Democracy in the Parks

                The ‘waves’ of arrests have started. Yesterday, it was announced, that 2 out of 20 ‘supsects’ will be charged in the Çarşı wave (Çarşı is the Beşiktaş football fan club who lead the way against the police in many of the protests). The day before that, the news reported that 33 of 97 would be charged in the previous days wave of arrests. And that’s in Istanbul alone—there are more ‘waves’ in other cities.

The anchormen and women state these figures blandly, not questioning the logic behind the arrests at all. It’s the ‘Terror Intervention’ division of the police. They are conducting house raids early in the morning. They are stopping Terror.

It is all so familiar—three entries ago I talked about how this would go down. I remember how it felt back in 2011, when every day on the news you heard about how many were charged in that day’s ‘dalga’ (wave) of arrests of Kurds. The unquestioning, docile news teams spouting out the Turkish Government’s version of events and everyone unquestioningly swallowing every word because they had been trained from preschool to regard Kurds as terrorist and every kind of political activity as splittism provoked by secret forces bent on destroying Turkey.

So will all the unrest and horror of the last three weeks just get swept under the rug or sent to prison?

                The standing man protests continue—people stand in silence along the wharf and at the Bull in Kadıköy. People stand at the meeting for press freedom in Brussels. And crowds still fill Taksim Square. But now the Gezi Park movement, with Gezi itself lost, has spread to all the parks of Istanbul this week. At 9:00 the town meetings start. We went down last night to Yoğurtçu Park to see what was happening.

               They’d set up a stage in the park where anyone could sign up to speak. The audience showed their approval by waving their hands in the air, a tactic they probably coopted from Occupy Wall Street, but with the very logical reason of not wanting to disturb the neighbors who surround the park with clapping. A girl spoke about the corruption in the last election—the buying of votes, the casting of ballots by the dead. One foreign resident stood and suggested that Turkey call for foreign election monitors to ensure that there is no tampering with results. A lawyer stood and, after greeting all the undercover cops in the crowd, to mass laughter, urged cooperation and persistence. Many stood and spoke about the need to organize.

                Some of the character of Gezi Park has been brought to each of these mini-Gezi’s. Last night there was a ‘Revolution Market’ where cookies and drinks were distributed for free. A wide range of people were present--most of whom would never have been caught dead together a month ago. One man spoke on behalf of the LGBT community whom, he said, had been at the protests from the start, had born the brunt of a lot of police violence, and who remained one of the most oppressed groups in the country. Everyone cheered their support. Another man stood and spoke about the injustice in the investigation into the massacre by Turkish warplanes of 34 Kurdish villagers--most Turks regarded this issue as irrelavent, believing, as their news told them, that these 34 boys were all smugglers anyway, and probably terrorists. But everyone cheered their support. Whatever else comes of these townhall style meetings, these people are, perhaps for the first time, getting together and listening to each other’s views and building tolerance. I can’t stress enough for American friends what a radical change that is for Turkey. Your political views can get you arrested or attacked here. People defend their positions with hysterical screaming and protests. It is against the law to insult Atatürk and Turkishness. Anyone against you is a terrorist. For all of these people with different opinions to sit around quietly and listen is a revolution of its own.

                Sadly, there was some bad news. A park in another district, Yeniköy was attacked by amob with clubs and knives. The mob, about 30 people in all, was apparently organized by the District Mayor (Muhtar), Engin Cevahiroğlu. If there were any justice in the current rulers of this country, he would be immediately relieved of his position and prosecuted, but we save that sort of justice for protesters standing silently in the squares. Those against us get the Gas, those for us get pardoned.

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.’

Where does it all come from?

Ambitious title: we are now embroiled in the struggles of the prison hunger strike. According to the BDP there are 10,000 people now on strike--a number difficult to confirm. In any case, my father in law is now one of them. We are proud, worried, and distraught at the increasingly militant stance of the government. I have been meaning to write something all week about it--time is running out--but I can't seem to gather the thoughts. They are a mess of emotion, fear, excitement, desperation, nerves. We have faced down police tanks at demonstrations--others in the East and farther from the eyes of the press were attacked by them. In any case, I took a textbook from our high school. It's used to teach the mandatory class of 'National Security Science' which everyone in Turkey is required to take. Here is a section from this 170 page book that I think neatly encapsulates that what hunger strikers and indeed, anyone who wants to live in a just society are facing. A people trained to delude themselves into thinking a militarist, paranoid dictatorship is actually the true meaning of democracy. The parenthesis and italics are mine.

