Punished for being punished--My Father-in-Law sentenced to isolation.

So this week brings me to the current ‘Peace Process’ between the government and the Kurds. I have written nothing here about it because I am not qualified. I don’t have time to follow all the sources that would be required to make any intelligent observations. To sum up what I and everyone else know: Abdullah Ocalan has negotiated a deal where the PKK withdraw from the borders of Turkey in return for—well, we’re still not sure. There is vague talk of rights and constitutional reform. At Ocalan’s recommendation, a committee of ‘Wise People’ has been appointed to tour the country and research the issue. A long awaited ‘Fourth Judicial Reform’ has been passed which, in the words of Amnesty International, makes cosmetic changes ‘to minimize criticism but leave most restrictions on freedom in place.’

What comes down to us ordinary folks is a hope that we know is naive, but since we are so desperate for it, we cling to it anyway--like a life raft with a hole in it on a hurricane whipped sea. Then when something happens to confirm our naivete, it is crushing all the more because we allowed ourselves to be tricked again. Hope! There is so much talk of hope in the papers and on TV. This is it, they say. This is the end of all the long guerilla war and century of oppression. Then why last Monday, April 29th, did we get a call from my wife’s father explaining that, after a secret trial, the men and women who had gone on hunger strike last Fall were going to be punished?

91 former hunger strikers, some barely recovered from 67 days of no food, were sentenced on charges of insubordination. When the first waves of hunger strikers were being taken away to isolation cells, their fellow prisoners pounded their fists on the walls and doors, and generally put up a fight. The article on bianet.org says 'they are being punished for ‘participating in the strike, protesting being handcuffed, and resistance to strip searches.’ My father-in-law has been sentenced to 12 days of confinement to a cell, 5 months of no communication, and 17 months of no visitations. I had to reread that sentence several times before I was sure I understood it. Surely I was missing a comma or some nuance of Turkish. It could not possible be a year and half! 17 MONTHS! And all appeals have been rejected. 17 MONTHS!

I cannot exaggerate what this is going to do to my family—my wife, her sisters, her aunts and uncles and grandfather live for Wednesday when they can go to Silivri and visit the man that has been taken away from them. Our whole week often revolves around that one day. We don’t speak of his imprisonment much anymore, but it is the 800 pound gorilla that is always in every room. The sense of injustice is something I can literally taste in my mouth. This acidic, nasty taste.  I woke up today with tears in my eyes—rage and sorrow and worry for my wife all rolled into one ugly emotion. The last visitation—and last in every sense of the word—did not go well. Delal’s dad is having kidney trouble apparently, his health is not so good. And now there is to be 5 months of silence with that in our minds.

This day reminds me of the day that we first learned he had been arrested. The process was the same. Delal was acting odd. I knew something was wrong but she couldn’t say. A strange, awkward silence followed us like a ghost. Then the full weight of the terrible news. The day he was arrested she told me we would be late to meet our friends for a concert. I pressed for a reason. She said we had to go to Aksaray. Why? No answer. After a lot of prodding, she told me we had to go to the security bureau at Aksaray. And finally I learned he had been taken. This time, she told me that her sister Hilal had talked to her dad on the phone. The hunger strikers were going to be punished. There would be a month of no visitations. She was strangely moody for a few days. She smiled, but it was like a light had gone out in her eyes, and then this morning I read in the paper that the isolation is to last 17 months.

The latest shocking bit of news allows me to step outside of the situation and look back at the past year and a half. We have been like rocks, you see, a wall of stone against the raging Lodos winds that rush at Istanbul from the Marmara Sea. We do not show the day to day wear and tear of the waves crashing in on us—no crying, no depression or woe-is-us moaning and groaning—but when you look at these same rocks as they were a year and a half ago and compare them with today, you see how much has been worn away and you wonder how much longer they can hold out against the storm before everything falls apart.

The list of prisoners with the most severe punishment is as follows:

Celalettin Delibaş 18 months with no visitations, 4 months prohibition from all social functions.

Kemal Seven—17 months with no visitations, 5 months ban on communications, 12 days of confinement to his cell.

Tuncer Özdoğan, 12 months with no visitations, 5 months ban on communication, 12 days confinement to his cell and 1 month prohibition from all social functions.

Hüsnü Çetin 14 months with no visitations. 20 days discipline. 4 months ban on communication.

Ahmet Yılmaz 24 months with no visitation, 6 months ban on communication, 25 days confinement to his cell.

 

An Addendum to Yesterday

And here, in today's Boston Globe, in light of what I wrote yesterday...

'At Logan International Airport Tuesday morning, a United Airlines flight to Chicago was brought back to the gate ­after passengers expressed fear over two people speaking a foreign language, said aviation authorities. Passengers and bags were taken off the plane and re-screened, and two people were rebooked on a later flight, said United Airlines spokeswoman Christen David.'

I certainly cannot stand on any higher ground, but it is disappointing that the world is going the way of my own first, primitive instincts. Never mind the immediate assumption that it was a Muslim (the Boston Police interviewed a Saudi victim of the blast, as they are interviewing all survivors, and this got blown up into an 'interrogation of a Saudi suspect.')

And this guy is absolutely write:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/16/boston-marathon-explosions-notes-reactions

But I still don't want to hear it now--there are a lot of people in the U.S, and probably especially in Boston, who are thoughtful enough to realize that those murdered overseas in their name cause the same pain to family and friends (and yes,many many who don't, and don't care)


 

The Newest Boston Massacre

 

When you’re far away and disaster strikes home, it’s hard. Which means what exactly? Which means, that when someone bombs your old haunt and kills 3 people, your grief is like some kind of insanity, because your emotions are all out of proportion to those of people around you. You’re shell shocked and fumbling around the rubble—they’re reading a newsarticle.

I don’t have much insightful to say about the Boston attacks, but I need to say something. All day long I have been zombie-walking around school and home, tears coming into my eyes whenever I stand still too long and someone talks to me. Across the ocean, watching from afar, I have been meditating on reactions to calamity. Particularly my own first reaction.

I first heard last night when an inlaw from Holland and then my nephew texted me wanting to know ‘If everyone in Boston was okay?’ But it was midnight and I figured this was another case of my family hearing about an earthquake in the Middle East and wrongly assuming I had been standing at the epicenter—something clearly had happened but most likely it was some minor little mishap in some suburb somewhere.

Then the next morning, I heard the news—the finish line of the Boston marathon bombed in two different locations. And I know both those locations well. Every year I took my students down to see the marathon—I and a stalwart group always made sure to elbow our way through the crowds to find a good view of the finish line.  The marathon was a pet project of mine—I prepared a lesson on how to rank people (second fastest, third fastest), on the history of the marathon, on vocabulary associated with races, on the first marathon in Greece and the role of Greek myth in English. It went off just up the street from the Boston Public Library on Boylston, where Delal and I stood last summer eating hotdogs and arepas, and taking pictures. The second bomb was further up Boylston, near the first school I worked at in the city.  

There was a video of the first explosion—people screaming and scattering, people tearing apart the barricades to get to those trapped inside, blood,  a woman praying.

And now I have to be honest about something ugly.

As I walked up the road to catch my bus to school, a covered lady was coming up behind me, a chubby, sour-faced woman who, every morning, without fail, brushes past me in a rush to her own service bus. I was thinking about the bombing, wondering if my friends were okay, when she bumped my arm as she breezed by.  I’m ashamed to say my first reaction was pure hatred.  ‘Enough of you people,’ I muttered at the woman’s back. Our neighborhood is conservative AKP territory, the moderately Islamic political party that brought you mass arrests of Kurdish activists, censorship of books on evolution and physics, and the persecution of numerous writers, journalists, and artists like pianist Fazıl Say, sentenced yesterday to prison for ‘insulting religion.’ And now another bombing, I thought. Enough of these right wing, closed minded, extremist Muslims. Get rid of them! And I didn’t just mean whoever I thought attacked Boston, or the woman, but everyone in my line of sight. The old man with the beanie hat hobbling in the other direction, the dimwitted convenience store owner setting up his newspapers on the sidewalk.

