FULL SUPPORT FROM MÜSİAD FOR THE TERROR-FREE TÜRKİYE PROCESS:

A CALL FOR DEVELOPMENT AND BROTHERHOOD FROM DİYARBAKIR

Beautiful people of beloved Diyarbakır, the ancient city of Anatolia; my dear brothers and sisters, esteemed members of the press,

On behalf of our more than 14,000 members and our 84 branches at home and 100 branches and representative offices abroad, I greet you with my most heartfelt feelings, with respect and with affection.

Today, here in Diyarbakır, the city of prophets and companions, the ancient fortress of our civilization, where adobe and wisdom have been kneaded together, we are living the deep excitement and honour of being together with you.

As the MÜSİAD family we have a tradition: we come together with our branch presidents from all four corners of Türkiye in order to take stock of each new period and to shape our vision for the future. These gatherings are our council of consultation, the place where our collective wisdom manifests itself. We usually hold these meetings under the roof of our Head Office in İstanbul.

But this time, in our internal consultations, we took an important decision. We knew that not only MÜSİAD but also our beloved nation and our heavenly homeland stood on the threshold of a new era. That is why we believed wholeheartedly that it was a spiritual responsibility to hold our most important gathering at this historic threshold and the beginning of our new era not in İstanbul but in Diyarbakır, the heartland of our civilization; to repay our debt of loyalty to these lands; and to launch a mobilization of revival precisely from here, from these blessed lands.

Esteemed Friends,

For nearly half a century Türkiye has struggled not merely with a security problem but with a sedition that dynamited our unity, our well-being, the law of brotherhood among us and our common future. This dirty struggle did not only take from us the lives of our beloved martyrs whom we committed to the earth; it also targeted the hopes of development of this fertile geography, the dreams of prosperity of our nation and, most painfully of all, the future of our children, the apples of our eye.

But praise be to God, today, thanks to our nation's unshakeable discernment, our state's sagacity, the peerless self-sacrifice of our security forces and that powerful good sense rising in our region, we are leaving a historic crossroads behind us. The terrorist organization laying down its arms and dissolving itself is not merely the exhaustion of an organization; it is also the glad tidings of the resurrection of our brotherhood, our kinship and our companionship, which we have woven stitch by stitch for centuries.

Let us not forget: we are a single nation… For a thousand years on these lands this noble people has not been merely neighbours. They gave their daughters in marriage and took sons; they became in-laws, they became kirve. Above all, they became comrades in the same ranks. They gathered around the same table, lent a shoulder at the same funeral, and walked together to martyrdom for the sake of the same crescent. We are a nation with one destiny, one qibla, one history. Those who have tried to sow the seeds of discord among us have never been able to understand the depth and the might of these bonds that mixed the mortar of our civilization. Today the end of terrorism is also the eternal collapse of the dark scenarios that targeted this brotherhood.

Of course this end did not come of its own accord. This success is the joint work of the political will manifested under the leadership of our esteemed President, of the patient and determined strategy of the wisdom of the state, of the efforts of the conscientious opinion leaders of our society and, most importantly, of the fortitude shown by this beloved nation as a whole. This victory is not the victory of a single segment but the common victory of all 85 million.

Let us think for a moment… If this network of betrayal had not existed, where would Türkiye be today?

The accounts are plain to see. The resources our country has spent directly and indirectly in this struggle exceed USD 2 trillion. This figure is not a simple economic cost; it is the price of postponed dreams, of usurped hopes, of the lament of the farmer in Cizre and in Yüksekova who had to sow fear instead of seed in his field. This figure means that the wealth that would have gushed from those fertile lands was stolen from the table not only of the people of the region but of an entire nation. While our city of Gaziantep, which borders Urfa, is among the top 30 in terms of the level of development, what has happened just beyond it that Urfa has not even been able to enter the top 60?

Think about it: with the resources spent to date we could have built hundreds of projects on the scale of GAP on these lands; we could have turned the bounty of the Euphrates and the Tigris not only into fields but into factories and new doors of employment. Today our country's Gross Domestic Product could have exceeded USD 3 trillion, our per capita national income could have risen above the level of USD 30,000, and with these enormous resources that were spent we could have carried our country among the world's top 10 economies.

