The U-turn of a minister who resigned

AHMET HAKAN

Yesterday, all of us were “the boy who was beaten to death in the middle of Eskişehir” Ali İsmail. We all became you. We were like you. We too felt the kicks on your body. The sticks on your back, came to hit our backs too.

We tried to understand how it is to be killed by beating, Ali İsmail.

***

Yesterday we all “dreamt of a free world”

Just like you did. We all liked your handsome pictures. We liked your photos just like your father did. With tears in our eyes.

We all talked about you, Ali İsmail.

We shouted your name. We told his killers and their accomplices, “Ali İsmail is not alone.” Yesterday, we were all as if killed at 19.

Your suffering became our suffering. Your family became our family. Your mother became our mother, your father, our father. Your trial, our trial, your killers, our killers.

***
- We took buses and went to Kayseri.
- We said I want to be his lawyer.
- We faced your killers.
- We slammed your picture in the faces of cowards.

Yesterday we all wrote a legend, Ali İsmail.

Not a legend of police; but a legend of humanity and consciousness.

Sleep well, Ali İsmail.

We are following your trial; we are after your killers.

Why are they calling back Fethullah Gülen?

Not a day goes by without someone from the government calling on Fethullah Gülen to come back to Turkey. I am very curious. What would they do if Fethullah Gülen comes back? Will they greet him in the airport? With flowers and so on?

Will they say, “Welcome back to your homeland Fethullah Gülen?”
Will they make an operation in the early morning?
Will they take him directly from the airport?
Will they seek ways to work together?
Will they talk in favor of him?
Will they act as if nothing has happened?

The U-turn of a minister who resigned

Erdoğan Bayraktar decided to take back his resignation. Apparently, he regretted it.

He said “those words” came at a moment of high temperament and anger. They were not his real feelings.

He was told to come back and work for the party, and he said “yes.”

Everyone is wondering about this spectacular U-turn of former minister Erdoğan Bayraktan, who had said, “I am resigning from the Parliament and from my party; the prime minister should resign as well.” People keep asking “How can this happen?”

I however am obsessed by two issues:

1) Those Justice and Development Party (AKP) supporters who have gone even as far as insulting him when he said, “I am resigning, the prime minister should resign too,” how can they now digest going and working together for the campaign?

2) What will Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu (the head of the main opposition party), who had called him a “straight forward man,” now say of him?