Erdoğan, on all-out attack, adds new names to long list of ‘traitors’

If the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) comes back as strong as it is now after the June 7 general elections, the biggest contribution to the party’s success will no doubt have come from President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Erdoğan has been holding at least one rally a day for the last couple of weeks, in addition to often appearing on television shows on which he receives questions from openly supportive journalists. 

What started as “opening ceremonies” turned into “meetings with the people” when it was understood that no facility was really opened in the opening ceremonies.

In his speeches on television and in the rallies, Erdoğan advocates a one-party government that will change the parliamentary system to a presidential one, and has not been shy to refer to the AKP candidates as “our candidates.”

He also uses the election tactic he is best at, pointing at the “enemies of the national will and traitors.” But the main difference of his current campaign from the previous ones is that he has added too many names to the list.

“When we look at who is not supporting the presidential system … here is what we see: the terrorist organization [the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party/PKK] doesn’t want it, Pennsylvania [Erdoğan’s ally-turned-foe, U.S.-based Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen] doesn’t want it, those who call people ‘[idiots] scratching their bellies,’ don’t want it and the Armenian diaspora doesn’t want it,” Erdoğan said May 27 in an address to a bus drivers’ federation.

Of course, the hand-picked successor of Erdoğan in the AKP, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, followed suit. 
The prime minister said he was fighting against the opposition parties, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), as well as the PKK, the outlawed Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C) and the Gülen Movement. He even accused the opposition parties of “plotting” to replace the government. Some AKP members actually believe that trying to beat the ruling party at the ballot box in the June 7 elections is a “coup attempt.” 

One of them is Markar Esayan, an Armenian-origin journalist who has long dedicated himself to the AKP’s cause and has been on the very front in the fight against the Gülen Movement’s “parallel state.”

Esayan, who recently wrote in a column that he “appreciates Western democracy,” apparently has his own way of doing that.

“The independence of our country, which has been waiting on its knees for 100 years to stand up, cannot be obstructed. We will stop this election-like coup at the ballot box.”

Oh, how the AKP leaders and supporters love the world “coup.” It is like a magical word that when you say it out loud, convincing the citizens to vote for the one and only anti-coup party in the country: the AKP, of course.

But the coup-plotting opposition parties, the PKK, the DHKP-C and the biggest evil, the “parallel state,” now have local and international media support.

That’s why Erdoğan has filed a complaint against daily Cumhuriyet Editor-in-Chief Can Dündar for a story on alleged weapons transfers by the country’s intelligence agency to rebels in Syria, asking the prosecutors to seek two life sentences plus 42 years in prison.

And, of course, that’s why the president unveiled a conspiracy against Turkey that includes the biggest international media organizations, which are trying to weaken the country and then divide it in line with instructions issued to them by what he called “the superior mind.” 

“Think about this; this newspaper [the New York Times] did the same thing against [Ottoman] Sultan Abdülhamit in 1896. It fulfills a duty imposed by a certain power. It serves this power in line with the assignment. This is what it’s doing now. It fulfilled its duty during the Gezi incidents [in 2013] as well, as you know. Just like the BBC and CNN,” Erdoğan told private broadcaster Show TV late June 2.  

With such a long list of enemies abroad and traitors within the country, one should give credit to the successful job Erdoğan and his supporters have done in the last 13 years in running the country.

One may ask what happened to the military coup plotters, including an ex-top general of the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK), sentenced to life imprisonment in the Ergenekon and Balyoz coup cases. The accusations were a plot by the “parallel state,” the documents published in the pro-government media were all fabricated, while Erdoğan, who said, “I’m the prosecutor of these cases,” was deceived by the evil. 

So the AKP’s election win in 2011 was not “the victory of the national will against military tutelage.”
It is time to get over it and focus on the “real plotters” President Erdoğan is pointing at now.