It was only after I boarded the bus that I calmed myself down and reasoned it out—even it were an Islamist extremist group, it was stupid to get angry at all Muslims, or even the meddling conservative ones in the government here. Every religion has extremista capable of violence. You can’t blame  a group for the actions of an individual. It might not even have been an Islamicist—hell, domestic terror was more likely. And a variety of other common sense ideas that any idiot can rattle off at the drop of a hat, all of which, in a subtle way, are racist in and of themselvers. Why should anyone need to remind themselves tha t you can’t blame a group for the actions of one? To say it suggests you already do so.

 My instinctive bigotry caught me off guard.  It was frightening to see years and years of being surrounded by other cultures, merging into them, learning about them, and a natural empathy for their differences go up in smoke and to find that all I was left with at that instant of crisis was tribal, racial rage. I wonder if the searches going on in Boston now  of several Saudi students and visitors (read the Globe) are inspired by anything similar? I hope not. I hope that the thing that drives my country forward in the next few months and God knows, years, is not the same primitive emotion that overwhelmed me this morning, that people will take the time to stop and calm down.  

On Facebook, I scanned for messages from friends. One after the other, ‘I’m okay,’ from Emily. ‘We’re safe,’ from Jessica.  ‘I’m okay,’ from Karen and Joe. A variety of well-meaning posts were up from other friends.  One shared an article pointing out that many people die in American drone attacks every day in foreign countries while the US grieves over one bombing. Another pointing out the countless civilians who died in Iraq and Afghanistan—perhaps violence begets violence? Some students and Turks suggesting its all a conspiracy to blame an Iranian and justify another invasion.  It’s the same predictable mix of reactions. Some trying to point out how misguided policies may have led to this. Some showing that others’ grief may be greater and more frequent—and again caused by us.  And, (in this country) some making the instant jump to conspiracy mentality.

To me it’s like this. Imagine if your mother were suddenly hospitalized for lung cancer. As you are out in the hallway, waiting on the results of an emergency surgery to remove the tumors, several friends arrive to comfort you. One says,

‘Well, you know, some people’s mothers die in a lot more horrible ways! You should think about that!’

Another says, ‘Well what do you expect? She did smoke alot.’

Another says, ‘I think she’s doing it on purpose to cash in on her life insurance!’

While I’m online trying to confirm the safety of people I love, the last thing I want is a lecture about politics and history—no matter how true it may be. You want someone to grieve a little with you, to help you clear the rubble, to share the sadness and shock, but that’s just not going to happen far away. You’re alone.

Right now I am picking through memories of Boston. Baseball games at Fenway—once trashtalking the Tampa Bay center fielder so effectively that I am sure he struck out the next inning. Listening to music at Wally’s jazz bar, small and cozy, a glass of gin in hand.  Dinners and green wine with Misty in some East Cambridge Portuguese restaurant. Long endless walks with Fred across the city. Street fairs in Somerville. The drunk woman dancing in the snow at the St. Patrick’s parade as everyone cheered her on. Eating Canolis at the park in the North End. Proposing to my wife at the new Evoo. Or the spring days at the marathon with the tulip trees blooming and the apple blossoms scattering on the sidewalks and those crowds and the feel of the sun on skin after a long winter and complaining about how its always the Kenyans that win. Or the hawk what used to sit on the rooftops of the Boylston Street buildings, like some guardian, our very own gargoyle keeping the evil spirits away.

Enough about me. My prayers, for what they’re worth, go out to all in Boston, and as William Styron said, ‘to all the world’s butchered and martyred.’

Here is a picture of the boy who died--with a poster wishing for peace

 

Newroz Piroz be--And Happy St. Patrick's

It’s been a long time since I posted anything—I haven’t felt much like writing lately. Maybe it’s the winter. If that’s the case, then yesterday’s Newroz celebrations in Istanbul should have broken the wicked season’s spell—I’ve jumped the proverbial Newrozian fire.

For those overseas: Newroz is the traditional Kurdish holiday to welcome spring and has become quite the political flashpoint in recent years. Then again, in Turkey, what doesn’t? The big hullabaloo this year is an argument over the spelling—Yes, spelling. According to crazed nationalists—patriorts--spell it Nevruz and it shows you don’t hate Turkey’s martyrs, spell it Newroz (with the evil Kurdish W!) and it showsy you are a crazed terrorist.

The devil evilly typing the evil W into every noble Nevruz

Last year, Newroz celebrations were forbidden by the government and police blocked access to transportation as far away as the ferries in Kadıköy. The usual chaos ensued—with one man losing his life to police tear gas cannister. The official Newroz celebrations are set for March 21st in Diyarbakır—and it’s going to be a big day this year because that is the day the Kurdish BDP party announces their vision for a peace plan after long negotiations between them, the government, and Abdullah Öcalan. Okay, it’s a long story—but the most ridiculously hopeful think that it could all mark the beginning of the end—the end of random arrests and of all official oppression as well as the end of the guerilla war that has gone on for 30 years. I don’t enough about politics to speak (comfortably) much about it, but let’s just say, this year, Newroz carries a great deal of weight.

Diyarbakır—unofficial capital of unofficial Kurdistan--is being given the exclusive for the official celebration, so other cities like Istanbul chose to celebrate on the weekend—for us, that meant March 17th.

We caught the ferry from Kadıköy, across the Marmara and Golden Horn to Eminönü. Then from there, hopped the commuter rail from Sirkeci station—a train I’ve only ridden one other time in my five years in Istanbul. It runs along the ruins of old Byzantine walls through neighborhoods of rickety but grand Ottoman and Greek houses that are heart breakingly picturesque, but have seen better days. We got out at Yedikule—the stop for the fortress of torture where the Sultan’s enemies used to rot before being killed and tossed into the sea. From the moment we exited the train, there were huge crowds, a river of people flowing past the fortress, through all the side streets to the Kazlıçesme fair grounds. Tens of thousands of people.

I’ve gotten kind of accustomed to this—but the walk to the fairgrounds is historically stunning. Through the old Greek and Armenian neighborhoods, past the ruins of the Imperial Byzantine gate, along the thousand year old city walls and then down to the fairgrounds. It was nearly a half-mile walk and was packed with people the whole way. Then the fair ground itself was bursting with bodies. The fences set were swelling outward with people and every inch of space was crammed with human beings—they even stretched vertically with lots of people climbing the ruins of an old mosque. Every free space was full. During election year, the AK party filled this space and claimed it held over 200,000 people. I suspect their calculations (made according to how many human bodies could fit into a square meter of land), but I wouldn’t be surprised of that’s how many were there yesterday. Or more—they spilled out into all the side streets after all.

Picture borrowed from Yuksekovahaber.com--gives you an idea of the crowds. Go to the website for more.

All the woman were gussied up in bright colored dresses with silver bangles and head dresses of the Kurdish colors green, red, and gold. There were purple fistans and orange ones and men in the olive green of the mountains. Every member of the Turkish left (an alphabet soup of political parties. Really, it’s best just to nod and smile and sing something pretty in your head when they start naming them all). You had your usual stupid young men climbing the towers that held the speakers and hanging from the rafters with Kurdish flags. Tons of people were dancing the halay, music was blasting between the political speeches and towers of cotton candy were floating over everyone’s heads as vendors wove in and out of the horde. People sold hot köfte sandwiches from carts and the smell of roasting meat filled the air. Some one lit a fire and, feeding it with plastic bags, led a group of boys in the Newroz tradition of fire jumping.

