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Menderes, The Martyr.
S. Qasim Hasany
In a Sunday magazine at glancing a
scene,
So moved was I with sentiments keen,
Tears trickled down from saddened eyes
As set at the scene under Istanbul's
skies.
It was Menderes reburial with state
honor
With a pair of cabinet colleagues dear.
A great reformer was he and city
builder,
A proud nation's charming leader.
The dead were given full military honors:
The President, cabinet, army leaders
And other dignitaries and the dead's
followers
Followed the coffins, borne by soldiers.
Why all the three innocents were hanged
And thus the doors on democracy were
banged?
Though I will try to give you an answer
In a parable form, a stanza latter.
But answers to the questions lie
In history's most paradoxical tie
Of persons and events, that be-lie
Wise historians searching and critical
eye.
The parable is: a gallant guard of a
house
After repelling the robbers from the
house,
Also turned out the owner of the house
And posed himself as the master of the
house.
He turned the house into a club of
friends
Of alien nature and awkward trends
Throwing out family relics, religious
books
Which were disliked by his companion
crooks.
The same fate befell the Ottoman Empire
When It's gallant guard set afire,
Many precious aspects of the Empire;
Religion, culture, system, sage or sire.
A military oligarchy ruled in guise of a
republic
To conceal their nature from the public,
With a rubber stamp assembly prefixed
"grand"
To display despotic actions as democracy
brand.
So a great nation whose empire was on
continents three
Prestigious and free as a nation could
be free,
Was reduced to be an aimless people
Made to ape merely the culture of rival
people.
But how long a gallant people like them
Could be held under the usurpers at the
helm?
The people's Menderes[1]
took up the cudgels with them,
Though lost his life but won the right
to hold the helm.
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