HIGH SCHOOL NATIONAL SECURITY SCIENCE
Distributed by the Ministry of Education
Published in 2010

 

FROM CHAPTER ON 'THREATS DIRECTED AGAINST TURKEY'

 

DESTRUCTIVE ACTIONS

Those termed 'destructive actions', in general, have the aim of destroying the existing regime (The secular-democratic system) through force of arms and setting up a system governed by their own ideology. Actions designed to destroy the country from the inside arrive at their goals through four phases (preparation, organization, action, and civil war). First and foremost, these activities are financed through human and narcotic trafficking. At the same time, these organizations profit from donation campaigns, the sale of illegal magazines and newspapers, the collection of monthy fees and concerts.

Our country stands confronted with constant attacks designed to spread ideology and remains the target of destructive activities aimed at obliterating the rapidly developing social and cultural integrity that goes hand in hand with a developing economy taking its place in the world of international and geopolitical politics.

In this arena, the 1980s saw the development of organizations designed with the sole aim of destroying the Constitution of the Turkish Republic and setting up their own views in its place.

 

SPLITTIST ACTIONS

Splittist threats directed at our country with great constancy go back 200 years. Throughout the process of history, threats have appeared that are extensions of the Imperialist Powers efforts to profit from the Middle East region. Today, too, movements, and demonstrations have surfaced with their own internal conditions and alliances with outsiders.

As for today, splittist activities among elements of our fatherland claiming to be separate races or nations and carrying the quality of a threat were begun by outside powers in the days of the rise of the Ottoman empire. European states, during the 19th century, not only exerted efforts to foment rebellion but at the same time played an effective role in the creation of splittist-ethnic organizations.

In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, westerners in various disguises as archaeologist, historians, theologians and geographers at every opportunity sowed the seeds of dissent among eastern tribes as part of their missionary work. These actions opened the road to the weakening of state power through various rebellions and uprisings at different periods.

One of the most important of these rebellions supported by foreign powers was the Sheik Sait uprising, the results of which, forced The Turkish Republic, with the Lozan Peace Treaty, to give up its right to the Musul-Kirkuk region that lay well within its borders.

The PKK, with which the Turkish Republic has struggled since the last quarter of the 20^th century, was founded on November 27^th, 1978 with the support of foreign countries. It began operations with the raids on Eruh and Şemdinli in 1984. The final and true aim of this terrorist organization has been to split off lands starting with Turkey, and spreading to Iraq, Iran and Syria; lands that have been theirs since their foundations, to have the Kurdish identity recognized in the constitution (this makes saying the word Kurd a terrorist act essentially) and to form an autonomous or federal Kurdistan region which later will become the United Democratic Greater Kurdistan.

                This terrorist organization, with these aims, has endeavored to implement the following struggles.

·         The murders of 30,000 people charged with the duty of securing the state without regard for the elderly, women, or children

·         To destroy the vehicles of service to our citizens and hinder the development of the Southeast region

……..

Since February 16^th, 1999, with the capture of the head of this organization, they understood that they had lost on the battlefield and changed their tactics to attacks on the political field. (Thus nonviolent political struggle is also terrorism). With this aim, they took advantage of our citizens living in the East and Southeast who for various reasons were not able to find educational opportunities. This terrorist organization:

·         Forced young people without regard to gender to take up arms during their education years and turned them against the state.

·         Tried to break the national unity spirit of the Turkish people by fomenting divisiveness and splittism.

·         Profitted from the civil services for years and used them in actions against the state to incite the loyal people at every opportunity against the state.

·         Forced our children still at a tender age when they are still playing with toys to join protests and instilling in their vulnerable minds violence and disobedience against the state.

·         The above activities have been propagated side by side with armed actions and with the support of foreign powers.

This terror organization, after the terrorist attack of 9/11, in order not to draw the ire of the world have struggled to disassociate themselves from the word ‘terror’ but several countries and foundations have put these new names on their terrorist lists.

Let them change their name as often as they want, every foundation that takes aim at human life is a terrorist organization (which qualifies all the militaries of every country as terrorist) and they are responsible for all damage done to the state and every murder they’ve ever committed.

The desire and wish for humans to live in peace and security grows all the faster as the regional services and investments by the state and the passionate endeavors by the state for the people are lost through terrorist influence in the region.

THE DUTIES THAT FALL TO CITIZENS WHO ARE AGAINST THESE THREATS TO THE STATE (Though all sections of this chapter have been underlined by the student who used this book, this one is double underlined)

·         To take responsibility for the development and enrichment of a nation and people reliant on the principles of secularism, democracy, and modernity.