But what everyone was really waiting for were the political speeches—this is the year things are changing. And it was in one of these speeches that something interesting happened, something that made me want to pick up my pen. I was standing in the mud, shivering in the cold, when the speaker who was trying to introduce the Kurdish Party’s chairman, Selahattin Demirtaş, said the word ‘Martin Luther King’ into the microphone. He then quoted the famous ‘I have a dream’ segment of King’s eponymous speech.  He ended with King’s geographic call to the four corners of the American continent:

Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.

Then he began the speech again, substituting this time the cities and towns of Turkey for those of America. Let freedom ring from the plains of Anatolia, let freedom ring from great river valley of Mesopotamia. Let freedom ring from the lake of Van. And I got chills, the hairs on the back of my neck stood straight up. This could very well be history in the making, and the connection to another history that greatly affected my life and my home was electrifying.

I thought of my trip home, this winter, to Washington DC. I stood at the top of the steps to the Lincoln Memorial. It was an extraordinary day, strangely warm and sunny. At the spot where King stood during his famous speech at the March on Washington is a marble block carved with his name and the date, August 28, 1963, ‘the hallowed spot to remind us of the fierce urgency of now.’ I had just stood on that marble block and imagined myself addressing a crowd of tens of thousands on that historical day (I remember the crowds from the video—millions it seemed stretching from horizon to horizon with their banners and their children on their shoulders—just like now in Istanbul) and as I rested on the top step I saw a young black man coming out of the shadow of Lincoln’s statue. He was dapper in a fedora and long coat and carried g a Bible—obviously the preacher of a Baptist bus from Louisiana I’d seen parked down the road. He was very careful in placing his feet on either side of the block, as if measuring the exact place King’s own feet would have touched and then he square his shoulders and looked out over the Washington Mall. I heard him say to himself, ‘So this is where it happened! This is what it feels like!’ He couldn’t stop grinning. And I knew why. I had imagined the same thing myself not five minutes before. And now on this cold Newroz in Istanbul, fifty years later, another group of people who marched to this place compare themselves to the people who marched on Washington that day. From other cities, we heard of attacks by nationalist groups, people disappeared even, and yet here they were, these two hundred thousand with their flags and their optimism and their music facing decades of systematic repression, here, at the ‘thresshold of freedom’ at long last.

We are all skeptical of course. The people on the other side of the negotiating table are still making random arrests, my father in law is still in prison along with all his friends. But we are hopeful.

After the rally, we went to the apartment of a Conag villager in Kadıköy, where the neighborhood of Yeldeğirmeni (Windmill) is a defacto Little Conag. A bunch of ladies were at the house and as the only male in sight every morsel of food available somehow found its way to my plate—a feast of Turkey and lavash and celery root and afterwards, rice pudding. And they talked—in Turkish—about the loss of their mother tongue. One woman told me how, when she was a girl, she had understood nothing of school. She failed the 2^nd grade and only later learned enough Turkish to pass.

‘They’d beat our hands with sticks for speaking Kurdish,’ she told me. ‘And it wasn’t just at school either. We were supposed to spy on our friends. And on our families, too. If anyone spoke Kurdish we were to report to the teacher.’

Dede, our trusty granddad, added his two cents, or kuruş. ‘I remember the teacher would line us up and look at our tongues. He said he could see the Kurdish words on our tongues. We believed him because they say ‘mother tongue’ you know and so of course you could see it on our tongues!’

‘We have no strength as a people,’ the first woman said sadly. And then our host reminded her of where she’d just come from, the rally of hundreds of thousands of people, and said ‘We’ve found our strength.’

A Letter to a Turk--by Adil Kurt

During the hunger strike, we read a lot of letters from the strikers. This particular document by Hakkari representative Adil Kurt has stuck with me. It changed my views on the subject of Kurdish-Turkish relations, or more precisely, refined them. It was printed, after our translation and edits for the English, on the BDP's blogsite over at Word Press.  I am reprinting it here.

 (Türkçe aşağıda)

We are sharing the letter of our hunger strike activist deputy Adil Kurt.

I am writing this letter on the 61st day of the indefinite hunger strike started by Kurdish political prisoners.

I don’t know on which day you will be reading this. To make things easier for you, I will state the day and hour that I write this letter. November 11, 2012, around 21.00. Diyarbakır…

What I feel now is not the feeling of a member of parliament.

I will try to express my sentiments as a Kurd who has lived in the famous Kato region of Hakkâri and used to think of himself as the luckiest person on earth when he got a hold of a new pair of rubber shoes.

Yes, I, who used to be content with a pair of rubber shoes, who found no comfort (in life) except in listening to the (Kurdish) national anthem of Herne Pêş, the song which symbolizes the Kurds’ struggles in the Kurdish Federal Region of Iraq, and to the epic of Rustemê Zal in the late hours of the night on Radio Erivan, now, by God's providence, have to continue my people’s struggle for freedom by going on hunger strike.

I do not intend to repeat all those experiences that most of you already know and that we are so tired of telling.

Based on my 1.5-year period of membership in parliament, I now think that there are no words left to say to resolve the Kurdish question through democratic and peaceful means. Someone has always attempted to test our sincerity. We have always been treated as the kids of 'The Kurd, The Doorman.” Most of the time they meant to say ‘it would have been better if you were not here’ . True, we are frustrated by such discourse; but this is not the problem; that we lost our hopes is the problem.

Our experiences are reminiscent of the Algerians’. You know, the elderly French needed Algerian nursemaids. The only reason for their coexistence was the Algerian’s ‘right’ to be the caretaker of the Frenchman. However, the same Frenchman who cannot survive without the Algerian’s existence cannot even stand seeing the Algerian in his neighborhood. Not long ago,
only 3-5 years ago, the streets of Paris turned into a huge fireball. Those who set the fire were Moroccan, Algerian and Arab kids but the fuel for that fire was nothing but the incurable arrogance of the French.

This case also describes our ‘brotherhood’ with you. The first scene that met my eyes when I first encountered the Turkish metropolises reminded me of this. I was like the child of the Kurdish porter who feels the need to be the servant in that high-rise, garish life style. Each apartment building had a doorman and I saw it was Kurds in those apartments serving as these doormen.

Please remember the Kurd that rang your bell to visit you on a holiday, the one you wanted to leave as soon as possible, also the Kurd with whom you got angry because he took your garbage five minutes late.

When you label this ‘unity’ as brotherhood, our objection intensifies. This is not the brand of brotherhood we want. As a Kurd I have never felt like a conqueror of İstanbul (Turks are taught as children that they are the sons and daughters of the conquerors of Constantinople). I saw the feeling of conquest as dangerous because we have already learned through experience how cruel it was to be conquered.

Not to say that Kurds who came to İstanbul with a sense of conquest did not exist. With every step they took, they had to become more ‘white’. Looking back, they no longer liked what they had left behind.

Most of those, by denigrating the ones who stayed behind and wanted to remain ‘black’, hoped to save themselves from becoming doormen. In this way, they took on the role of the ‘bad black cat’ between us. There are also non-Turkish Turkish nationalists. They are the ones who sabotage our brotherhood.

