10/10/2015 Ankara. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

Whatever I write will fail. But something has to be written, though the words have all been gutted. People say “massacre”, “murderer”, “barbarous”, “genocide”, “liar”, but we have been using those words for years, and they have exhausted their sting. So what’s left? Something hurts and we need something besides rhetoric and ideology to answer it.

Today, I was coming off the ferry in Kadıköy. It was windy on the wharf. There were the usual gypsy flower sellers, the simit stands, the Black Sea band by the water. Some schoolgirls were tossing bread to gulls and terns flying by the sea. A melancholy, beautiful blue sky reflected in the waves. Near the highway there was an AKP election tent. A group of men stood in front, holding pamphlets no one was taking. One disheveled, bearded man handed some brochures to a boy I assumed was his son. I stopped.

“Monsters,” I said aloud, reflexively. “Killers.” And the whole world seemed to go dark with hate.

The whole afternoon had changed.

Everything has changed.

I’ve never kept an enemy. When I think about it now, I’ve never truly hated anyone, not for very long and not for real, but for the past week a storm of violent thoughts has raged in my head, and they profoundly disturb me. Worse, I don’t really want them to go away.

Last week, over one hundred innocent people were blown to shreds in a bomb attack in the capital of Ankara. More have died since and countless others are lain up in the hospital. The victims were students and middle-aged mothers and grandfathers. There were two young newly weds and an eighty year old woman, one of Turkey’s “Saturday Mothers” who for years has protested the State’s disappearing of her son. They were all gathered for a peace march, to protest the renewed fighting between the Turkish Army and the PKK. Their bodies were literally blown apart, so that even days after the attack chunks of meat are still being found in the area around Ankara’s train station.

The people of the AKP party, the people I now stare at on this wharf, have been celebrating these murders.

A glance at the week’s news.

On Sunday, pop star Tuğba Ekinci tweets to President Erdoğan in response to the murders, “We should remake the East, take the clean people and put them in government housing and then bomb the rest to oblivion.”

On Wednesday night, in Konya, at a soccer game between Iceland and Turkey, the two teams stand on the field for a moment of silence to mourn the dead. The Turkish fans jeer and boo them. Some shout Allahu Akbar.

On Friday, former President Gül tweets, "If we cannot even express our sympathy, how can we still claim we will live together?" After the bombings, he had called HDP co-chairman Selahattin Demirtaş to express condolences and had been reprimanded by the AKP.

A media ban is issued. No one is allowed to report on the investigation on the bombing. Lawyers for the victims are banned from accessing their files. This does not apply to the government papers, who report daily on the results of the investigation. ISIS was working with the PKK, they say. The Kurds bombed themselves to get votes, they say. And then because these absurdities are the official news, foreign agencies pick them up and introduce their obscene assertions with phrases like “The Turkish press has determined…” “The Prime Minister’s Office says…”

You can only stand aghast at the way such malignant disinformation becomes news. It’s an abomination, a deliberate polluting of the memory of those who died.

The trouble is the foreign press can’t read the secret codes.

Days before the bombing, a mafia boss named Sedat Peker led a rally in Erdoğan’s hometown in Rize. He said to the maddened crowd, “We will make all of their blood flow like a flood!” On Thursday, he was awarded two police escorts by the state security bureau to guide him around—presumably to protect him from revenge attacks against those who “misconstrue” him as responsible. This is one of those things that someone not neck-deep in recent Turkish history would never get the significance of. This man worked with the state in the nineties—implicated in murder, racketeering, everything you can think of. He is what’s called a Turanist, a Turk who believes that the destiny of Turkey is to seize all the land belonging to Turks from Xinjiang to Anatolia and transform it into Lebensraum for the master race. People know, but have never proven, that he was involved in the Deep State assassinations of the 90s. People suspect, with good reason, the hand of the Deep State in this bombing, too. No one assigned an escort to Hrant Dink when he received direct assassination threats, and he was shot in front of his own office in a case that is still ongoing and implicates many government officials. And what does a mafia boss who controls a crime organization need with someone else’s security anyway? The assignment of state protection is a message to the country that most foreigners, and certainly the press wouldn’t understand. A sly wink.