·         To know Turkish history and draw lessons from the past

·         As Turkish Youth (not my capitalization) to work diligently to raise Turkey to a high level of strength, wealth, and prosperity.

·         To learn the ideas of Atatürk and use them in our daily lives.

·         To know the aims of cadres of threat and propaganda from both internal and external sources who aim to impede Turkey’s progress.

·         To learn the Turkish language, tongue, culture and literature and bring it to life through the example of their own lives.

·         To know and defend the principles of Atatürk regarding the People and Nation in terms of national unity and togetherness.

·         To see clearly the truths and falsehoods of the publications of media press organizations both outside and inside the country and support ones that benefit the country and reject those that don’t.

·         To live knowing that knowledge is the guide toward the truest path and knowing the need for work and production.

 

 

54th Day--Hunger Strike

                Tonight was unusually warm for November—humid, everyone in short sleeves. I was coming from a friend’s house where we were doing some filming for an improv theater we are starting up on the Asian side. I went down to the wharf to fill up my Akbil (the card you use for busses, trains, and ferries) when I noticed a group gathering next to bus station. About a hundred people sat in front of a line of candles illuminating signs that read, ‘We are here on the 54th day to support the hunger strikers’ and ‘Ölüm değil, çözüm için’ (not for death, but for a solution) They chanted slogans—‘The murderers will have to answer for this crime!’  From the dark beneath Kadikoy’s Haldun Taner theater came another group marching with red flags. They called to each other across the newspaper sellers and sausage stands who started to notice. ‘What the hell are they shouting about?’ one asked. A crowd started to gather. Police began to notice.

I stopped in front of the candle flames like a moth. I don’t know what it was exactly—but the graveness of the situation seemed to flicker in that candle light. In Turkey, hunger strikes have always meant death. The prime minister denied their existence. ‘We have no hunger strikers!’ Or else called them terrorists. ‘The state will never bow its head to the pressure of terrorists’ or else said it was all a show. Every day there’s something else he says that is more crass. Some of the newspapers are saying that not much interest is being garnered by the hunger strikers—but here is this gathering crowd at the Kadikoy wharf. In Denizli 91 students from Pamukkale Univeristy were arrested for marching in support of the hunger strikers. Galatasaray students and others from universities all over the country have started sympathy strikes.

While we were filming tonight, a friend asked me if my father-in-law was striking. ‘Not yet,’ I said. There’s been an announcement tonight that all the prisoners will start striking—(some estimates put that at over 10,000 people, though it is still unclear just how many people have been arrested in the KCK case. The arrests continue—yesterday 21 people more people were arrested in Mersin.) This will include my wife’s dad, of course. And means…means what? There’s a storm coming. Shadows. I am proud of him. I want to help him somehow. But the government seems so ruthless, so indifferent. It throws as much propaganda as it can at the strikers. But I have felt how frustrating it is to be among these people and face the power of the Turkish state.

And I have seen a hunger strike before. In 1998, six Tibetans in New Delhi stopped eating to protest Chinese occupation. It ended when the Indian police stormed the tents and Thupten Ngodup, a 60 year old man set himself on fire. It changed nothing of course. For the past few months, people all over Tibet have been doing the same--self immolations, deaths, self-murder as the only weapon against the all-powerful State.

Those candles at the wharf tonight reminded me of the candles in front of the Tibetan strikers tents. And there’s this dread that spread over with the wind coming off the water, that the flames are rising again.

Hunger Strike at Silivri and Beatings (Türkçeşi en aşağıda)

 

Anxiety.

That’s the prevailing mood for the past year. Sometimes the anxiety is aimless and sometimes it is a divination.

On Monday, my sister-in-law received a call from her father. Monday are the days prisoners at Silivri get a phone call. She said his voice sounded strange—subdued, morose. We found out that a hunger strike was planned among the prisoners in the KCK case. We had no idea if my father-in-law would be among the strikers. His name was missing from the official lists, but it was clear from his voice that something was wrong. The trial is resuming next week. The visitation this week was canceled—the prisoners themselves were boycotting visits as a means of protest. We would have no news for a while.

Tuesday, my wife, determined to see her father and find out if he was okay, arranged a car and a lawyer to go with her to Silivri—while family could not get in, most likely a lawyer would be let through. The only trouble was finding a driver—we called friends, friends of friends, and friends of those, but there was no one who knew how to drive (imagine having that problem in the States!) She was talking about driving out there on her own—a thought which terrified me, given her lack of experience. It looked like we might have to give up the trip, but something was nagging at her and she had to get out there somehow. I was about to call in to work to make the drive myself when a friend came through at the last minute.