‘Understandably’, you may think of the following question: ‘Not all Kurds think like you. Look, there are Kurds from parties other than the BDP, and they don’t make so much noise.’ This is also true. We don’t claim that all Kurds are like us. But you should also know this. You have to accept the fact that the Kurdish elite have always acted in collusion with the government. Now, let me address a dimension of the above that needs to be clarified. Let me clarify the obstacles faced by the Kurds that have become entrenched in-the-system. I am thinking by putting myself in your shoes. If I also had a Turkish phenomenon split into two camps, I would prefer the one that looks like me. This again does not make sense to me. But here I’m talking about another reality. Those you consider in the category of unproblematic Kurds, in fact, constitute the essence of the problem.

How? Let me explain. All over the world, influential classes are ‘married’ to those in power by ‘obligation’. Obligatory marriage of our Kurdish elite to power holders is a bit more complicated. They have no confidence. They use every kind of clownery to look well-behaved. It’s enough for them that they simply continue to exist and retain their influence. This kind of Kurd with his influence does not desire to solve the question.

Let me also mention the non-Turkish Turkish nationalists. How can a human being become such? For example, Ziya Gökalp… Abdullah Cevdet … and today many other names that you can easily add to the list. I’d like to sit with a Turk and talk about this paradox. I would not desire someone else to form a great-syntheses for myself. So much that ‘Turkishness’ as an identity has become something that is repulsive. What would you think, if your child recited the nationalist oath every morning at school by saying “My existence shall be dedicated to the Kurdish existence” which actually means your child should dedicate his existence to my child’s existence every day? Please, think of me doing this very thing. (Note: One line of the Turkish national oath that is recited every week by school children is 'I dedicate my existence to the Turkish existence)

Let’s finish here the issue of empathy.

On 12 September 2012 Kurdish politicians in prison initiated an indefinite hunger strike.I hope it will have ended by the time you read this letter. Even if the strike ends we will be feeling the weight of its purpose.

This strike is based on two principle demands.

First, an end is demanded to the isolation at Imralı that has lasted for a year and 3 months and 15 days (as of November 11th) and which is in violation of the state’s own laws. Second, the right to a legal defence in the mother tongue in the courts.

The argument put forth by the politics dominating Turkey, is that today they want education in their mother tongue, but tomorrow they will want something else. “Their biggest wish is for an Independent United Kurdistan, anyway” This sounds very familiar, doesn’t it? I hear you saying “It is true, isn’t it?”

Look, lets be frank. I want to share a truth with you. If what the Kurdophobic politicians said were true and Kurdish politicians did the bidding of international forces then be assured that the PKK would not be on the terrorist lists of America, Europe or any other country in the world. The PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan would not now be in an isolation cell in Imralı Prison. If today Ocalan is in Imrali, and if the PKK is on the global terrorist lists there is only one reason for that. It is because they did NOT do the bidding of those powers.

We, Kurds have said what we wanted many times. Let me repeat because talk is easy but the written word is permanent.

We want education in our mother tongue. From primary school to the university. We want to recieve public services in our mother tongue. We want to manage ourselves. Rather than be managed by officials appointed by the state, let us choose our own.

We want a constitutional guarantee of our identity and status.

To meet all these demands means a thousand year old unity continues under a new social contract. It also means to draw in the Kurds who are living outside the borders of Turkey. Can't you understand that does not mean that the dismemberment of Turkey? On the contrary it means growth. So where is the problem? The reason I write this letter is to make you think about this. You will find an answer to this question when you stop seeing me as the Kurd, the doorman to whom you toss a holiday tip without even inviting into your home.

Finally, I would like to make this clear. Yes, we have a thousand year old unity. But Kurds have another history older than that. Just like you do. How come a thousand years later you exist but we don’t? Please put yourself in our place, and give an answer to this question.

As I finish this up the calender has advanced to November 12th. It has already passed midnight. In my struggle against the “lamb-kebab' polemic, right will win. It will not lose, because I know that the thing we fight for is human life. No softer pillow than conscience was invented. When I put my head on the pillow, I hope to wake up to a day when brotherhood is victorius.