And there are so many such messages.

Articles in Turkish newspapers reveal the names of the bombers. They had been tracked and bugged and followed by police for two years, taken into custody but not arrested because, quote, “there was not enough evidence against them,” despite the fact that their ISIS cell, the "Weavers" (Dokumacılar) had been infiltrated for months. The press calls this a "security lapse". Yet the same papers reported the arrest of three foreigners aid workers, helping Syrian refugees at the Bulgarian border—taken in for spying, working with Israel, and various other made up comic book crimes. And what about the arrests of thousands of Kurdish politicians in 2011 based on thousands of pages of phone taps? Or the arrest of people PROTESTING THE ANKARA MASSACRE? The message? Anyone living in Turkey knows that arrests are never made on the basis of real evidence. The security net, when they want it to be, is absolute. Letting these murderers roam free is a political choice, a chess move.

In Forbes, an article comes out that gives a paragraph to one of the forbidden eye-witness reports. A man was trying to help a woman who was bleeding to death. A cop yanked him off of her. “Don’t help them! They’re terrorists.” Others report that the police formed a line that prevented the crowd from escaping after the first bomb went off. In today’s paper, you read of a doctor massaging a man’s heart and being tear gassed by riot police who ran through the crowd of bleeding and dying beating and gassing whomever they found.  

One of these injured is my wife’s friend Gülşen. She is a young woman in her early thirties, barely five feet tall.  She lies in the hospital with a wound in her leg, infected because it is filled with bits of bone from other people. Because of the infection, she has been kept in isolation. She had assumed that the doctors were lying to her. That the wound wasn’t all that serious but that all her friends were dead and they were trying to protect her from this knowledge. For days, she waited for the “truth” that she was the only one left alive.

On Sunday, we went to the funeral of Kübra Meltem Mollaoğlu, a woman who worked at the Üsküdar HDP office with my wife. As the imam spoke prayers over the coffin, her twenty something daughter wailed and wailed, MOM! MOM! Something in the crowd broke when the pall-bearers began to carry it to the hearse. “MURDERER ERDOĞAN” they shouted. The men in the woman’s family tried to shush them. “Not here!” they hissed. Did they not approve of the chant or of the politicizing of the funeral? There were riot cops all along the street and a police helicopter overhead, monitoring the burial of this woman who chose to work for a cause that for the first time, offered something besides strongmen and race hate. Would the police attack? Would they let someone else attack? What was the point? What could these boys in their riot helmets be thinking?

When I consider these cops and that boy in the AKP tent, when I think of the fans in Konya jeering the moment of silence or that awful pop star. When I see the names of the police who gassed the dying in Ankara or think of the faces of the young men behind the helmets at the funeral, I want to see them suffer. I want them to go into prison and die under the torture that their kind used for years in Turkey’s prisons. And then I want the old religion to be right. I want to see their souls cast into the pit. I want to see them burn. I want to stand on the edge of the Pit with Azrael and hear them scream.

What ugliness they have awakened in my soul! In all of our souls. And I have no resistance any more, I don’t want to mediate, I don’t want to compromise or sit at a table and discuss our opposing views. This isn’t polarization anymore. This is a moral choice, to stand with monsters or against them. And I know how awful that sounds, how dehumanizing and demonizing, and what this government and the racism has done to me results in what I am now—someone sick with vengeance, who wants to feel this way, who is comforted by nothing else.

And if I feel that way, a newbie on the outskirts, what must countless others feel? For those still shouting peace I feel nothing but awe. There was a Kurdish woman whose video went viral on Twitter after the killings. She shouted, “We will have peace. Kill us, murderer us, butcher us. We will still have peace!”

I’m not that good anymore. If I ever was.

