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| One of the predecessors of the KCK trials |
No more long breaks--the KCK trial will now drive forward with occasional weeklong breaks until the government gets what it wants, I presume.
It's October 1st. We
board the bus from home which begins our three hour trip to the courthouse in
Silivri. I have taken a personal day from school to do this, but Delal does
this every day. Sometimes she comes back at night, which means 6 hours of
traveling every day except Wednesday. And we are one of the lucky families in
terms of travel time and logistics. Nevertheless, however fortunate we may be
relatively speaking, this whole process is stressful, and has a wear and tear on
our lives here that increases with time. It's been two years! On the bus ride, I catch a glimpse of a
newspaper article about the government shut down in America and I think of all
the hysterical shouting about ‘communism’ and ‘dictatorship’ over this
watered-down, anemic health care plan—God forbid the US should ever get a taste
of what a real dictatorship is like (or real health care) but these games back home irk me today.
How could people there be so blind and ignorant?
By the
time we arrive, the trial has already started. I hear Judge Ali Alçın’s voice
as we rush down the hall—he is shrieking in that high pitched nasal voice of
his, shouting at the lawyers. When we enter he has just finished and things are
settling down. I won’t go into too much detail here—the proceedings are
monotonous, the same absurdities dragged out again and again, over an over. Two
people give their defense today—no one says the name of the first very clearly
(none of us catch it) but the second is a man named Kiyaset Mordeniz. Both are
local officials for the BDP. The proceedings are the same. Judge Ali asks ‘You
were seen at a political rally on such and such a date, what do you have to say
to that?’ And both of them give the same answer, ‘First, I was not at that
particular rally, and even if I had been, it would not have constituted a crime
because the BDP is a legally recognized political party and as an official, I
have a right and duty to attend a rally.’ One piece of evidence is that a picture was taken showing one of the men near a building where a political meeting was taking place. Again--'is being near a building enough to prove I joined the meeting and even if I had...' The mentality if frighteningly stupid.
At one
point, Judge Ali starts to quote a personal phone conversation between Mordeniz
and his wife. The lawyers stand one by one and issue their objections, private
conversations have no place in the courtroom they insist. But Ali shouts them
down—he does this alot today—and proceedings resume with this intimate phonecall between
a husband and wife.
It is
clear to me that these people are being tried here for being in the BDP on the
State’s assumption that it is equivalent to being a member of the PKK. They are
arguing against a mentality capable of seeing the world only in a very rigid
and twisted way. People who oppose the
government’s line are trying to divide the country and are terrorists. Any concession you make to anything they do
or say is treason. It’s the mentality of McCarthy, of the Witch Trials, of any
of history’s frightening and monsterous purges. It’s all spectral evidence and
guilt by association and circumstantial evidence and thought crimes—all the
things that democracy has spent the last four centuries trying to stamp out. It's a disease.
At the
breaks, we wave to my father in law. We try to talk over the huge distance but
even with shouting it’s impossible to hear anything. And after a minute or so,
the guards shove them all out anyway. They must vacate the courtroom during the
breaks—no choice, no tolerance, no mercy for those who have no other way to see
their loved ones. I am sure in the eyes of the hysterical Judge Ali—our personal
devil in all this, our Judge John Hathorne—we are also terrorist witches who
must be stamped out forever.
That’s a real dictatorship, kids.
The Law doesn’t protect you, it attacks you. The State sees you as the enemy
and changes its policies as necessary to punish you, and then uses lies and
animadversions to hide what it’s doing. Because you are assumed guilty, anything you do is spun to support that claim and as evidence is not really important, nothing you can say can exonerate you. Nothing is certain—not the fairness of
judges or the absoluteness of the Constitution—nothing except that the State
will win. Things will always be adjusted to ensure that ending. For those back
home playing like this is what you are experiencing, you should hang your
heads.