Adil Kurt / Member of Parliament from Hakkari

Türkçesi

Kürt siyasi tutukluların süresiz dönüşümsüz açlık grevlerinin 61. gününde yazıyorum. Sizler kaçıncı gününde okuyor olacaksınız bilmiyorum. İşinizi kolaylaştırmak için yazdığım gün ve saati yazıyorum. 11 Kasım 2012, saat 21.00 suları. Diyarbakır...
Şu anda hissettiklerim, milletvekili olarak taşıdığım hisler değildir. Hakkari’nin meşhur Kato bölgesinde yaşamış, çocukluğunda yeni cizlavit ayakkabıları olduğu zamanlar kendisini dünyanın en mutlu insanı zanneden bir Kürt olarak duygularımı ifade etmeye çalışacağım.
Takdir-i ilahi cizlavit ayakkabıları olduğunda sevinen, Irak Kürdistan Federal Bölgesi'nde yaşayan Kürtlerin mücadelesini simgeleyen 'Herne Pêş' marşı dışında Erivan Radyosundan gecenin geç saatlerinde dinlediğim 'Rustemê Zal' destanı dışında bir avuntusu olmayan ben; bugün halkımın özgürlük mücadelesini açlığa yatarak sürdürmek durumundayım.
Çoğunuzun bildiği, bize de anlatmaktan gına gelen yaşanmışlıkları tekrar etmek niyetinde değilim...
Bir milletvekili olarak 1.5 yıllık zaman diliminde; Kürt sorununun demokratik ve barışçıl yöntemlerle çözülmesi için söylenmedik sözün kalmadığını düşünüyorum. Birileri sürekli olarak bizi samimiyet testinden geçirme gayreti içinde oldu. Bize sürekli olarak 'kapıcı kürdün' çocukları muamelesi yapıldı. Çoğu zaman da 'burada olmasaydınız daha iyi olurdu' demeye getirdiler sözü. Yılmaya yıldık bu söylemden ama dert burada değil, dert artık umudumuzun kırılmış olmasıdır.
Yaşadıklarımız Cezayirlilerin yaşadıklarını anımsatıyor. Bilirsiniz, yaşlı Fransızların bakımları için Cezayirlilere ihtiyaçları var. Bir arada yaşamlarını sağlayan tek unsur Cezayirlinin Fransız’a bakıcı olma ‘hakkı’ndan ibarettir. Gelgelelim Cezayirli olmazsa yaşayamayacak olan Fransız, onu kendi mahallesinde görmeye de katlanamıyor. Çok değil,
3-5 yıl önce Paris sokakları ateş topuna dönmüştü. Bu ateşi yakanlar Faslı, Cezayirli Arap çocuklarıydı ama ortaya bu ateşin odununu yolarak yığılan, Fransızların onulmaz kibrinden başka bir şey değildi.
Bu durum bizim sizinle olan ‘kardeşliğimizi’ de tanımlıyor. Türkiye metropolleriyle ilk tanışmamda karşıma çıkan ilk görüntü bana bunu anımsattı. Çok katlı cafcaflı yaşamın içinde kapıcı Kürdün hizmetkarlığına muhtaç çocuğu olduğumu hissettim. Her apartmanın bir kapıcı dairesi var ve bu dairelerin müdavimleri Kürtleri gördüm.
Anımsayın lütfen, bayram ziyareti için kapınızı çaldığında biran önce gitmesini istediğiniz ama çöpünüzü beş dakika geç aldığında da kızdığınız Kürt.
Bu ‘birlikteliğin’ adını kardeşlik koyduğunuz da itirazımız yükseliyor. Bizim istediğimiz kardeşlik bu değil. Benim içimden hiçbir zaman İstanbul’u fethe gelen Kürt olma hissi oluşmadı. Fetih duygusunu tehlikeli gördüm. Çünkü fethedilmenin ne denli zalimane bir şey olduğunu yaşayarak öğrenmiş bulunuyoruz.
Fetih duygusuyla İstanbul’a kulaç atan Kürtler olmadı değil. Attıkları her kulaçta biraz daha ‘beyazlaşmak’ durumunda kaldılar. Geriye dönüp baktıklarında da geride bıraktıklarını beğenmez oldular.
‘Siyah’ kalan ve öyle kalmayı tercih edenlerin rengine çamur kalmakla kapıcı çocuğu olmaktan kurtulacaklarını zannettiler. Bunu yaptıkça da aramızdaki ‘kara kedi’ rolüne büründüler. Bir de Türk olmayan Türk milliyetçileri vardır. Onlar ki kardeşliğin ayağına takoz koyanlardır.
'Haklı' olarak şu soru aklınıza gelebilir. 'Kürtlerin hepsi sizin gibi düşünmüyor. Bakın BDP dışındaki partilerde de Kürtler var ve seslerini çıkarmıyorlar.' Bu da doğru. Kürtler bizden ibarettir gibi iddiaya sahip değiliz. Ama sizlerin de şunu bilmeniz lazım. Nüfuzlu Kürtlerin her dönem iktidarlarla birlikte hareket ettikleri de sizin kabul etmeniz gereken bir başka gerçek. Şimdi yeri gelmişken yukarıda açıklığa kavuşturulması gereken gerçeğin bir boyutuna değineyim. Sistem-içileşmiş Kürtlerin engelleyiciliğine açıklık getireyim. Kendimi sizin yerine koyup düşünüyorum. Benim de karşımda iki kategori oluşturan bir Türk olgusu olmuş olsa, kendime yakın olanı tercih ederim. Ama ben burada başka bir gerçeklikten söz ediyorum. Sizin sorunsuz Kürtler kategorisinde gördükleriniz, aslında sorunun özünü oluşturuyorlar.
Nasıl mı? Hemen açıklayayım. Dünyanın her yerinde nüfuzlu sınıflar iktidarla 'zorunlu nikahlıdırlar'. Bizim Kürtlerin nüfuzlularının iktidarla 'zorunlu nikahları' biraz daha katmerlidir. Zilliyetleri yok. Şirin görünmek için yapmadıkları şaklabanlık yok. İşleri görünsün, nüfuzları son bulmasın yeter. Böyle düşünen nüfuzlu Kürt sorunun çözümünü arzulamıyor.
Söz buradan açılmışken, Türk olmayan Türk milliyetçilerine de değineyim. Bir insan nasıl bu duruma gelebiliyor? Mesela Ziya Gökalp... Abdullah Cevdet... ve bugün devamında sizin de rahatlıkla ekleyebileceğiniz daha nice isimler. Bir Türk ile oturup bu paradoksu konuşmak isterim. Bir benim dışımdaki birilerinin bana ulu-sentezler oluşturmasını hazetmem. Öyle ki 'Türklük' kimlik olarak gözümde itici bir hal almaya başladı. Sizin çocuğunuz her gün okulda 'kendi varlığını benim çocuğumun varlığına armağan etse' ne düşünürsünüz? Lütfen, aynı şeyi benim için de düşün.
Empati faslını burada noktalayalım.
12 Eylül 2012 tarihinden bu yana Cezaevlerinde Kürt siyasetçilerinin başlatmış oldukları süresiz-dönüşümsüz bir açlık grevi var.-Umut ediyorum, sizler bu satırları okuyorken açlık grevi sonlanmış olsun.- Grev son bulmuş olsa dahi gerekçelerinin ağırlığını hissediyor olacağız.
Bu grevin iki temel talebi var.
Birincisi; devletin kendi hukukunu da çiğneyerek bir yıl 3 ay 15 gündür (11 kasım itibarıyla) devam ettirdiği İmarlı tecridinin son bulması isteniyor. İkincisi; kendi ana dillerinde mahkemelerde savunma yapmak istiyorlar.
Türkiye siyasetine egemen olan aklın bizlerin önüne koyduğu argüman şu: Bugün anadil isterler yarın başka şeyler de isterler. 'Zaten bizim en büyük ukdemiz Bağımsız Birleşik Kürdistan kurmaktır'. Bu söz çok tanıdık geliyor, değil mi? 'Haksız mıyız' dediğinizi hisseder gibiyim.
Bakın karından konuşmaksızın çıplak bir gerçeği sizinle paylaşmak istiyorum. Eğer ki Kürt siyasetçileri Kurdofobiaya dönüştürüldüğü üzere uluslararası aktörlerin oyunlarına teşne olmayı kabul etmiş olsalardı, emin olun ne Amerika'da ne Avrupa'da ne de dünyanın başka bir yerinde 'PKK terör listesinde' olmuş olmazdı. PKK Lideri Abdullah Ocalan şimdi tek kişilik İmralı Zindanında olmuş olmazdı. Eğer bugün Ocalan İmralı'da ise, eğer PKK terör listelerinde yer alıyorsa bir tek sebebi var. Terör listesi oluşturanların oyunlarına teşne olmadığı içindir.
Biz Kürtlerin ne istediklerini toplu halde çok kere dile getirdik. Tekrar babında yeniden söyleyeyim. Söz uçar yazı baki kalır.
Kendi anadilimizle eğitim istiyoruz. İlkokuldan üniversiteye kadar. Kamusal alanda kendi anadilimizle hizmet almak istiyoruz. Kendimizi yönetmek istiyoruz. Devletin atadığı vali yerine bizim seçtiğimiz vali bizi yönetsin...
Kimliğimizin ve statümüzün anayasal güvenceye kavuşturulmasını istiyoruz.
Bu taleplere bir karşılık koymak doğru olmamakla birlikte, biz bir karşılık da koyuyoruz. Bu taleplerin karşılanması demek bin yıllık birlikteliğin yeni bir toplumsal mutabakatla sürdürülmesi anlamına gelir. Ki bu da Türkiye'nin Türkiye sınırları dışında yaşayan Kürtler için de çekim merkezi olması demektir. Takdir edersiniz ki bu da Türkiye'nin bölünmesi anlamına gelmiyor. Tersine büyümesi anlamına gelir. Öyleyse sorun nerede? Bu soru üzerine biraz düşünmenizi arzuladığım için bunları yazıyorum. Beni, bizi kapı eşiğinde içeri almadan vestiyer üzerine önceden benim için bıraktığınız bayram harçlığını vererek gönderdiğiniz kapıcı Kürt olarak görmekten vazgeçtiğiniz gün bu sorunun cevabı bulunmuş olacaktır.
Son olarak şunu da belirtmek istiyorum. Evet bin yıllık birlikteliğimiz var. Ama bizim bin yıl öncesi tarihimiz de var. Tıpkı sizin de olduğu gibi. Nasıl oluyor da bin yıl sonra, siz hala varsınız ama biz yokuz? Lütfen kendinizi bizim yerimize koyun ve bu soruya bir cevap verin.
Yazıyı bitirirken, takvim yaprağı 12'ye evrildi. Gece yarısını çoktan geçti. İradem, 'kuzu-kebaba' karşı mücadelesinde galibiyetini sürdürüyor ve yenilmeyecek. Çünkü uğruna mücadele ettiğimiz şeyin insan hayatı olduğunu biliyorum. Vicdandan daha yumuşak bir yastık icat edilmemiştir. Kafamı yastığa koyduğumda kardeşliğin güç kazandığı bir güne uyanmayı diliyorum.

