Turkish journalist: there’s great gap between Islamists and seculars

PanARMENIAN.Net - The recent events at Taksim Square is a multi-layer issue with many different groups involved, a prominent journalist and commentator of Turkish affairs told Euronews.

“It started with a secular part of society and as a movement of young people. There is also another group involved: The Taksim Platform which is made up of people from the Taksim neighbourhood. It was a movement to protect Taksim and the Gezi Park,” Etyen Mahçupyan said.

“Then other groups joined, representing a wide spectrum of Turkish politics. The problem here is it became hard to differentiate between the groups. Because the major player in this movement is a spontaneous group with no leader. And they are not willing to use the traditional tools and methods of politics.”

“This meant they were not part of any particular organisation. So organised groups were able to dominate the situation. Simply it is the culture of disassociation. The groups stand side by side and they don’t touch or push each other and they don’t establish any kind of relationship. This created a mosaic and caused two things: Firstly, it partially became politicized and secondly it started to degenerate,” Mahçupyan said.

“The government is trying to differentiate between these groups. But I should point out that the government has taken days to come to this point. At the beginning they didn’t realise what was going on. For the first three days they just didn’t get it.”

“As a deeper analysis, we should underline that there is a great gap between the Islamists and seculars in terms of decoding each others’ cultural codes. For this reason seculars cannot understand the mindset of Islamists and Islamists do not understand the secular mind.”

“It means the government could not understand the reasons behind the youth uprising, because their young people are not like that. There are 1990 generation youngsters among the Islamists and they do not act like this.”

“The AK Party government only saw the people behind them. They witnessed that the people behind them were systematically manipulating these young men and women. Calling this an attempt at a military coup seems an exaggeration, but I do think there are people who want to produce the dynamics which would lead to a coup. We can see the signs of this particularly in the financial markets, where new organizational links are being established,” Mahçupyan concluded.