Yasin Aktay, Advisor to the Turkish President and the designated spokesperson of the Justice and Development Party, or otherwise the “Turkish intellectual and politician” as he identifies himself on his Arabic Facebook page, seems to have fallen for an unexpected understeer trap when he took up his pen to offer sympathy to his friends and colleagues of the Brotherhood traumatized over the unappealable judicial decision on the Kerdasa attack case. Aktay’s recent article on Yeni Safak website made reference in its title to “mass executions carried out in Ramadan”. The article discussed the death sentence issued against a number of terrorists who premeditatedly killed 15 Egyptian citizens, a ruling that took the court full eight years to issue after all judicial remedies stipulated in the Egyptian laws have been exhausted by the defendants.
In his article, Advisor Aktay, to whom I send my message, has taken quick steps down a slippery slope without cautiously considering falling down. Maybe he did so under the influence of the alleged “virtual message” that addressed him considering Turkey a guardian of the Islamic world and its people, a narrative that has only two likely scenarios. The first scenario is that you play that famous trick of many writers who get nothing to do but have a cover through which they can pass on their messages disguising behind an alleged reader’s message. On this, I’d like to point out that the concept of “aegis” is a profound problem at which Turkey’s understanding of its relations with the Arab world had stagnated. As closely connected as it is to the Turkish heritage and intellect over ages (which you want to revive or you alone could go back to them), the Turkish “aegis” today is held up as an exemplar of irony more than provoking blanket rejection and zero tolerance toward the idea of harking back to these bygone eras of history rich in horrific and scandalous chapters that the limited space of my article won’t fit and our stature won’t go down far there digging up this history. The second scenario is that the message you received is real and in this case, it should have required giving it long and thorough consideration instead of it dragging a high-profile official like you into defending a terrorist group, merely because the message sender belongs to the Brotherhood, masters of using emotionally charged words just like the ones appearing in the posted message. And how typical of the Brotherhood, the message came language-loaded without going into the reality of events, deliberately ignoring that the incident, the subject matter of the case, was indeed a full-fledged “terrorist crime”, most of its scenes were audio-visually recorded and its defendants were tried before ordinary courts enjoying all their legal rights.
So, it would have behooved a high-ranking official like you to put in the minimal effort to get to know the facts instead of just repeating the phrase “human rights” implying that those defendants have been deprived of their rights and seeking to portray the situation in Egypt as exceptional, which led you to present egregious falsifications just because you received a message that says so.
For this, I’ll share with Mr. Aktay important information that he may have missed given the preoccupations of his position and which he will find helpful in the future if mandated to put pen to paper or make statements in this respect. First, the Brotherhood has been judicially designated as a “terrorist organization” in Egypt and in other countries as well, albeit with varying nominations all revolving around “banning”, “freezing activities” and “besieging their extremist ideology”. Moreover, some of the organizations that the Brotherhood founded and ran in Egypt have been designated by the US and the UK as banned terrorist organizations and their members are pursued globally including Hasm and Liwaa Al-Tharwa movements and their founders who are prominent Brotherhood leaders, namely Alaa Al-Samahi and Yahia Mousa. The later served as the spokesman of the Ministry of Health during Morsi’s rule. The Egyptian judiciary, the Global Fugitives List, and the Arab Quartet have designated both Al-Samahi and Mousa as fugitive terrorists for proven involvement in running a terrorist activity inside Egypt and both are also fellow activists of the figures Aktay came out to talk about and it is unlikely that you, Mr. Aktay, want your name associated with theirs being fugitives, particularly several instances reveal their ties with Turkey, not least of which them taking a refuge in Turkey and finding it a haven for their activities.
Mr. Aktay performed an “overacted” political stunt, jumping from defending and promoting the Brotherhood to talking about “human rights”, which, in his words, is a sensitive issue to the whole Islamic world (and not just Egypt, the topic of his article). Aktay went on to address the situation of human rights in the Islamic world which – strangely – “provokes his Islamic thought and evokes his pain”. Indeed, reality shows that neither Egypt nor any Islamic country has any sensibility to addressing human rights, at least as opposed to Turkey which he is coercively trying to sit on the preacher’s deck to give lessons to the world about distinctive violence. This, I say, is an eternal somersault, particularly because it came from someone who is influential and have been actively involved in formulating Turkey’s internal and external policies at least in the few years that followed the alleged coup of 2016 after which Turkey witnessed scores of unprecedented human rights abuses. The limited space here doesn’t allow for stating the categories and numbers of citizens who were imprisoned, tortured, or arbitrarily dismissed of their positions. These would require volumes and volumes to tell them all. The substantial numbers of judges, soldiers, journalists, and state officials who were ravaged under the absurd pretext of belonging to Gülen movement is no secret to the whole world.
So, instead of wasting both or our times giving lessons he had been always dying to share – atypical characteristic of the group he champions – I think Mr. Aktay would do better to devote this time and use his writing space to mention numbers of people who were displaced and thrown into the Turkish prisons. And while we – just like many others – accurately know a great deal of information about these acts, we consider them an internal Turkish affair as long as they were conducted against Turkish citizens. So, you composedly putting pen to paper and mentioning these facts would provide a useful resource for future research on this era.
I hope my well-meaning suggestion would be of interest to Mr. Aktay particularly given that international human rights reports no longer talk only about what is taking place inside Turkey and in its prisons but speak also of operations involving staff of diplomatic missions as outlined in the joint submission of the United Nations Rapporteurs to Turkey which was based on the findings of an international inquiry and fact-finding committee and in which they expressed their deep concern over extraterritorial abductions under the aegis of the Turkish regime after it has been established that it [the Turkish regime] carries out abductions and forced repatriation of Turkish citizens from several countries, throwing them into prison without trials only under the accusation of belonging to the Gülen movement which had been an ally of the ruling party for years.
Finally, given Turkey’s willingness to restore normal relations with Egypt and the Arab countries that is unfolding before us, I conclude my brief message with a note to Mr. Yassin Aktay, and his fellows, to leave these ideas which reveal lack of knowledge of the reality of facts and failure to understand the magnitude of rejection of them in the Islamic world. Leaders of the Islamic world, and its people as well, realize that politics has its considerations that made the whole world keep silent and remain indifferent to the project which the Turkish regime has been involved in since 2011 and till just a few months ago.
Mr. Aktay let’s test – and believe – that Turkey is determined to rebuild sound political relations with other countries away from these ideas capable of revoking the pain of victims of your project, who are tens of thousands and are capable of turning the tide are they to catch a whiff of sympathy for those who murdered their loved ones for hire and for serving the extremist ideology, let alone reopening files that would turn the whole scene into comedy at which no one will laugh – just as what happened when you mentioned human rights. The good that lies ahead for Egypt is louder than you’re growling.