The rest I heard from my wife herself.

The prison was eerily empty—the crowds of visitors for the KCK inmates missing, home because of the protest. The lawyer was let in and met with my father-in-law, Kemal Seven, who was extremely pleased to see him. Something had happened, and in their isolation, he had feared no one would ever find out.

My wife’s instincts had been correct.

Tuesday, September 25th, 10 of the 99 detainees remaining from this particular round-up began a hunger strike. They wrote a petition to the prison announcing the strike so that later the officials could not claim ignorance should something happen later on. The remaining 89 prisoners wrote a petition of their own declaring their support. Sometime the same day, roughly between  40 to 50 guards and riot police in full gear (this means shields, gas masks, billy clubs and pepper gas) gathered at the door of the prisoners wards. Among them were the assistant warden and the chief of the prison guards. They entered the cells to take away the hunger strikers. Apparently, they were taking them to one-person cells isolated from the others. Their comrades did not want to give them up—they feared that in a few days the strikers would no longer be able to take care of themselves, and expected little help or understanding from the prison officials. Thus, they tried to prevent the guards from taking them awa. The guards attacked. Everyone was beaten (Remember, please, that resistance or no, many of these men are around 60 years old with a host of ailments ranging from heart disease to diabetes). The ten hunger strikers and 2 other prisoners were taken away. None of their belongings were removed from the cells and they’ve had no word of where they’ve been taken. The others worry because, on hunger strike, of course, they need to drink water and sugar water quite regularly and there has been no sign of anyone making provisions for that.

The remaining 89 have refused food since Tuesday in solidarity. I’m posting this on a Saturday, so this might have changed. The trial will resume Monday. Most likely with the reading of the 2,500 page indictment-I think after 10 days in July we left off on page three hundred and something.


Türçesi (Özet)

Silivri L Tipi Cezaevinde, KCK davasından tutuklu bulunan 99 tutukludan 10 kişi süresiz dönüşümsüz açlık görevine başladılar.  Bir dilekçe yazıp, hapishaneye bildirmişler.  Kalan 89 kişiden bu arkadaşları destek verdiği diye bir dilekçe yazmışlar.  Sonra robokop şeklinde 20-25 hapishanenin gardiyanı ikinci müdür ve başgardiyan koğuş kapılarını açmışlar bu on kişi alıp bir tek kişilik hücre götürmek istemişler.  (Bu arada koğuşlar 18 kişilik. 99 kişi kalıyor, bu koğuşlarda, her koğuşa gardiyanlar dağıtılmış).   Dün Salı günü yaklaşık 40-50 kişi yarısı gardiyan yarısı robokop şeklinde, koğuşlara girmişler. Koğuşlardakiler tabii ki arkadaşlarını bırakmak istemdiler (Çünkü bu 10 kişi 10 gün sonra kendi ihtiyaçlarına bakamayacaklardı). Direnmişler. Gardiyanlar onlara darp etmişler.  10 grevlileri götürmüşler bir de direnen kişi den iki kişi daha. Bu 12 kişinin nereye götürüldüğünden koğuş arkadaşlarının haberi yok. Henüz gardiyanlar gelip onların eşyalarını götürmemişler. Açlık grevinde olan bu kişilerin su ve şekerli su almaları gerekiyor, bu yazı yazıldığında kendilerinden bir haber alınamamıştı. Tüm tutuklular Salı gününden beri arkadaşları destelemek amacıyla yemek ve ekmek almıyorlar.

The KCK Trials--the Last Days (continued from previous post)

The lawyers talking to the press in front of the courthouse

.

I spent seventeen months waiting in prison queues in
Leningrad. One day, somehow, someone 'picked me out'.
On that occasion there was a woman standing behind me,
her lips blue with cold, who, of course, had never in
her life heard my name. Jolted out of the torpor
characteristic of all of us, she said into my ear
(everyone whispered there) - 'Could one ever describe
this?' And I answered - 'I can.'

Anna Akhmatova
[The 1st of April in the year 1957. Leningrad]

I kept coming back to this poem during the writing of these entries—and I thought, what would I answer to the woman’s question? What if one of the Kurdish mothers in the courtroom asked me, ‘Who can describe this?’ I’d think, someone can, but not me. My heart’s in it, but my blood is not, and that seems to make a difference in who can get at what this is like.