Gezi Parks Everywhere or How I Learned to Love the Flag

 

The Turkish flag at a march for a Kurdish victim

                ‘I’m so excited and nervous,’ the middle-aged Turkish woman said into the microphone. ‘I can barely speak. This night, we made history.’

                This was at Yoğurtcu (Yogurt Maker’s) Park two nights ago in Kadıköy. That day, in the Kurdish region of Lice (pronounced lee-jay), police had opened fire on a group of people protesting the rebuilding of a soldiers outpost and killed one eighteen-year old boy, seriously wounding others. In a spontaneous outburst of sympathy and outrage, the crowd at the ‘people’s forum’ in Yoğurtcu park marched through the city chanting ‘Resist Lice! Kadikoy is with you!’ For the first time in the country’s history, white Turks carrying Atatürk flags protested together with Kurds about soldiers killing civilians in the East. The old tradition of calling them all ‘terrorists’ seem to have abruptly died. An ancient wall had been torn down in an instant. Now everyone, Kemalist and Kurd alike were chanting Kurdish slogans. ‘Biji biratiye geran!’ Long live the brotherhood of the people!

The march for Medeni Yıldırım (on right) and others killed during the course of the Protests)

                ‘In 1993 the region of Lice was completely razed,’ the woman went on. ‘I went there in 1996 and saw what was left. No Turk ever saw what happened there, and now we all see. We all see clearly. I am so proud of Kadıköy tonight.’

                One by one, after the march, people came up on the stage at the park’s ‘forum of the people’ and spoke--both Kurd and Turk. It was as if they were pouring out emotions and memories they had stored up their whole lives.

                ‘I met a woman from the East who lost all six of her children. Some to the guerillas in the mountain, some to the military, some to demonstrations like this where police used real bullets and not rubber ones. Six children! Imagine! She was not covered on the news. And now here we are standing up against the state murder of the boy in Lice. Things have changed.’

The diversity of the crowds-LGBT in back, woman in traditional Kurdish clothes in the front, out of frame to the left, nationalists with red flags.

 

                Another Turk got up and spoke about all the people who had lived on this land—Turks, Kurds, Armenians, Greeks. ‘So many were driven away, but we all used to be together here.’ He seemed on the verge of tears. An older Jewish man, a professor of philosophy, got up and read a poem he had written a long time ago about brotherhood. And all the while there were people in the crowd waving the Turkish flag, waving it after the boy spoke entirely in Kurdish, praising the crowd’s solidarity, waved it after the woman cried out that the Kurds had been ignored too long, waved it as the man reminded the crowd of the government’s bombing of 34 Kurdish civilians at Robowski, waved it as the shy nineteen year old girl got up and read nervously from a paper that her eyes had been opened today. The Kurds around me were shocked-they had never seen that crescent moon and star banner lifted in their support.

                Similar scenes were happening all over the country in all the park forums—in Beşiktaş, in Cihangir, in Kugulu in Ankara. With a violent death, the government had seemingly succeeded in doing what every government had failed to do for a century—unified nationalist Turks and political Kurds.

                The park forums popped up after Gezi Park was cleared and sterilized in the police assault of June 15th. It began as a movement to ‘reclaim our public space’ and has ended up becoming the transplanted spirit of the Gezi protest. In Yoğurtçu in Kadıköy—the Revolution Market has resurfaced, distributing free tea, cookies, pastries and water. The Free Library is back and even a piece of the old Revolution Museum—pictures and paintings hang from clothes lines strung up between trees. People camp there over night and every evening around 9:00, thousands gather for the ‘park forum’ where one by one people take the stage and discuss the agenda of the night. Tonight’s topic was the killing in Lice and the new, fragile solidarity, but the previous night they had been discussing the future of the movement.

At the park forum in Üsküdar

                ‘Please keep in mind,’ one young lawyer told the crowd. ‘We are not Occupy Wall Street. This is not a class war. We are united here against intolerance and police brutality.’

