While the terror attacks that have been continuing in Turkey for a while are carried out by different terrorist organizations, they are all conducted with the same objective and motivated by the same powers. The perpetrators of the attacks on the U.S. Consulate and a police station in Istanbul within the same timeframe earlier in the week were members of two different terrorist organizations. The timing and location of these attacks indicate that we are facing a multifaceted and coordinated series of attacks driven by one single power. In this regard, the terrorist attacks that Turkey has experienced recently are quite different from the separatist ones that the U.K. faced in the 1970s and the 1980s. The PKK is a separatist terrorist organization like the Irish Republican Army (IRA), but the PKK, apart from having Kurdish nationalist objectives, has a regional and implicit agenda. It is also at the helm of Turkey's leftist terrorist organizations such as the Revolutionary People's Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C). So, it is possible to argue that the PKK is subcontracting organizations like the DHKP-C and the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). That is why we cannot address the DHKP-C's attack against the U.S. Consulate separately from the PKK's ongoing assaults. Turkey's agreement with the U.S. on the fight against ISIS in the Middle East, its re-opening of the İncirlik Air Base to this end, and the rapidly changing positions of countries in the Middle East, including Iran and Israel, have all brought Turkey once again to a very strategic and determinant position. The Western countries, with the exception of the U.S., as well as countries in the region, including Iran, Israel and Egypt, want Turkey to be destabilized, to fail to be influential in the region and not to have a say in the energy and trade cycles in the region. For instance, the Egyptian junta inaugurated the expansion of the Suez Canal with the New Suez Canal propaganda. This project, which was completed in a year, was certainly carried out to deliver a political message, rather than to meet commercial necessities, as it was not already operating at full capacity because of the current shrinking trade volume. The new line parallel to the canal was welcomed in Western media outlets with acclamations that justified President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi. But the project does not just concern the increase of the commercial capacity of the canal.
The functionalizing of Egypt as an alternative power to Turkey in the eastern Mediterranean is, beyond any doubt, a project, which I think will fizzle out. The el-Sissi junta will strive to ensure stability through violence and state terrorism in the medium and long run. History has taught us that this is not a good path to follow and those who are helping the el-Sissi junta achieve domination over the eastern Mediterranean, Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are backing the wrong horse. Those who think the stability that el-Sissi brought about through massacres is permanent, but who attack Turkey's democratic stability at the same time are playing the wrong game, a game that will entrap them, as they cannot control the Middle Eastern energy fields and the African and Middle Eastern commercial transits through the el-Sissi junta. In this regard, the Southern Gas Corridor (SGC) is a very important project that not only carries energy physically, but paves the way for the establishment of an energy stock market and a new pricing mechanism in Turkey. In this way, the energy pricing that is at the helm in Russia and other energy monopolies and the market that will emerge here will lead to an economy where everyone will win.
Unlike in the previous century, politics and economy in the eastern Mediterranean, Middle East, North Africa and Caucasus will no longer be designed merely in the Western capitals, as we are entering a new period where countries such as China, Russia and Turkey act in line with their own interests. During the Cold War period as well, Russia and China were the powers that positioned themselves separately from the system, but acted within the general systemic detente. The U.N. Security Council took form in line with this paradigm. Now, things are not as they used to be and these two big powers repudiate systemic detente and act with the objective of determining global politics and economy in addition to their region. This reality also goes for Latin American countries and will apply to African countries in the near future.
This being the case, no one can assert that Turkey will be an Egypt. We know that a malevolent game is being schemed, but the schemers of this game and those who included Iran in the system in a mad rush as a trump card against Turkey should calculate the new wave that is rapidly coming from the East, the awareness that the top of the Turkish state has, and popular support.
Let me reiterate this very significant historical lesson: Economic stability cannot be ensured while there is a public that resists constraint and oppression. Even if it can, it would be permanent and those who rely on it will be frustrated in the end. From this standpoint, those who bank on the political stability of the fascist el-Sissi junta in Egypt, and which challenge Turkey and want Turkey be an Egypt will fall short of their goals.
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