But then this is not the Stalinist years in Russia, and we are not suffering all that much on a day to day basis. Every afternoon in Silivri, we have been going from the courthouse to the beach or to the coast where there is a nice nargile café. There, we sit on bean bags and smoke grape-mint water pipe and drink tea. This is a summer resort for wealthy Turks. They had a parade on Wednesday, all international, in celebration of the ‘Yogurt Festival’. Texan square dancers marched behind some old Korean men doing a harvest dance, followed up quickly by some Serbian folk dancers. Turkish Pop Stars closed the night.

While we are doing all of these things, whole families sleep in the BDP tents on the ground among the flies and heat and dust (We stay in a comfy apartment with one of Delal’s college buds). The campers have no money for food so they have to eat what the party can provide—usually a pretty decent meal of fresh tomatoes (this area is famous for them) rice, bread, cucumbers, and water melons.

We cook for each other every night in the apartment—I made black bean burritos on Tuesday. Our host made meftune on Wednesday.  Curry another night.

Many of these people have blown all their savings to come across the country from tiny villages in Siirt and Şırnak. And they are the lucky ones who had the cash to blow—others were left behind. Some have relatives in our group of political prisoners with severe heart problems or serious cases of diabetes. No, we are lucky--the petty bourgeoise of the political prisoner relative set.)

On Wednesday, after the Yogurt parade, we repair to the nargile joint.

‘What do you think they think we do after the trial every day?’ my wife’s sister says as she lets out a draught of minty smoke. ‘This almost feels wrong!’

‘Maybe they think we ululate in grief and slap our faces.’

We ululate for effect and laugh.

‘Or beat ourselves with whips and wear hair shirts,’ I add.

The moon rises over the town and makes a splash of milk-white on the water. It’s utterly beautiful. We stay up till late doing imitations of one another.

The thing is—there is an anxiety that underlies everything. It’s like—while watching that moon rise over the glittering town, there’s someone raking their fingernails down the chalkboard. And it has been that way for a year. This is the thing I cannot describe—it’s like that thought on the tip of your tongue that never materializes. It’s why everything you do comes with a slight stomach ache, a last minute hesitation, why your nights are filled with dreams of concentration camps and round ups and jails.

I think this anxiety is all very run of the mill for my in-laws. This kind of anxiety is just part and parcel of life those Kurds who won’t say they’re Turks.

And then there are those that do. We have a young visitor with us this Wednesday night, a family friend still in high school and only 16 years old, come to pay his respects to Mamoste in prison. As we walk the boardwalk around midnight, a concert is blasting the entire town with noise from the portside.

‘I guess we Turks will always love noise,’ he says, or something like it. I don’t quite catch the beginning of this.

‘Well, maybe,’ my wife answers. ‘But just remember, we aren’t the same as all these people. We’re Kurds, not Turks.’

‘Not me,’ he says. ‘I’m a Turk.’

‘How so?’

‘I reject my Kurdishness.  I don’t want it.’

This is not exactly the most socially aware thing to have said to a group of people going to a political show trial every day for a family member imprisoned for fighting for Kurdish rights.

‘But you are Kurdish,’ we protest. ‘You can do what you want with it, but you can’t get rid of it any more than you can get rid of the fact that you were born a male.’

‘No, it’s a choice,’ he insists. ‘I don’t want to be Kurdish. I’m Turkish. That’s how I feel!’

I’d like to tell him that any true hater of Kurds won’t care what he chooses.  They’ll arrest him if they feel like it, or beat him up, or kill him like the guy in the bar in Ankara did when he heard a man singing a Kurdish song.  I remember the eleven year old girl who told me, upon learning my wife was Kurdish, that the only good Kurd is a dead Kurd. The 7^th grader who, again, when she found out my wife was Kurdish, told me ‘you should be careful.’ The friend who told me the best thing I could do for Turkey was kill Kurds. ‘It’s just like killing chickens.’ The 8^th grader who got angry at me because I said my wife came from the village of Conag. ‘Conag is not a Turkish word,’ he growled. The teacher at school—half American at that—who stopped talking to me because I said that Kurdish and Turkish weren’t the same thing.

‘You’ve been brainwashed,’ We tell our denying teen.  Of course, it’s true. He has had 12 years of nationalist schooling feeding him this mentality. He’s had classes in Ataturk’s thought and National Security where’s he learned about internal enemies (his own people) and the imperative of the unity of the nation. He’s recited every day of his school life the school-kid oath that ends ‘Happy is he who calls himself a Turk.’ Everywhere he turns, on the news, in the music he listens to, the magazines he reads, is the same message. 

