CUMHURIYET- Columnist Ergin Yildizoglu comments on current political situation in Turkey after Parliament overturned Saturday a proposal which would have allowed deployment of US troops on Turkish soil. A summary of his column is as follows:
Turkey’s ideological universe split when Parliament failed to approve US troops proposal last Saturday. This universe, which has long been kept intact by a false claim that globalization and the US hegemony are inevitable and resisting them would amount to nothing, has began wearing thin so much so that new options’ entering into it is now more probable than ever. The crack can get even bigger.
The concept of colonialism, when stripped of its historical attributes, can be described, in philosopher and anti-colonialist Frantz Fanon’s words, as “the power and the ability of an outsider to rule over a national realm.” The outsider enters this realm by using force (though not always a physical one). It transforms or completely destroys economic and cultural structures of that realm; it realizes its power there through representative bodies or institutions. The foreigner declares that particular national culture ‘inferior’ and moulds a new social class which would adopt and reproduce a ‘superior’ culture. This new social class begins to see itself through the gaze of the ‘other’ and asserts itself as the dynamics of progress, reproducing racist tendencies of the colonial power.
Drawing on these conclusions, Turkey can be said to have been suffering from a colonial syndrome for quite a long time now. And recently, we once again witnessed ‘the power of the other’ unfolding as negotiations between Turkey and the US proceeded on a war against Iraq. The government has begun talking to the US without taking the ruling party’s and the Turkish people’s tendencies into account. It has put forward US’ will as Turkey’s only option and presented Washington’s shaky and ambiguous promises as real gains. It has used International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) pressures to defend its own cause. It could resist neither to the US nor to IMF’s demands.
We can face more serious problems in the future if we don’t see things through the crack the US troops proposal had opened and question the colonialist syndrome.
SOURCE: OFFICE OF THE PRIME MINISTER, DIRECTORATE GENERAL OF PRESS AND INFORMATION