The factual core of the objection is accurate, and this site does not hide it: during the 1997 crisis Gülen made statements pointing to the government's own share of responsibility and voicing exit routes including early elections and resignation; the era's Islamist press attacked that stance harshly as "surrender". What is contested is not the fact but its reading.
The site's reading is this: a civic leader choosing de-escalation over confrontation in a country under the shadow of tanks is not "partnership" but an ethic of responsibility the same survival strategy millions of ordinary pious people were following. The real test is the outcome: had Gülen been a partner of the process, the process would have rewarded him. Instead, the moment the Welfare Party's dismantling was complete, the June 1999 cassette campaign traced by the period's own press to West Working Group files placed precisely him in the crosshairs; he was charged with the era's gravest offence, and his de facto exile became permanent. The system did not spare even the conciliatory because its problem was never tone, but independent civic power it could not control. That is not a refutation of our thesis; it is its confirmation.
No page of this site denies that Milli Görüş suffered a grave and real injustice in 1997–2001; the timeline and actors files record it in detail. The site's objection is not to the existence of the victimhood but to its accounting: the measure of victimhood is not only the size of the pain but whether the loss was ever made whole. The Milli Görüş cadres recovered their losses with interest the bans were lifted, and the movement's reformist wing has governed for over two decades. By contrast, restitution never came for the student marched through a persuasion room, the blacklisted tradesman, the purged officer, or the movement that was acquitted in court yet whose founder's exile became permanent and which, after 2016, was liquidated wholesale. "The real victims" is not a contest of suffering; it is the name of this asymmetry of restitution. And cadres who converted their victimhood into capital, then inherited the very methods that had victimised them, forfeited the title of victim at the latest on that day.
This is the heaviest objection the site faces, and it must be answered on its merits. First the facts: Turkey's judiciary and state institutions have designated the movement a terrorist organisation since 2016 and hold it responsible for the July 15 attempt; that is the official account, which every reader of this site already hears daily. The movement rejects the accusation entirely and calls for the attempt to be investigated by an independent international inquiry. That 251 people were murdered on the night of July 15 is beyond dispute, and whoever its perpetrators were, it is a crime against humanity that this site, too, condemns.
The site's position has three layers. First: the period 1997–2008 cannot be rewritten retroactively through a designation made in 2016. The 1999 cassette campaign and the State Security Court case ended in acquittal in that era's own courts; the February 28 victimhood is established by the era's own judicial record. Second: whoever the perpetrator of July 15 was, what followed is by name collective punishment dismissing, imprisoning and dispossessing hundreds of thousands over union membership, a bank account, a newspaper subscription or a mobile app, without proof of individual participation in a crime, is irreconcilable with universal principles of law. The ECtHR Grand Chamber's 2023 Yalçınkaya judgment found that evidentiary practice in violation of core principles, and the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has found the detentions arbitrary in dozens of opinions. Third: this page's subject is February 28 and its methodological legacy. That the "coup-plotting organisation" charge was constructed in 1999 out of West Working Group files, and in 2016 out of the same template at colossal scale, demonstrates precisely this site's thesis that the machinery of profiling and trial-by-headline survives by changing hands. The reader should know both the official account and the objection recorded here, and judge; what the site demands is not a declaration of innocence but the application of fair trial and individual criminal responsibility for everyone.
The "never implemented" defence has two weaknesses. The first is one of principle: in a state of law, signing a "measures plan" against a community of citizens implemented or not is itself documentation that the February 28 mentality, the reflex of treating citizens as potential internal enemies, lived on; that the cadres who called this reflex "tyranny" in 1997 signed the same kind of document at the same table in 2004 is the continuity exhibit at the heart of our thesis. The second is empirical: the decision was not shelved but held in reserve. The government cooperated with the movement for as long as interests aligned; when alignment turned to conflict in 2013, the framework signed in 2004 was deployed at scale. That a profiling decision can be switched on and off by conjuncture does not make it innocent; it proves the February 28 apparatus had become an adjustable weapon in civilian hands.
It does not ignore it; it applies the same principle here. That the mass trials of 2007–2013 involved serious procedural violations, contested evidence and prolonged detentions and that those cases later largely collapsed is on the record. The site's principle is clear: an unlawful method is unlawful whoever wields it in the general's hands in 1997, the prosecutor's in 2010, the decree commission's in 2016. Two entries must accompany this. First: those trials ran under the open political ownership of the government of the day (including the declaration "I am the prosecutor of Ergenekon"), with legislative support and in that era's media climate; consigning the whole responsibility to a single address today is the comfortable way of laundering yesterday's partnership. Second: the distinction between institutional fault and collective guilt must hold individual acts of judicial officers can and should be tried; they cannot retroactively legitimise the collective punishment of hundreds of thousands of teachers, homemakers and tradesmen. For a February 28 critique to be consistent, it must stand at the same distance from every era's profiling; this site undertakes to keep that distance.
True, and duly recorded: the coefficient was repealed, the headscarf ban effectively ended, the NSC was civilianised, EMASYA was scrapped. These gains are real and improved millions of lives. The site's criticism aims at two things, not at the gains. First, selectivity: restitution was not extended without regard to identity; the rights restored were the government's own base's rights, while the experience of profiling and dismissal was inflicted on new target groups at far greater scale. Restoring a right to your voters while stripping the same right from others is not rights advocacy; it is a patronage economy. Second, duration: February 28 victimhood continued to be operated as a mobilisation asset for decades after the gains were complete; the quiet closing of the file with the perpetrators' pardon in 2024 showed the rhetoric could not pass its own sincerity test. Restitution is the payment of a debt; waving the promissory note after the debt is paid is called dividend.
The site does not claim neutrality; the Editorial Position box on the home page declares as much. Its claim is transparency: fact is separated from interpretation, facts are sourced, interpretations are labelled as the site's thesis, and as this very page proves counter-arguments are published in their strongest form. Neutrality and honesty are not the same thing: narrating a scene in which the tanks and the front pages stood on one side as "both sides erred" is not neutrality; it is dressing the stronger side's propaganda in the costume of balance. What is asked of the reader is not agreement but verification: go to the sources, set the official account beside this one, and judge. The site remains open to criticism, correction and documentary contribution at all times.
The story differs; the method is identical, and the connection is documentary, not speculative: the WWG profiling of 1997 → the cassette campaign and State Security Court case of 1999 → the NSC "measures" decision signed by a civilian government in 2004 → that decision's rhetorical revival in 2013 → the decree-law annexes, trustees and mass trials after 2016. Each link runs on the previous link's template: a legally undefined threat label ("irtica" → "parallel" → "affiliation"), a verdict pre-delivered by media, liquidation by judiciary, confiscation of property. Even the February 28 trial belongs to the continuity: the perpetrators received life in 2018 and were pardoned in 2024 by the signature of the leader who rose to power on their victims' story. When a method has operated for twenty-seven years by changing hands, narrating it in the past tense is the real anachronism. That is today's meaning of "it will last a thousand years" and the origin of this site's name.