‘No, it’s you who’ve been brainwashed,’ he retorts. ‘You don’t have to be Kurds either, but you buy into it. I don’t have to.’

There’s the rub.  I imagine that, at 16, the idea of ‘being Kurdish’ would give anyone pause in Turkey. I imagine that as you are coming out of high school, you stand at a fork in the road.  To the right, are fairly normal, fun filled days of going to concerts with friends, drinking beer by the water, trying to feel up girls, getting sentimental over rock songs, playing video games, reckless road trips, part time jobs and midnight swims in the Bosphorous.  On the left is what he’s seen today—a people always feeling victimized, camping out in shabby tents in front of a courthouse that’s arrested hundreds of their family members, political battles that go nowhere, people shouting at demonstrations and then getting tear gassed, guerilla war, anchormen calling you a splittist and a terrorist, exile from poor villages to ghettos in the city.  What teen looking for a normal life would deliberately walk down the left fork? I remember a quote from an interview somewhere.  ‘What do you do for a living?,’ was the question. ‘I’m a Kurd for a living,’ came the answer. ’If I hadn’t been a Kurd, maybe I would have been an engineer instead.’ In some cases, identity subsumes everything.

I listen to his arguments and make the silent promise never to send my children to school here. I think of a Kurdish girl I met in Nashville.  She was about 17 and running the register at her father’s store.  I asked her where her family was from.

‘Sırnak,’ she answered.

‘Oh we have an aunt there,’ I told her.

‘You live in Turkey?’

‘Yep.’

‘I went to Istanbul once. Fun city. There was some girl there, though. I remember telling her my dad was from there and that I was Kurdish. She said, ‘but Kurds are just a myth,’ and I was like, yeah okay, whatever. Who needs you…’

I want to produce a kid who can say breezily, ‘I was like, whatever. Who needs you?’

It reminds me of a story—a friend of a friend. Her grandmother was Lakota and grew up on the Lakota Reservation when it was definitely not cool to be native—brought up in white schools, assimilated. To this day, in her seventies or eighties she will not admit to being Indian. Her granddaughter—the friend of a friend—turned down a scholarship because she knew it would hurt her grandmother to hear the word ‘Sioux’ spoken out loud, even if it did mean money for college.

THURSDAY

For the first half of the day, there is more droning through the indictment. At the lunch break, I see that little nine year old girl again. She’s wearing a red tank top and white shorts. She’s very chubby and manages to push past up security and stand at the railing of the lawyers section where she starts to blow kisses to the two women I assume are her grandmother and mother—one is much older than the other and wears a headscarf patterned with red and purple flowers. Both look alike. The little girl’s  fat ankles squeeze out of the white straps of her shoes.

We lunch in the BDP’s tent—it’s hot and full of flies. They buzz around the red slices of water melon. Our meal is had communally on the floor—a sandwich of peppers and kaşar cheese, chicken and rice, fresh tomatoes. It is very dusty today—clouds of dust roll in from parking lot on hard gusts of wind. The sound of power drills and hammers fills the air. There’s construction going on at the prison.  On TV the night before, an academic discussed the Assistant Prime Minister’s announcement that 196 new prisons would be built by 2017. 

‘This is way more than necessary to relieve overcrowding,’ he’d said. ‘It seems the government is clearly anticipating thousands of new prisoners, but who?’

After lunch, Judge Ali announces that he will now hear statements from the suspects and lawyers—‘talep’ he calls them, which means requestbut in the legal sense , is better translated as ‘plea’. ‘But only for those willing to give their pleas in Turkish,’ he adds. This is the day before the announcement of who will be released.

A husky woman with short hair stands. The mike is passed.  She explains in Turkish that she never really joined all the meetings that she was accused of joining in the indictment—and that the ones she did join were half-hearted and few and far between. There’s a collective intake of breath. They’re giving in. They’re breaking ranks. 

