Taking turns with the handcuffs
What does our proverb say? “Don’t make a martyr sigh, you will pay for it by and by.” Or you can say, “What goes around comes around.”
It’s not exactly like this. Or it is exactly like this. Maybe this coming around was slow in the past, but we are living in such times now that today’s wrongdoing does not even wait until tomorrow to be corrected.
Just go back five years... Remember those days... Dear Professor Türkan Saylan was fighting cancer. Her house was raided one unfortunate morning. Remember the tired and sad expression on this lady’s face while she was looking out of her window.
Remember how her neighborhood stood up for her. There were a lot of sighs in that neighborhood on that morning.
Remember the desperate rage, the suppressed outbreak of people whose houses and private lives were shattered.
While they were kept in prison, the embarrassment people had to go through because they were “out.”
Visualize the spouses, the daughters and sons of arrested officers who struggled unbelievably for their fathers and their spouses.
In those heroic households, there were many, many sighs…
* * *
Write down those columnists, those politicians one by one, those who mocked them, those who scorned them.
That hubris, that humiliating attitude was agonizing for many people. For millions of souls, the conduct meted out to honorable officers of the army was too upsetting…
The rebellion that was kept silent because fear had become embers in the heart and transformed into deep sighs.
In this country, there have been many sighs…
It has only been five years.
Now, the people who staged this conduct against them are being handcuffed and are being taken themselves.
I'm watching…
There they are; the same scenes, the same cruelty. The only thing that has changed is who is taking turns in being handcuffed.
However, I'm not saying anything to those who are being handcuffed now…
My words are now for those who are putting the handcuffs on and the politicians who are behind them…
Sincerely, I am talking with the conscience and the sentiment of what I have lived through, what I have seen:
Now it is your turn to put on the handcuffs…
Be fair and merciful… Do not put yourself in the position of a prosecutor, a judge or a correction officer and do not make them a convict and a victim from the first day…
Do not agonize and accumulate any more “sighs…”
Do not forget, it was only five years ago…
Remember those days. How full of pride they were… What kind of a power was that, how uncontrollable that authority was…
They were so capable…
They were told “Go and get them,” and even cancer patients, old bodies were dragged to be “brought in…”
You, hey you…
The powerful of all times, whoever you are…
Don’t you ever assume nothing is going to change… Don’t you think you will ever occupy that throne of reign forever, the one that seems unshakable.
Beware that the day will come; the time will come sooner than anybody thinks…
And, you will see once and for all, that the unshakeable throne was nothing but your own coffin of conscience.
This country is queuing up to handcuff and be handcuffed.
If we cannot save our country, every one of us will take turns…
***
Justice… Only an impartial justice, a fair one…
I am calling to every one of us, but especially to the powerful whose trunk of sins has exceeded its load capacity…
Be fair. Do not interfere with justice.
Do not, so that that short time that will arrive very soon, the one when history repeats itself, will not do so one more time, this time for you…
Be sure that once it repeats itself, there are millions accumulated who will be there to boo and whistle at you…
Nobody can be the sultan in these modern times.
If you say “put on the handcuffs,” well, you have the control of it today, but somebody else will have control of them tomorrow…
Do not make a martyr sigh…
Be sure, you will pay for it - not by and by, but in a flash…