Latest KCK Trial at Silvri and Interview by Ezgi Başaran with Burhan Kuzu

This December, the third leg of the KCK trial and Silivri resumed. I took off work the first day to attend the opening day. Not much was going on. The overwhelming security forces were gone from outside the prison at least—no line of tanks this time only dead fields and a cold grey sea. Inside the prison, the security people at the front were happy to see me back. They shook my hand and asked me how things were going. Even the woman who ran the metal detector was smiley and helpful, as were the guys who worked the tea counter (one of whom looks remarkably like a Seinfeld character). The trial was uneventful—page after page of the TV anchorman reading through the indictment. Garbled phone calls, anonymous testimony, again the phrase ‘and then the organization showed its true ugly face’. The only point, really, was to see my father in law at the breaks. To make eye contact and wave at him across the shoulders of the young gendarmes—the first and only time I have seen him since the end of the hunger strike.

What was not publicized, in fact I have not yet seen it in any newspaper, was that all of these prisoners—all of whom went on hunger strike during the last leg of the movement—are now undergoing a second trial—kept very low key of course. Their crime? Insubordination. Banging on walls, shouting slogans, creating an uproar. For this, they want to punish my father-in-law with a year and a half without family visits. They began the week before the main one.

Toward the end of this trial—Judge Ali (whom I have profiled before) did something that I thought was very tellling. He insisted that they skip over the ‘philosophy lectures’that appeared in the indictment-(this had been a school after all). Page after page of expoundings on quantum mechanics, evolution, and the like. ‘It’s too hard,’ he complained. ‘Listening to it will give everyone a headache!’ The defense lawyers objected of course, ‘You clearly saw this as part of the crime because you are the ones who put it in the indictment in the first place,’ went the argument. ‘It should be read, too.’ Ali’s reaction, a sigh and ‘Let the torture begin!’ Poor little fellow—he reminds me of some of my own sixth graders. What does this show, though. An intolerance for ‘them anti-God theories like Evilution’ or that these people really aren’t all that smart and are just pawns for someone else behind the scenes or that they are all simply anxious to get to the prewritten ending? Or all three?

We met with a lawyer in one of the other KCK cases on Christmas day (Happy Holidays!) . They refer to these cases as ‘waves’—I think our trial belongs to the second or third wave and the lawyer has the fifth wave though there are so many, it’s hard to keep track. The prisons are swelling. Just today, January 1st there was a new wave of arrests. Anyway, the lawyer said that ‘my colleagues and I all understand there will be no acquittals.’ ‘At all?’ I asked. ‘You’re sure?’ He nodded.

I can’t explain how tiresome this all is—this charade of a fair trial, this game we play, pretending all of this is part of the process of justice when everyone knows that it is political persecution. It takes a huge emotional toll, and you aren’t even aware of the daily wear and tear. When the trial ended with only four releases (on bond only) and my father in law was not one of them, I burst into tears. Anger, Sorrow? Frustration? All of these at once? My inlaws say that the AKP is trying to wipe out all oppositon--permanently. It sounded extreme (how naive am I?) until I read this interview in the Radikal with Burhan Kuzu—a high official in the AKP.

The man himself

I translated this article myself. Ezgi Başaran wrote it in a series of interviews the Radikal is doing with AKP officials. If there are any mistakes or misrepresentations here—they are my own and not the fault of Ezgi Başaran. The article originally appeared in 24 December, 2012’s edition. I asked her permission to translate. It was written following a shocking police crackdown on students at the Middle East Technical University who came out to protest when the Prime Minister visited for the launching of the ‘Gokturk 2’ satellite and talks also of the PM’s push to punish the TV drama ‘Magnificent Century’ and a recent statement he made that the separation of power principle caused him some discomfort. This man Burhan Kuzu is the chairman of the commission to write Turkey's new constitution and during the height of the hunger strikes made the statement that 'education in Kurdish was yielding to the Devil's temptation.'

For an article on the protests—click here.

‘The Reason for all the Uproar about the Separation of Powers is Two Hospitals.’ By Ezgi Başaran, December 24th. RADIKAL

An AKP parlementarian and the chairman of the constitutional commission, Professor Burhan Kuzu served as a university lecturer for 30 straight years. After becoming a parlementarian, his relationship to students changed. He comments on the roll of police on university campus in light of two incidents; a conference last year in Ankara University’s Department of Political Science in which he was egged and the events this past week at Ankara’s Middle East Technical University.

The Rector at Middle East Technical University, in reference police intervention in the student protest, told Murat Yetkin from the Radikal newspaper ‘I’ve never seen anything like this.’ Have you?

As a man of science who has addressed students for over 30 years, I know their mentality well. They always react in a kneejerk faction against the established order because of their age and position. This is natural, but when they resort to brute force the police force must enter the fray. In the pre-1980 consitution, there was a law which states ‘The police cannot enter the universities.’ Then the law changed. If the adminstration calls, the police may enter. Depending on the ideology of the administration, the police were either called or not called. As a result, 5200 of our youth died, on the left and the right. It was a blood bath. The gendarmes began to enter schools the police couldn’t enter. Whenever I was giving a lecture, the gendarmes were there. If the students started to quarrel, a gendarme would come to me and ask,‘Do you want me to shoot him?’ If I had said ‘shoot’ he would have shot. However you look at it, all of this comes from these students not knowing the value of the freedoms they are given. There are over 200 ways to stage a legitimate protest in the name civil disobedience.

How do you know that the students at METU were not using one of these legitmate methods?

The Prime Minister, the Chairman of Parliament, the Chief of Staff, and many other high officials were there. It was a very important day. A celebration was to be held for a device we had sent into space. The students did not feel any joy in this.

Why didn’t they feel it?

This may be our fault. And I am speaking of ‘us’ as a nation. How did those children come to this? What is the source of the ideology behind this? Why would you protest sending a device into space?

Were they there to protest the spacecraft or the state officials?

But those state officials went there for the spacecraft! What did our great prime minister say? ‘They stoned us!’ This is unacceptable. Aside from that, if these students cannot feel joy at such a wondrous event, then other things come to my mind.

What other things?

That information shall remain with me.

Okay, but what I’ve been trying to ask from the start is the attitude of the police.

Let me give you a personal example. The Department of Political Science called me to a panel discussion. Süheyi Batum (from the opposition CHP party) was going to speak before me. They called me and said‘The students are going to protest’. I said, ‘Then cancel it! But cancel Süheyl Batum’s panel as well because I am in politics. If he speaks then I’ll go there even unto death.’ That was exactly the way I put it. They didn’t cancel Süheyl’s panel and they protested him. If you’ll remember, he also got angry and told the students ‘What you’re doing is called fascism!’ Then I entered the hall and they began raining eggs on us. We were a mess. We were of course forced to leave. Afterwards I called the dean and said ‘Where are you, most honorable Dean? How is the view from where you are? You weren’t here and none of your assistants were here! What is the meaning of this? Resign immediately!’

As someone with political power do you think saying something like that to a dean is normal?

Very normal! His own school’s student club asked me to come. Then they threw eggs at me. It’s not like I made them invite me.

You said ‘Then I’ll go there even unto death.’

I said if Süheyl goes on, then I’m going on. Don’t go off half-cocked and write just anything. Write everything I say.

You can be assured that I will write everything exactly as you say it.

Look, besides, they put Süheyl’s panel in classroom A and mine in classroom B, because A was the new one and they didn’t want the eggs to mess it up. If this dean won’t resign then who will?

Resigning is the dean’s decision

No! It’s my decision. That's not how it is at all. I must be able to say it.

You must not be able to say it. After all, a university dean isn’t dependent on you.

