In order to understand and make sense of February 28, it is best to begin by analysing the post-February 28 process in Turkey.
Political Islamist movements have argued that they were "the victims of February 28" in this country for more than 20 years. They had to argue it, because they needed a strong origin story to provide a basis for the regime they wanted to establish, and they needed to write a new history for themselves.
Up until February 28, the bourgeois order in Turkey had been unable embrace existing social and political structures and therefore needed a coup. Politics had to be reconsolidated immediately. The Turkish General Staff stepped in with the support of the capitalist class.
It was in the context of the establishment of the coalition government (Refahyol) formed between the Islamist Welfare Party (RP) and the centre-right True Path Party (DYP); the Susurluk car crash, a key event in the unravelling of the deep state in Turkey, as the peculiar associations of the crash victims and their links with then-Interior Minister Mehmet Ağar led to a number of investigations, including a parliamentary investigation; and the "We want sharia" demonstrations, that the National Security Council (NSC) held a nine-hour meeting and announced an eighteen point decision.
This process would be the first significant step in paving the way for the rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP).
THE DECISIONS OF FEBRUARY 28
The NSC issued a list of 18 decisions, known as "the National Security Council Decisions", to the government, emphasizing that the decisions had to be put into practice to protect secularism.
The 18-points of the NSC briefly made the supervision of private schools of religious sects and cults mandatory; demanded the reformation of the education system according to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s original education reforms; asked that primary schools continue for eight years without breaks to prevent transitions to Islamic imam-hatip schools; placed Quran reading courses under the supervision of the state; dismantled Islamic monasteries and dervish lodges violating the revolutionary laws; placed the Islamist media under supervision by the state; banned Islamic-based clothes such as the hijab, turban, and headscarf in official places; and blocked attacks on Atatürk’s personality and his revolutions as well as reactionary Islamic activities ("irtica" in Turkish) against democratic, secular and social law.
Then Prime-minister Necmettin Erbakan signed only four points of the decisions of the NSC. Yet, the Islamist Erbakan resigned after five months, and a coalition government was established with the alliance of Mesut Yılmaz's centre-right Motherland Party (ANAP), Bülent Ecevit’s Democratic Left Party (DSP) and Hüsamettin Cindoruk’s right-wing Democratic Turkey Party (DTP).
Erbakan's Islamist Welfare Party (RP) was shut down by the decision of the Constitutional Court. The only point of the NSC decisions that was put into practice was the 8-year compulsory primary education system already discussed since the 1960s.
It is quite obvious that the capitalist system in the 1990s was in search of stability and tried to overcome the stability problem with the "restorative" manoeuvre of February 28. As the February 28 process led to the abolishment of the Welfare Party during this process, it paved the way for an intraparty opposition movement that called itself "reformist". This "new" political group consisting of so-called 'Islamic democrats' has seized political power by compromising with the U.S. and the West as part of a neoliberal trajectory.
FEBRUARY 28: THE CREATOR AND BREEDER OF THE AKP
Since its establishment, the AKP has been lamenting the "oppression and victimization" it suffered due to February 28, and has succeeded very well in exploiting this rhetoric. Yet, the AKP is, in fact, a unique child of February 28.
But how?
The capitalist class in Turkey has swapped roles with "moderate Islamists" in its target path towards full integration with the neoliberal world order. First, the Ecevit government was overthrown in 2002, then the AKP, formed by splitting from the Welfare Party shut by the constitutional court, was put into power, and last, Fethullah Gülen, then-collaborator of the AKP supported February 28.
The bourgeois order was in crisis and it thought that it could reconsolidate the system with "moderate Islamism".
The AKP government's attempts to join the European Union during the first years of its power, the acceleration and intensification of privatizations, the placement of neoliberal economic policies dictated by Kemal Derviş, who was formerly responsible for the IMF and World Bank’s global programmes and policies and the former Minister of Economic Affairs in the Ecevit government, into practice by the AKP government, and the invasion of these territories by marketism and savage capitalism, all indicate that February 28 was not for nothing.
In other words, February 28, claimed to be a "balance adjustment to democracy" by the Turkish army on the pretext of "traditional laicist" concerns, has paved the way for the rule of reactionary Islamists politicized against the progressive components of Turkey. The existence of the AKP is due to February 28, allowing it to be a banausic instrument that could fulfill the needs of bourgeois politics.
LIES ABOUT "VICTIMIZATION OF MUSLIMS" DURING FEBRUARY 28
The 'reckoning/revenge' discourse of the AKP with February 28 is only a lie fabricated to consolidate its own grassroots for years. The February 28 trial of hundreds of generals and Coup D’etat Trials for September 12, 1980 - what is left behind from the actions done in the name of AKP’s reckoning with the putschists, does anyone even remember today?
None of the lies fabricated by the AKP government are mentioned today. Because there is not a single prisoner accused within the February 28 Trials. Today, all the defendants have been released by the court on conditions of trial without an arrest in the lawsuit initially brought against 76 prisoners accused, while the case has not concluded yet despite the passing years.
How can the AKP reckon with the events of February 28 that it owes its existence to? And who cares about reckoning or revenge whilst there was a "wind of democratization" that has been created in the name of 'reckoning with putschists.'
This is the short story of the events of February 28 which the AKP still takes advantage of.
