cannot be dried up. True, there will always be people who would believe that Gülen is the Mahdi. However, those people will be insignificant compared to the resources Gülen was able to reach up until yesterday. What is important is not to grant that resource to Gülen and future possible “saviors.”  

What created Gülen and made him a phenomenon were the mistakes and shortcomings of our republic. The Justice and Development Party (AKP), which is justifiably blamed for providing the biggest support to the Gülen organization, is also the product of the same mistakes and shortcomings. 

We should be able to make this diagnosis properly and with courage. 

I will not go into the official ideology, its practice and the anti-religion period of after Feb. 28, 1997, but our issue is that in 90 years, we have not been able to form a social state. 

The biggest human resources of the Gülen movement were in education and service. Its service was mainly providing access to education, especially quality education to people who did not have this access.  

This is what the state has failed at. In a couple of weeks, schools will open. Out of the more than 1 million kids to start school this year, only 10 percent will be at a level comparable with their peers around the world when they graduate after 12 years. Some 25-30 percent would be “good for Turkey,” while the remaining 60 percent would have unfortunately spent a major part of these 12 years for nothing. If our state had provided each child access to quality education for 90 years, we would not have been talking about Gülen or democratization today. 

We have solved the access issue in the past 10 years, but school buildings, classrooms and the functioning “bussed education” system are not adequate for quality education. 

This is from where Gülen is fed. For years, they have been making PR campaigns that their schools and preparatory courses are the best. This movement not only opened schools but it provided accommodation and religious services also. They had dormitories and apartments where elder brothers and sisters helped with school and homework and held religious conversations. They provided career counseling, jobs, sent some of them abroad for further education. They became civil servants, businesspeople, academics and medical doctors.  

The “Fethullahist Terrorist Organization” (FETÖ) was such a self-sustainable arrangement that it could well be called Fetullistan, according to Republican People’s Party (CHP) deputy Taha Özkan. 

We are not only talking about a state that has failed in education and being a social state but also a state that failed in providing religious services. Put the cronies’ network of distorted capitalism practiced here, then you will find the pro-Gülen business people and the enormous financial resources.
 
Add to this our state making us live always within the gray areas instead of within the framework of rules, thus obliging us to search for a facilitator for everything and in every opportunity, then you can find how FETÖ was spoiled by the state. 

If we want to get rid of FETÖ today and if we do not want other FETÖ-type organizations to emerge tomorrow, what we need to correct from top to bottom is obvious.