 no longer enthusiastically celebrates the national day of the Republic of Turkey, founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Instead, Erdoğan’s new regime annually commemorates the coup attempt of July 15, 2016 with great fanfare as “Democracy and National Unity Day” throughout the country and worldwide.){kind=link}
Türkmen Terzi
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) no longer enthusiastically celebrates the national day of the Republic of Turkey, founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Instead, Erdoğan’s new regime annually commemorates the coup attempt of July 15, 2016 with great fanfare as “Democracy and National Unity Day” throughout the country and worldwide.
According to many, the coup attempt was a false flag aimed at entrenching the authoritarian rule of President Erdoğan by rooting out dissidents and eliminating powerful actors such as the military in his desire for absolute power.
The failed coup killed 251 people and wounded more than a thousand others. The next morning, after announcing the coup had been put down, the Turkish government immediately started a wide-ranging purge of military officers, judges, police officers, teachers and other civil servants that ultimately led to the dismissal of more than 130,000 from their jobs.
Since the coup attempt, Democracy and National Unity Day has been marked every year on July 15 with numerous events throughout the country, organized by state institutions such as governor’s offices, police departments, religious offices, municipalities, ministries, schools affiliated with the ministry of education, private schools and many others. Turkish embassies worldwide, in collaboration with the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TİKA), the Turkish Maarif Foundation, the Yunus Emre Institute and other government-funded organizations also organize several events to remember the civilians who lost their lives during the coup attempt.
State broadcaster TRT and almost all mainstream media outlets, which take direct orders from Erdoğan’s cronies, give generous coverage to the July 15 events. South Africa is one of the destinations where Erdoğan’s AKP tries desperately to spread the July 15 propaganda.
The Turkish Embassy in Pretoria shared only two tweets on May 19, 2024 to mark the commemoration of Atatürk, Youth and Sports Day, which is regarded as the beginning of the Turkish War of Independence in official historiography. For Republic Day, which commemorates the proclamation of the republic in 1923, or Victory Day, which marks the victory at the final battle in Dumlupınar ending the Turkish War of Independence in 1922, there were no significant social media shares. However, the embassy shared 23 tweets and retweets on X to mark Democracy and National Unity Day on July 15.
Erdoğan’s AKP declared the so-called July 15 coup attempt, which has not been investigated by the Turkish parliament, independent judiciary, media outlets, courts or any international bodies, as a national holiday along with other national days representing great successes in recent history against colonial powers. The AKP has prevented state institutions from investigating the true events of the coup attempt while paying tribute to the civilians who lost their lives in the July 15 coup with hundreds of events funded by millions of dollars from taxpayers.
On the other hand, the victims’ families, journalists in exile and security officers who were arrested during coup events continue to expose the AKP’s July 15 lies.
“That night is still dark for me. Nothing has been clarified in eight years. No politician pursued this issue, and it seems none will. There was nothing from the opposition, either. It appears to have been a state project, a systematic thing where everyone got what they wanted. The powerful clashed, and the people were trampled,” Nihal Olcok, who lost her husband Erol Olçok, AKP’s prominent publicist, and her 16-year-old son Abdullah on the night of the coup, told the Kürsü TV news website on Monday. She claimed that her husband and son were killed by snipers.
Erol Olçok, in tweets he posted five days before the coup, pointed to July 15, stating that Erdoğan would plot against the Turkish military by purging Kemalist, leftist and Gülenist soldiers and form a national army with soldiers loyal to him. On the day of the coup, persistent phone calls from AKP headquarters instructed him to go to the Bosporus Bridge where the false flag coup attempt had begun.
SAT (the Turkish equivalent of the US Marines) Commander Mevlüt Öncel detailed in court that it was not soldiers but unknown gunmen who killed the civilians. “So, what happened that night? First, some authorities managed to bring together the military and civilians in the same location, confronting each other on the night of July 15. Thousands of citizens were coming to the barracks, but there wasn’t a single police officer. They saw that the soldiers were not firing at the citizens. At 3 a.m., they cut off all the electricity to the military base. At the same time as the soldiers’ warning shots, they also fired. In fact, this was an execution…”
Autopsy reports support Öncel’s testimony that almost all the civilians were killed not by soldiers’ bullets but by snipers. The Turkish Army did not have a sniper unit at the time.
It has been eight years since the coup attempt, yet Erdoğan has not provided an explanation as to why he risked the lives of millions of civilians by calling on them to take to the streets on a CNN Türk live broadcast to counter the coup plotters’ guns and tanks on the coup night. Furthermore, he has prevented courts and parliamentary commissions from investigating who was responsible for these civilian deaths.
Erdoğan was quick to accuse Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen of being the mastermind of the coup while the coup was still underway. And after eight years, he is still leading a widespread crackdown on over 2 million Gülen followers, including teachers, housewives and students. To date, neither he nor anyone in his government has been able to provide a single shred of credible evidence showing Gülen’s involvement.
But Erdoğan, Hulusi Akar, the army chief at the time who later served as defense minister, and current Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, who was then the intelligence chief, did not testify to a parliamentary coup investigation committee or in any courts to share the details of the coup attempt. Erdoğan, who had ruled the country for over 14 years at the time, described the attempted coup as “a gift from God” in his address to the nation at İstanbul Airport during the coup attempt.
Almost a decade later, time has proven that Erdoğan managed to entrench his one-man rule thanks to the July 15 coup attempt. Erdoğan’s AKP successfully purged almost half the Turkish generals from the army and replaced them with commanders closest to the AKP. The AKP purged over 4,000 judges and prosecutors, replacing them with new law school graduates who have been appointed as judges and prosecutors and who take orders from Erdoğan. Police and other key public servants were fired from their posts for simply being accused of membership in the Gülen movement.
The failed coup allowed Erdoğan to silence all his critics in government institutions. The AKP shut down 170 media houses, and many top editors and journalists had to leave the country. Since the night of July 15, Erdoğan has transformed Turkey’s parliamentary system into an executive presidency where he faces no resistance from the Kemalist military establishment or the once-strong bureaucratic power of the Gülen movement. He can singlehandedly launch the country into war, as Turkish military operations in Syria have shown.
The irony is that while the AKP’s witch hunt against members of the Gülen movement has continued without interruption for the past eight years, the soldiers who protected Erdoğan in Marmaris on the night of July 15 and the pilots who flew him to İstanbul were imprisoned for being part of the movement.
Turkish Professor Nursen Mazıcı, whose Ph.D. thesis is on military coups, told Habertürk TV, “July 15 is not a military coup. Whoever benefited from this event is the perpetrator.”
The July 15 coup attempt was a false flag operation and was a gift from God for Erdoğan. As the main opposition Republican People’s Party’s (CHP) former leader, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, said, Erdoğan conducted his civilian coup after July 15, and Erdoğan’s Islamist regime can only continue with the rhetoric of July 15.