                And indeed, he pointed out an important difference between the American movement and the Turkish one. Here, for the first time, people are standing up before others and speaking their minds without fear-a privelege Americans can take for granted. Before Gezi, this would have been unthinkable. You could have been arrested, prosecuted, or at the very least shouted down by a hysterical crowd. Now nothing was taboo. A man spoke about the LGBT movement, how they were in the forefront of the protests. Everyone cheered, Turkish flags were waved.

Forum participants waving their hands instead of applauding (copied from Occupy) so as not to anger neighbors with noice--notice the covered lady in white in the back. It's not all secularists, kids

The Park Forum in Abbasağa Park in Beşiktaş

 

                These forums are taking place all over the country—at last count (the number seems to always be increasing) there were over 87 parks hosting park forums all over Western Turkey (Skim down to Other Parks and Public Forums in the link). Some are small—we went to the one in Üsküdar the other night and found a dedicated, diverse crowd of about 100 people—not a bad number for a neighborhood that is the heart, in Istanbul, of government support. They seemed to be focusing on what the movement could do next. One after the other, people came up and stressed that the problem was not with Erdoğan alone, but with the entire system that had paved the way for one dictator after the other. An old covered woman cheered. Passers-by out walking their dogs stopped, listened, and stayed.

Man Listening to Forum in Beşiktaş--he is at a statue holding a copy of the 1961 Turkish Constitution

 

                Many are large, with tens of thousands, like the one in Abbasağa Park in the neighborhood of Beşiktaş. There, in an amphitheater, people discussed the merits of trying to enter parliament. Some were for finding independent candidates of their own (‘We can do what the BDP did!) recommended one Turkish housewife, referring to the coalition party the Kurds formed with independents like Sırrı Süreyya Önder. A male college student said that they should stay away from the official paths of politics because the system itself was rotten.

                Every Saturday, the groups in Istanbul gather and march on Taksim Square. Yesterday (June 29th) there was a sit in on İstiklal Avenue and Taksim Square in memory of Medeni Yıldırım, the boy murdered in Lice. It was the same scene as the night before—Turkish flags and nationalists marching side by side with Kurds chanting in Kurdish, in the back ground the rainbow flag of the LGBT. The sit-in was held—tens of thousands of us filled the streets surrounded by riot police. I will never forget the two laughing Saudi woman in black burkhas cheering for us and giving us the peace sign. At about 8:30, the crowd started to disperse. Most everyone was heading toward the parks. We hopped a subway with everyone else and headed to Kadıköy where we learned that, almost right after we left, police had attacked the dispersing crowd. More tear gas and rubber bullets and dozens of arrests.

Our sign--Bingol Resist! For the 16 year old girl who was raped by the soldiers in Bingol Province. The soldiers were released.

 

                Today is the Gay Pride parade. A huge turnout is expected—the Gezi movement has come out in strong support of the LGBT community here. Last week the crowds at the Trans Pride Parade were enormous.

A sign at Yoğurtcu--(The State) Will Answer to the People for the Murders' The park forum was canceled because most of the crowd was down in Taksim getting gassed--again.

             (The video shows a protest song in the Square yesterday--'Zıpla, Zıpla, Zıplamayan Tayyiptir' or 'Hop! Hop! If you don't hop, you're Tayyip)

Riot cops blocking passage to the Independence Monument

   Things are changing—but Erdoğan’s government has issued an ultimatum to Twitter (open a branch under Turkish control or we will get rid of you altogether) and started an investigation into bank accounts with ‘suspicious foreign links.’ HuseynÇelik, the AKP’s public spokesman, blames the Lice killing and protests on the same ‘outside forces’ that they blame everything else for. Park forums outside of Istanbul have been attacked by police. It’s a deeply disturbing uncertain time.  

 

The crowd marching from Galatasaray High School with pictures of the casualties of the protests

The ambulance that was really an undercover police vehicle--it kept turning on its sirens and circling the park only to reappear again and do the same thing. It would cut a path through the crowd and then the police would march down the opened path.

