There is no you or me; only Turkey

Thinking up a new election slogan twice in one year was perhaps too much for the Justice and Development Party (AKP). That must be how they ended up with “Sen ben yok, Turkiye var” (“there is no you or me, there is Turkey”).

For the upcoming November 1st election, the AKP ads feature happy looking people from all walks of life repeating this “sen ben yok, Turkiye var” mantra, ending with a strong masculine voice pronouncing the words “AK Party” and a photo of a happy looking Prime Minister Davutoglu and the AKP’s lightbulb symbol (again, after the banning of so many of their previous Islamist parties, the people behind the AKP may have been having difficulty coming up with a new party symbol, and they ended up with a lightbulb).

I did not have a chance to ask AKP officials what the slogan is actually supposed to mean (beyond the literal translation, of course). I suspect their answer would be something along the lines of “Let’s all get along, put aside our differences and self-interest, and advance the welfare of the country.” Still, the slogan’s implied abrogation of individual rights and freedoms for raison d’etat (state interests) troubles me. Turkey has a long history of putting the state so far ahead of the individual that bad things happened to a lot of people. I therefore wondered if Turks might be similarly disquieted by the slogan or if I was missing something due to Turkish not being my native tongue.

So I called some of my friends. Since most of my friends from Turkey are not exactly AKP stalwarts, I got some amusing answers: “They have no idea what it’s supposed to mean,” one told me, “because they don’t need a slogan for their supporters to vote for them and nothing they say will get their opponents to change their minds. It’s just empty words.” Another hypothesized that the slogan means “Stop thinking of yourselves, shut up, and make Erdogan a dictator for life already.” My friends’ mood seems to capture the country’s mood, I think – cynicism, bitterness and an increasing realization that things will likely get worse before they get better.

All of which makes the AKP’s slogan for this election more than a little ironic. If they mean “sen ben yok, Turkiye var” as a call to unity and fraternity, they might ask how Turkey became so much more polarized and divided in such a very short time. Could it have something to do with calling every critic of a certain AKP leader a “spy,” a “terrorist,” a “tool of the ‘interest rate lobby’ (i.e. the Jews),” an “agent of the parallel state,” an “Armenian,” an “Alevi,” or something else along those lines? Why have some people been using “Jew,” “Armenian” or “Alevi” as an insult when many of Turkey’s citizens are in fact Jews, Armenians or Alevis? How did artists, students, professors and others protesting the bulldozing of Gezi Park suddenly become “çapulcular” (“bandits”), according to the state’s top leader?  How did an investigation into a coup plot against the AKP government several years back snowball into a witch hunt against every prominent Kemalist or secular critic of the government? How is it that the AKP’s “health” and “morality” initiatives look a lot like an assault on a Western lifestyle that many Turks value? Could this be sharia’ by other names and means? Why was the peace process with the Kurds suddenly abandoned after the June 7 election results? How is it that Turkey’s media freedom ranking went from 99th in 2002 to 149th today, placing it behind the likes of Myanmar, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Zimbabwe and Afghanistan? Why have there been so many lawsuits targeting even a beauty pageant winner and a 17 year-old student (amongst thousands) who tweeted something objectionable to a certain leader?

Perhaps the most important example of what happened to Turkey in the last few years comes from a good friend of mine who was born and raised in Diyarbakir. He told me of his visit home last month during clashes between the population and state forces. “For the first time in my memory,” he said, “it felt like a colonial struggle; it never quite felt that way before to me.” “Not even during the 1990s?” I asked. “No,” he answered, “Back then the PKK would fight the army in small groups, mostly in rural areas – but this, what I saw this summer, felt like a whole city under siege by the police and the army. For the first time, large numbers of people are starting to think we cannot remain in this country. Not like this.”

Things have thus degenerated remarkably quickly in Turkey. Many, including your humble columnist, lay most of the blame at the feet of one man’s temperament and tireless efforts to increase his power. If “Sen ben yok, Turkiye var” really means setting aside self-interest and personal ego in favor of unity and the country’s interests, then perhaps someone should point this out to President Erdogan.

David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since 2010. He is the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and author of The Kurdish Nationalist Movement (2006, Cambridge University Press) and co-editor (with Mehmet Gurses) of Conflict, Democratization and the Kurds in the Middle East (2014, Palgrave Macmillan).

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.