A man named Erdoğan Baysan rises and the mike passes to him. ‘I joined the BDP at a friend’s recommendation,’ he says. ‘But I never really attended many of the meetings.’ A frizzy haired student named İdil Aydınoğlu says that she was part of the women’s auxillary of the BDP but didn’t really attend the meetings.’ A young college girl named Büşra Önder says that she joined the BDP, yes, but couldn’t really keep up with the meetings with all her school work and her aunt getting cancer. She was Tunisian by heritage anyway. Kemal Karagöz says he was not so much a member of the BDP as he was the leader of the Alevi Association. He is Alevi first and foremost. (This is significant because it is a classic escape of many Zaza Alevis—we are not Kurds, we are Alevis) Another man, barely able to speak Turkish at all, says in a heavily Kurdish accent, ‘I would like to ask for release. Thank you.’ One by one, like dominoes. One or two, like Pervin Tunbul, feel the need to stand and make a kind of protest. ‘I don’t wish to defend myself like this,’ Tunbul says, but their voices are drowned in the pleas for release. And the odd thing is, they defend themselves by distancing themselves not from the KCK but from BDP—a legal political party in Parliament.  They have, subconsciously perhaps, accepted the court’s judgment that being part of the opposition is a crime. I can’t judge (goes the classic phrase before a withering judgement)—I have never spent 9 months in prison, what do I know? But I feel embarrassed for these people and sad—that they have been brought to this, begging for the freedom after doing nothing to deserve losing it. 

Then Büşra Ersanlı stands up. 

Her voice is quivering with emotion—rage, sorrow, despair?  It’s hard to tell. She speaks about her academic record, her years of fighting for peace and equality—her absolute insistence on discussion and dialogue and non-violence.

‘I became a member of the BDP because of a desire to make a contribution to an opposition movement that offered a solution. I don’t regret that now. I feel ashamed of the word ‘request’. I don’t ‘request’, I demand my acquittal!’

I want to stand up and applaud (but that will get us kicked out of course). The silence that follows is ominous. A lawyer stands up and says, ‘The ones who can speak Turkish have a voice. What about the more than one hundred people who cannot? I again make the request that the other defendants be allowed to make their statements in Kurdish.’

‘Request denied,’ says Judge Ali.

And so over 100 people are silenced.

FRIDAY

The last day of the trial before the summer recess. The day they make the announcements about who is released and who is not. We expect a huge crowd—over ten people are coming from our family alone, and there are 205 prisoners—so we set out at 8:00. The bus turns from the coastal road into the Silivri sunflower fields and I notice that absolutely every plant is in full bloom, a rolling sea of gold all the way down to the real sea. It is unbelievably gorgeous, and so strange that these plants have followed the progress of the trial so precisely—almost no blooms the first day, hitting full flower only on the last. 

The tanks are back, and the 21 troop transports.

We arrive over an hour early at the courthouse gate and find it already swarming with people.  At the gate itself are three lines of gendarmes in full riot gear and regular prison guards with Kalishnikovs.  More soldiers line the fence. They have blocked the doors to the building before, but never the gate.

‘There are no more visitor passes,’ the officer in charge tells us.

‘Liar!’ screams an old woman. ‘You’re lying!’

‘There’s no one in the building!’ says a portly mom.  ‘We can see that it’s empty from here!’

‘I’m sorry,’ says the commander again. ‘But each of the people inside has taken between ten and fifteen passes for members of their families, and there’s none left.’

‘Then make them give them back!’ a woman in a headscarf protests. ‘There should be a limit to how many each family can bring in! We all want a chance. We came all the way from Hakkari! Over 24 hours on the bus and we used all our money to come here. Are you telling us we should just go home!?’

The soldiers look tense. They tighten up their wall and raise their riot shields. They are fully armed with Turkey’s favorite weapons against its citizens—pepper gas and billy clubs. More people come pouring down from the BDP tents.

‘What’s going on here?’ they shout.

‘They’re lying to us! They say there are no more visitors’ passes!’

An aside here—my wife’s family often talks about random strip searches when they visit the prison, of harsh interrogations and harassment when there was nothing of the sort the previous time.  They say this is all the State’s efforts at psychological intimidation. I thought that maybe they were being a little paranoid, that maybe it was true that these random searches were, as the soldiers explained, part of the prison routine. I believed the commander when he said there were no more visitor badges because the few people we saw inside had commandeered them all.

I was naïve. For in the next second, the soldiers parted and we rushed the security desk to find over one hundred visitor passes unclaimed.

‘There are only a few,’ the officer distributing them shouted. ‘So each family can only have one! No more taking a dozen!’

So they were still sticking by that story. And this produced a mad rush of people pushing and shoving and trampling each other—who knew when they would run out or when the soldiers would decide to stop handing them out. After the madness and everyone had gotten their badge, there were still plenty left and any stragglers could pick up as many as they liked.

What the hell was all of this about? Why did they deliberately lie about something that didn’t really matter at all? And then change their minds? The ubiquitous Turkish disorder or something else?

Inside there were frisks and strip searches. I was checked more thoroughly than I ever had been—in fact, until today most of the security had been calling me ‘Enişte’ (meaning ‘Man married into the family’) and waving me through with nothing more than a ‘Good Morning.’