No, that's not how it is at all. Let’s put an end to this interview.

Let’s try to continue. I’m trying to understand you.

This is not a problem of autonomy. I don’t have the authority to remove him from office. If I did, I would already have done so. (Note: The deanship of Ankara University’s Political Science Department passed from Celal Göle to Professor Yalçın Karatepe in February 2012.) If a provincial governor or governor did such a thing would you tolerate it? But here universities are autonomous, you’ll say. It must not be so. And besides, despite all of this, I did not file a case against the students who threw eggs. I want to emphasize this. In other words, I too possess the virtue of tolerance.

Do the police possess it?

If this had happened in America, the American police would have crushed them like a bull dozer. I’m not saying that’s the right thing, I’m just saying this to all those who look to Europe and America as examples. Sometimes on the internet you can see a group of American police gathering around one of their fellow citizens and beating him. But every time my police do anything...

There was a video on the internet of 7 police in Turkey kicking a fellow citizen. Did you see that?

It’s happened, yes, but I’m not saying it’s right.

At the beginning of our discussion about the presence of security forces on campus, you went as far back as the days before the 80s when the gendarmes would come into your lectures. Has that presence changed much today?

It’s changed enormously. But whenever there is a danger to life and limb, the police will come. Naturally, the are going to be around. For things not to come to this point, our students must take care as well. If you say it was just eggs...in Switzerland a man’s retina was scratched and he went blind. What right do they have to blind me? Are they going to say ‘Let the eye of the AK party be blinded!’ afterwards?

Okay, are you saying that the reaction of the students was just a result of their being hot headed youth?

Students are the same everywhere. They have registration papers in hand, they go to Hopa, from there they go to Ankara, from there they go to Antalya...

Are you referring to the representatives of the organized student movements like the Student Collective and the Village Homes.

Yes, them! Like you said, there is no widespread student protest movement like there was before 1980. They are the same children. Those who conduct these movements on the street are seeking to foment chaos. The military has retreated to the barracks, the courts have been normalized, now all that’s left is the street. Only the movement on the street is hoping that they can do something to this government.

As you say that the courts have been completely normalized, why don’t we change the subject. The prime minister made clear that he feels uncomfortable with the separation of powers. I wonder if he is not of the same opinion about the courts?

The statement of the prime minister was taken too much at face value by the public. Your question is somewhat of the same ilk. Anyway, if the prime minister felt uncomfortable with the separation of powers, then he would not make such a fuss over the presidential system.

I was asking what was meant by the being ‘uncomfortable’ with the courts.

He’s not complaining about the courts in general but feels uncomfortable with certain decisions. In other words, the courts are normalized but there may be three to five decisions and these three to five decisions really hurt Turkey. No where in the world do politics and the courts get along. It’s natural. Ozal and Demirel both quarreled with the courts but this does not mean that they were against the separation of powers. That’s not what the prime minister is saying.

Which decisions make the prime minister uncomfortable?

For example, many of our citizens have acquired real estate in foreign countries. The Constititutional Court protests the law of reciprocity on principle in this case. Okay, am I going to ask you as the Parliament—never mind that there doesn’t have to be an equal exchange for everything--okay, let me designate what it is.

Is this not one of the channels for checks and balances in a democracy?

I understand that but it limits power. The issue of privatization is this way as well and in the end, as a country, we are suffer material loss. Moreover, the Constitutional Court does not stick to a decision. This uproar over separation of powers is ultimately about two hospitals. The prime minister wants to build two hospitals, one on the Asian side and one on the European. Enormous hospitals. The locations have been made clear. For example,( in hospitals of this size), it’s not taking a patient from one section to another by stretcher, but by rail system! That this plan was halted of course upsets him.

What was the reason the plan was halted?

I don’t know the details. Maybe a fellow citizen complained. We’ve seen this before in Marmaray. A few pots and broken ships surface during construction and all work stops. Who knows for how long? The matter goes to Natural and Cultural Heritage, let them research it, they say. For years, no report comes out of them. The oligarchic system you speak of is this very thing. Come on, just look at it and tell us—is this historical or not?

You’re saying this research eats up a lot of time then?

Of course! More than a decade. This is how matters of this nature are viewed, but they must not be. Everything needs to be quick.

But you know that investigations and trials take a long time. It’s been a year since Uludere for instance, but we still don’t know what happened.

It has been a year since Uludere but how many years for these ancient pots and pans? It remains to be seen whether these bones and ancient cookingware were put on the dig site after the fact. We don’t know. You are young, but we have seen some things in our time. For example, it came up once that a man’s fields were going to be made public property. Then he tossed a few bones into the fields and said, stop and work on that for a while. What makes the prime minister angry is the loss of time and the ideogical views of some judges. To reflect these views they misuse the power they possess and no sanction can be applied. You can’t ask ‘Why did you make this decision!’

Should the views of Turkey’s most powerful person affect a statue or a community, or even a TV series?

You are referring to the prime minister in a sneaky way, aren’t you? I get it. If a normal citizen can use his freedom of speech, then so can the prime minister! There are no mandate in his words.

But the statue was torn down...

There were other legal problems with that statue. That’s not why it was destroyed. And the Magnificent Century is still on the air. Only Hurrem (Roxelana) has started to do the Muslim prayer, that’s all that’s changed. In my opinion, it’s too little too late. That program does not show Sultan Suleyman properly. You watch it and all you see is sex! Even TV shows that speak about historical figures need to be careful.

A Letter Home OR My First Whiff of Tear Gas--the November 17 Solidarity Hunger Strike

Dear Defense Technologies,

The sexy and sleek, Spede Heat CS

Today I tasted some of your gas—probably from a long range Spede Heat CS cannister , the preferred model of the Turkish police, but I can’t be sure because there wasn’t a lot of time to stop and check the exact model.  

No I am not a soldier or an agitator or a regular attender of protests.  I am a middle school English teacher living in Istanbul. We have something in common because the contact page on your website lists you as headquartering in Jacksonville, Florida and I was born and raised in Florida. In fact, my father lived in Jacksonville for a long time when he first moved down from his small farm community in Georgia. My mother is your proverbial ‘country girl’ from West Virginia—she likes Michelob Lite, can ride a horse, and worked for years as a P.E. teacher. She lives in tiny Pinson, Alabama now along with the rest of my family. They attend a Baptist church. My sister works with handicapped kids. My brother’s a fireman. My nephew works in disaster clean-up.

Today, my wife and I went to a demonstration on a public fairground on the outskirts of Istanbul to support thousands of political prisoners who were hunger striking in Turkey’s prisons—most of them Kurdish.  64 of the strikers had not eaten for 67 days and were literally on death’s door—the pictures of them that came out of the prison reminded me of concentration camp victims—gaunt, hollow eyed. Several thousand who had joined later were well on their way to the same end—including my wife’s 60-year-old father, a retired elementary school teacher and a diabetic. Family members on the outside felt it was the least we could do to come together and conduct a two day hunger strike of our own to show that we had not forgotten them.

We arrived at the fair grounds to a small gathering of mostly old men and women. A good eighty percent of the crowd was over fifty. I may sound like I am exaggerating for effect, but the busses carrying the younger people from the center of the city, an hour away, had not yet arrived. There were only about six or seven young men in a crowd of not quite a hundred people. It was cold—a gathering of chubby  grandmas sat huddled together on make-shift stools and a group of old men talked over cigarettes.

Gendarmes with riot shields took position on the sidewalk. Three alleys across the street were shoulder to shoulder with police and ten police busses filled the parking lot of the city hall. Two police tanks and several armored cars were parked along the side of the road. I laughed at first because, honestly, what in the world did this small army think was coming from this crowd of shivering retirees?