This analysis is not a document of pessimism. On the contrary, this picture is a road map pointing to the starting point of Türkiye's greatest growth drive in the coming century and to the place of its greatest hidden treasure.

So, after this heavy cost, what is the region's present picture? The figures clearly show us both the depth of the wounds and the magnitude of the potential:

  • To wit: the region is experiencing a strategic rupture from the country's economy as a whole. While barely 5 liras of every 100 liras of national income we produce comes out of these lands, its share of industrial production has fallen below 3 percent and its share of exports below 1.4 percent. This shows that the region's production backbone has weakened and that it has effectively been isolated from global competition. This picture is not a fate but a structural problem that must be solved.
  • On the other hand, the region's greatest dilemma is the paradox of abundance and inertia. Although these lands lie in the heart of Mesopotamia, their share of agricultural production has remained far below their potential, at the level of 13 percent. More importantly, while our region possesses a priceless treasure of young population, this demographic opportunity is turning into a spiral of migration and unemployment because of the narrowness of the doors of employment. While unemployment across the country stands at the level of 9-10 percent, its climb to around 25 percent in these provinces of ours means that the hope of one in every four of our young people is being deferred. This is not a sustainable situation.

The time now is not for waiting but for rearing up! The time has come to use this enormous resource not in defence against terrorism but in an offensive for development.

We look at this picture not as a loss but as an enormous potential waiting to be filled, an ore waiting to be awakened.

Distinguished Guests,

This new door that has opened today is a light of hope not only for Türkiye but also for Iraq, Syria and all our neighbouring geography. And in this new era Türkiye will draw its sole strength once again from its own children, that is, from its beloved nation that has become one heart with its Turks, its Kurds, its Arabs and its Laz.

At this historic turning point, as MÜSİAD we take on a responsibility and from here we make a call to all of Türkiye: we call out to all our civil society organizations, our trade unions and our chambers, foremost to the other esteemed umbrella organizations of our business world: come, let us not be mere onlookers of the terror-free Türkiye vision. Come, let us be the architects of this vision, each of us a soldier of revival. Come, let us shoulder this historic responsibility together. As MÜSİAD we are ready to do our part, and we take the first step from here:

1. Without losing time, together with our branches in the region we will establish a special working group for economic and social development, and from today we will be in the field. 2. By establishing close relations with all the Chambers of Commerce and Industry, the Organized Industrial Zones and the Agricultural Cooperatives in the provinces of the region, we will determine the areas in which we can reach results quickly for the sake of development in industry and agriculture.

3. With the Independent Venture Capital Fund we have established within MÜSİAD, we will support the entrepreneurship ecosystem specific to the region.

4. Our 16 sector boards will begin business development work concerning the priority sectors that hold potential for the region and that we believe will have a locomotive effect on its development, foremost agriculture, tourism and trade.

5. In order to provide employment for the young people who will be the region's greatest strength, and by placing at the centre the vocational high schools relating to the sectors in need of staff, we will design mentorship programmes together with our branches in the region.

Every investment and every factory chimney in these regions will be not merely a door of employment but also a seal set upon our unity and our brotherhood.

Finally, I would like to emphasize once again that this process is not an end but an honourable new beginning. Our confidence is complete that all the parties taking on responsibility in this process will remain faithful to the word they have given to our nation and will promise these lands nothing but peace. As MÜSİAD, we will continue to be the greatest follower and supporter of this process in civil life.

Because we know and believe that the leaven of our civilization is sound. This is the common leaven of the seed Sultan Alparslan sowed in Anatolia, of the banner of justice Saladin carried to Jerusalem, and of our grandfathers who walked shoulder to shoulder to martyrdom at Çanakkale. This leaven is the greatest guarantee of our common future.

On this occasion, I thank my branch presidents who have come to Diyarbakır today from all four corners of Türkiye and who breathe with us this climate of brotherhood extending to all of Türkiye, and you, our esteemed members of the press, and I would like to end my remarks with the lines of Cahit Sıtkı Tarancı, one of the distinguished poets these lands have raised;

I Want a Homeland

Let the Sky be Blue, the Branch Green, the Field Yellow;

Let it be the Land of Birds and Flowers.

I Want a Homeland

With neither trouble in the head nor longing in the heart;

Let there be an end to the Strife of Brothers.

I respectfully greet you all…