With about fourteen family members there that day and only four visitor passes, we were on rotations.  Four in to wave at the breaks and then four out so that a new group could come in and wave at the next break. I was with the first team in.

The previous day, the trial had ended with the lawyers making their pleas for the clients. Only three had been able to speak. The last one asked the judge for an hour’s extension.

‘Your honor, we request to continue until six o’clock today. There are two hundred and five suspects and we think at least five minutes for each one would be fair.’

In the Ergenekon trial going on just down the road, the judge had extended proceedings to 7:00 for the same reason just the other day.

Judge Ali, despite the precedent, despite the fact that he had been over half an hour late that morning, refused. And so now, this morning, we witnessed the absurd sight of over one hundred lawyers trying to speed-read their pleas before the noon deadline. I could understand nothing they said. They sounded like auctioneers. They are out of breath when they finished. I would have laughed if the consequences had not been so dire, but then, the end of this play had long been written—of that I was becoming more and more convinced. It’s not paranoia anymore, but a common sense observation.

After thirty minutes, my turn is through and I file out and hand my pass to an aunt. The rest of the day is spent waiting outside the gate in the sun. It’s over 90 degrees outside and windy. More than a hundred people squat in the dirt or in the middle of the road. The BDP’s tents are already full—there’s no shelter there.

Around 11:30, the commander abruptly announces that all women can go inside, visitor pass or no, and so they flood the courtroom—no seats, no place to stand even. The crowd pours out the doors and down the steps. The cafeteria, entrance hall, and restaurant are teeming with people waiting. We men hang outside the gate.  So the women are there at noon when the judge announces a break (again refusing extra time to finish the legal pleas).

‘The court will convene again at 3:30 or 4:00,’ he says, ‘Without any observers.’

Apparently (the girls tell me) when court adjourned and the suspects started to file out, the audience had once again burst into applause. This was their slap on the hand.

The heat was unbearable. I went with an uncle to a van parked outside the tents where we could at least sit in the shade. A pretty young woman jumped in with us, holding a cell phone.

‘Can I use your van to make a call?’ she asked after sitting down.

‘Sure.’

‘I’m from the IMC news team. I just need to call in an update on the story.’

It turns out that the IMC news channel has a few journalists among the suspects as well.

‘The government doesn’t like us very much,’ the woman explains. No wonder—they’re the best news channel in the country.

Eventually, Delal sends for me with a visitor’s pass (It’s my turn again) and I go to the courthouse and find her in a cafeteria packed with people. There’s nowhere to sit and barely anywhere to stand. People have been taking off their visitor cards, passing them through the fence to those without them, and then repeating the process until the whole place was crammed fuller than before.

3:30 came and went without any sign from Judge Ali. Delal and I decided to go out for some fresh air. We were crossing through the hall when suddenly the doors to the courtroom burst open and reporters leapt through the crowd and ran through the security check (knocking over tables) to get to their news vans. The crowd thronged toward the doors to see what was going on.

‘They’ve been released!’ Someone shouts.

The whole room erupts into an excited panic. Who’s been released?  I catch sight of that little chubby girl from the day before. She’s sobbing and holding onto a woman’s waist as if she might sink. Other  people are collapsing into their chairs, overcome with tears. Some are hugging each other.

16 people have been released on bond including Büşra Ersanlı, Zekiye Ayık (the old woman I spoke about in an earlier blog) and several of the people who had broken ranks yesterday and made pleas in Turkish. And though Mamoste was on trial for the same crime as Büşra Ersanlı, he was not among those let go.  We had not expected him to be. But still many of the family were crushed.  Clearly, some of us had hoped.

The trial will continue on October 1^st. At first they told us that all the prisoners would be moved back to their original prisons—in our case, Kandıra—but now it looks like they’re staying in Silivri till the trial resumes. New security measures have been put into place that we’ve never had to deal with before—more harassment--the prisoners are being searched before every visit, and so far they’ve boycotted these visits in protest.  This week the trial of the KCK lawyers began in Istanbul--the lawyers of many of the people at Mamoste’s trial—in fact, many of the defense team went straight to their own case from the Silivri courthouse. They’re defending themselves. Meanwhile Erdoğan’s government continues to arrest people in the KCK case.  An academic on TV the other night estimated that over 11,000 people were now in jail and more on the way.

As for us, we are taking a break from all this. My next entry will hopefully have nothing to do with politics and will be something about music and travel in the Appalachians.