Winter rain clouds turned the sky an ashen gray—we chatted with a friend of my father-in-law’s, Zekiye. She is sixty years old and has long, cotton-white hair with dark expressive eyes that, despite her not being able to read or write, shine with intelligence.  We’ve brought tea and sugar—she seems pleased.

The first volley of water cannons--no one's all that convinced yet

I notice a man standing on the side walk with a megaphone. He is middle-aged, pale, with thinning blond hair and thick glasses. He is dressed in a powder-blue jacket and slacks.  ‘We are asking you to disperse,’ he says in a quiet voice. ‘Who is this guy?’ an old man asks. ‘Disperse for who?’  Then in quick succession, the man with the megaphone issues 3 warnings, as required by Turkish law, ‘We will not permit this, we will intervene.’ The old ladies on the stools looked puzzled—then stood and started gathering their things. That’s when the tank moved in, firing water from the cannon on the top. It struck the smokers first who were slow to react. They behaved like cats chased away from a meal, grumbling and flinging their cigarettes down in frustration. Then the tear gas cannisters began to fly—I’ll never forget those trails of yellowish smoke streaking across the grey sky--and we fled.

I have never breathed in tear gas before—it hurts, but then I am fairly young and can run. The hobbling old women in layers of skirts and the limping old men, on the other hand, though a whole lot spryer than I gave them credit for, were far slower than I, and had a hard time getting away.

Those first few moments were strange. I remember wondering if the police could possibly be serious. I stopped and ran backward. My wife was running toward me, covering her mouth with her scarf. Her sister came next, tossing me an extra handkerchief so I could cover mine. I didn’t at first—just watched in a kind of stunned disbelief as the tank advanced on us and more tear gas cannisters rained down. A young man fell in the mud and couldn’t get up. Another came behind and tried to lift him. ‘What’s wrong with him?’ my wife cried. Then a tear gas cannister fell near me and my lungs began to burn, though thank God it was far enough a way that my eyes were only slightly affected.  One woman took a direct hit and had to be rushed to the hospital. I covered my face with the handkerchief, but my glasses immediately fogged up so I had to give it up. If I choked, I choked. We ran toward the line of apartment buildings at the opposite end of the fairgrounds—and then ducked down a side street.  All the neighbors poked their heads out the window to find out what was going on and then quickly ducked back in once they understood.

We stopped in front of a small convenience store and frantically discussed what to do. ‘Let’s go back,’ someone said. I was in tears from the frustration and rage—looking at all these ordinary people around me wiping at the burning eyes and clutching their throats. One young woman was shouting ‘What do we do?’ and as if in answer some of the young men started scrounging the street for rocks. The old folks in the crowd were trying to stop them.  One man waved his arms and cried, ‘Don’t hurt anyone! This is our neighborhood! These are our people!’  Thanks to him, no one broke any shop windows, but they all rushed back the way we had come for a go at the tanks, and soon they came running back toward us, this time with armored cars following.

The subsequent chase through the backstreets and alleyways was terrifying. The armored cars left the rock-throwers behind and came after all of us. I dashed down an alley with an old man in a beret and very fat woman who couldn’t really run at all but only waddle quickly in front of me, clutching the wall as she went for support, and panting as if she were about to have a heart attack. The three of us tried to leap a brick wall and climb over a wood pile—to my astonishment the woman didn’t need any help--but a group of our people from the other street were coming from the opposite direction, fleeing from armored car on that side, and we realized we were trapped. We ran back to where we came from. On that street, one of the armored cars was speeding down the road swerving left and right after anyone it saw in the street as if it were trying to run them down.

I grabbed my wife’s hand, or she grabbed mine, and together we ran out onto the main highway and fell into a crowd of ordinary pedestrians. By now, the police were wandering the streets in plain clothes making arrests, so we all dispersed and tried to look like tourists seeing the sights.

I find it difficult to articulate all the things I felt during this attack. There was anger—watching all those old people flee in terror from what amounted to a small army. And for what?  I could certainly understand why those men threw the rocks. Why so many police against so innocuous a crowd? Why attack the demonstration in the first place? It was infuriating that they could make you feel like such a criminal, so immediately on the defensive. As soon as I saw those men pick up the rocks, I knew how this would be portrayed in the Turkish papers—‘Police had to intervene when protesters turned violent,’ and I started framing a defense in my head though anyone who was there would not require it.  This was the undeserved humiliation they imposed--at the end, we were skulking through the streets as if we had just committed a crime.  I wonder, is this the kind of society our country wants to support—where ordinary people have to live in fear of the very people who protect them?

During the whole ordeal, I had so much adrenaline pumping through me that I didn’t have time to feel afraid—at least not until we were cornered between the houses. I was worried for those closest to me--my wife for one—though of course to be honest I have the general impression that should she so desire she could, Wonder Woman like, pick up one of those tanks and hurl it through that line of riot police. Watching her younger sister run was more surreal—Zelal never leaves the house without going through a three-hour salon treatment. How odd to see this pain-stakingly made-up woman in a leather jacket, designer jeans, and chic boots fleeing from a rain of tear gas and tanks.

Later on, we all gathered together in the headquarters of the Kurdish political party. I met a young man there from Diyarbakır, an eighteen-year-old jazz percussionist. He told me his mother had warned him that if he joined this protest today, she would never cook for him again. He laughed.

‘She said ‘That will teach you to hunger strike!’ She’s scared for me, of course. The police used to harass us all the time. I remember one night my dad was coming home from playing cards and some gendarmes stopped him in the street. They poked him in the belly with the rifle and said ‘Why are you strutting so slowly down the street?’ ‘No reason,’ he answered. ‘Then walk faster!’ they told him. So he did and one of them stopped him again, and again poked him in the belly with the barrel of the gun. ‘What are you running from? What did you do?’ This was every day life for us. We lived in the Bağlar neighborhood of Diyarbakır when I was a kid—a very active neighborhood. That’s where I went to elementary school. We breathed tear gas every day on the way home from school! It was just a part of normal life. One day, when I was in first grade, me and a friend decided to join one of the protests.  I was about 7 and he was about 12. We had both started school when we were older. My friend got caught throwing rocks at the police and a group of them knocked him down and beat him with billy clubs. They killed him.’

He says it so quickly, it doesn’t quite register.

‘They what?’

‘They killed him.  Oh, that happened to a lot of guys.’

During the course of the night, I hear stories from others. One woman’s little sister was tortured so badly in prison that she now cannot walk. ‘I came today for her,’ she tells the crowd. ‘Because I can do nothing else for her.’

This is the government you are selling your tear gas to.

I have no doubt that the millions of dollars worth of tear gas cannisters you produce have their place—a non-lethal and usually harmless method of dispersing mobs who have gone out of control, but this is not how the Republic of Turkey uses your product. The police break up every manner of gathering in a similar way that they did ours—whether it is a group of secular nationalist on Indepence Day, a gathering of Kurdish mothers in a tent, townspeople protesting the building of a dam or students objecting to tuition hikes. They attack teachers, church goers (a sizeable Christian community lives in Istanbul), democrats, rock musicians, children and housewives.  And the gas cannisters are certainly not always harmless—a Google image search on ‘tear gas cannisters’ is enough to yield some pictures of injuries from these things that turns your stomach. There are rumors sometimes that the police are deliberately targeting people.

I am writing to ask you to be more judicial in who you select as your customers, to not sell your product who regularly use it to attack their own people. As men and women of morals and good conscience, I am sure you don’t want the name of your company and those who work for it connected to such primitive brutality.

Thank you for your time,

Jeff Gibbs