By Ahmed Yakub Ismail
Since the July 15, 2016, failed coup in Turkey, there has been a deliberate attempt to distort the real issues in the country and draw people away from them. Many propagandists have focused on what they see as a crackdown on suspected members of the Gulen community, accused of being behind the attempted forceful takeover of government.
This is what the piece by one Sukru Kucuksahin published in key Nigerian newspapers under the headline: “What’s behind Turkey’s selective clampdown on Gulen community?” sought to portray. But people with deep knowledge of what is happening in that country know better.
Indeed, the Gulen movement led by United States-based Turkish cleric, Fethullah Gulen, had become so domineering and notorious that it became a thorn on the flesh of leaders of the country. Over the years, the Gulenists took over virtually all segments of Turkish national life, the police, military and key bureaucratic institutions in Turkey. They were so effectively in charged that they created what can be regarded as a state within the state.
Many countries in the world, particularly in Africa and the Middle East, are today contending with the devastating consequences of terrorism and other forms of sabotage because of their failure to act when it mattered most. Some of these countries saw the threat coming but could not act because they underestimated what was playing out. Nigeria, for instance, is paying the price of Boko Haram’s insurgency because of what many people have blamed on government’s failure to promptly and decisively act in the face of perceived threat to public peace. Perhaps, that informs the President Muhammadu Buhari administration’s resolve not to take the challenge posed by members of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria, led by El Zakzaky, lightly because, as they say, once beaten, twice shy.
The fact is that the ultimate goals of the Gulen movement remain unclear. The movement had been very dogged in its avowed determination to take over Turkey. Even Gulen himself had in an article in 2011 under the headline, “Wrong methods cannot be used for a right cause,” admitted the excesses of members of his movement. The truth is that most Gulenists became as fanatical as they were uncontrollable.
In the opening paragraph of Kucuksahin’s piece referred above, he wrote: “As of August 18, about 12,000 people have been jailed pending trial, including prominent businessmen, academics, journalists and soldiers; 10,000 people remain in custody for questioning and 85,000 public servants have been either suspended or dismissed. To make room in the prisons, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government issued a legislative decree last week, paving the way for the release of at least 38,000 prisoners, including convicted thieves.”
Nothing can be farther from the truth. A writer and author of “Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty,” Mustafa Akyol, had recounted his interaction with Gulenists in the U.S. when he was invited to give a lecture. He told the Gulenists in the U.S.: “Your people in Turkey did very wrong things of which I don’t approve. To my positive surprise, they responded: ‘We agree. Turkey’s context made them too fanatical, we are very different here.’”
Akyol then said: “In the next two years, 2012 and 2013, I spoke and signed books at more than a dozen Gulenist events in America. I met people who gave all their lives to a missionary cause, which was, for them, only about showing the beautiful truth of Islam to the world. They were all kind, modest, good-hearted people for whom I only had sympathy. I was convinced, as I still am, that these people, in fact, most Gulenists, had no idea about the dark side of their group.”
The point is, while the propagandists and anarchists continue to distort the truth, the fact remains that no responsible government folds its arms and watches its country go up in flames by fire ignited by agents of destabilisation.
• Ismail wrote from Abuja.