The history of Turkey's "secular democracy" is neither democratic nor free of violence and oppression. The secular military has had to assert its control numerous times since Mustafa Kemal Atatürk took power in 1923. Furthermore, Kemal was involved with the the Armenian genocide.
The point I'm making is that this situation is not an automatic validation of the current administration's efforts to "democratize" the region. If Turkey is any sort of precedent, we should forget that naive notion and accept the requirement that force is the only thing that will keep the islamists from holding power in any Islamic country.
The brave secularists in Turkey know they need more than demonstrations to restrain the islamists. They're right.
“Furthermore, Kemal was involved with the the Armenian genocide.”
Actually, no, Ataturk wasn’t involved with that. He was a soldier busy fighting the British in Gallipoli and elsewhere during those years. There are a few Armenian sites, like the ones you linked to, that’ll accuse Ataturk of involvement, mostly because of their dislike for anyone the Turks revere.
But in reality, most third party historians do not find Ataturk to be culpable for the Armenian massacres. His troops faught Armenian troops, in an actual war. It was the Ottoman pashas that preceeded him before 1923 who caused the large scale deaths of civilians. Even the Pope, on his trip to Turkey to mend fences with the Orthodox church, visited Ataturk’s tomb; I doubt he would’ve done so had Ataturk really killed thousands of innocent Armenian Orthodox.
I do agree with the idea of needing force at times to keep Islamic fundamentalism at bay.
Kemal was a member of the party in charge at the time of the genocide, but he was a front-line general at the opposite end of the country; Some historians believe that he had knowledge of, complicity in or even an active role in the genocide, but that is a minority view, in my reading -- most historians believe he was out of the loop.
Turkey's democracy doesn't look like hours, and neither will any others that take root in the region. Maintaining its secularism requires restrictions on speech and religion that Americans -- or most Westerners -- would find intolerable. No democracy is perfect, and Turkey's is definitely less democratic and more authoritarian than ours, but it also faces different threats -- and the fact that its citizens are rallying across the country to resist the imposition of Shar'ia or something like it makes it an example for the rest of the Muslim world.