The view of the sit in from the front of Burger King

Says 'Justice is on vacation, the killers are in charge'

The press on the roof of Burger King with protective helmets in case gas canisters should rain down and crack their skulls

An old couple slow dance in Yogurtcu Park at the Fenerbahce Fans 'Revolution Cafe'--the music is accordion

The white flag of the 'Taksim Solidarity' crowd

The Saudi ladies cheering us on, sorry about the picture--couldn't avoid the wires.

 

 

The Carnation March on Taksim--3 Pictures That Speak A Million Words

      

          Three different pictures from last night's Carnation March seem to sum up the whole situation here in Turkey at the moment. I don't have actual photographs of them--sorry--but the description seems more telling anyway. Please bear with me.

1

We passed by Gezi Park earlier in the afternoon. The place is pristine nowadays. A herculean effort has been made by someone to beautify the place—new trees fill the park—as a Floridian, the white blossoms of the magnolias stuck out. Wide sidewalks have been laid and lined with brand new benches. Roses bushes and neatly trimmed flower beds festoon the green lawns—color exploding out of every corner. The government has accomplished in one week what no one could do for decades—turn this place into a pedestrian paradise. This Gezi Park has never existed. No space anywhere in Turkey is this clean. The side of the park that faces Taksim Square is lined with oleanders blooming a cheerful cotton candy pink. But it also has a line of police sitting in lawn chairs guarding the entrance behind police tape. They surround the entire perimeter of the park—relaxing in the grass, their heads propped up on their helmets. Billy clubs and riot shields nearby. This fantasy pedestrian park is completely empty of pedestrians. It is not only clean, it is sterile. The police hover like the angels with flaming swords guarding Paradise—it is right here in front of you, everything that you demanded, in fact, we've made it better than before--but you will never touch it again.

Channel NTV reported, ‘Gezi Park has been opened to the public! Police deny entrance.’

I stood at the steps of the park for the longest time staring past the drowsy cops into the bright, open, and empty greenery of the park. There was something deeply unsettling about the picture. Last week the park was overflowing with life and joy and optimism—with an atmosphere that was more than a festival, more than a communal expression of hope, more than anything I have ever witnessed. And now it was like a Moghul tomb, a place for the dead and forgotten, or no, more like one of the grand North Korean squares that remain ominously empty unless the government orchestrates a rally to force people to fill it. It was pretend public space—a grotesque violation of freedom dressed up to look pretty.  A beautiful menace.

Last night, a march on Taksim was organized to leave carnations in Gezi Park to commemorate the four people who have lost their lives in the recent protest—including one policeman. Tens of thousands gathered on the square and because there were too many people to orderly leave flowers anywhere, people threw them forward into the crowd toward a place where a press conference was being held. The sky filled with spinning blossoms of red and pink and white. The usual people were there--an old couple, a man with long hair and shoulder tattoos, a couple of shirtless football fanboys on each other's shoulders, couples, groups of girls in tank tops, middle aged housewives and fathers with sunglasses on their faces and kids on their shoulders. The crowd shouted the usual slogans. ‘Hukumet İstifa’ (Resign government!). Faşizme karşı omuz omuza (Shoulder to shoulder against Fascism) and our favorite, the nonsensical Zıpla zıpla, zıplamayan Tayyip! (Hop! Hop! If you don’t hope you’re a Tayyıp!!’--which is accompanied by everyone jumping merrily up and down). Instead of party flags everyone (except for a few diehard Atatürkçüs) carried neutral white flags that read ‘Taksim Solidarity’. About an hour after the crowd gathered—hundreds of riot cops and two or three TOMA tanks appeared at the top of the steps that led to Gezi. A small group of people marched up toward them with flowers—determined to lay them in the park. We expected no ‘intervention’ that night. The Istanbul mayor had bragged that ‘we won’t even add a bus stop without public approval!’ It seemed the mood of the government if not conciliatory, was at least ‘Let’s lay low a bit.’

I imagine there were insults thrown at the police—this was a march after 21 days of constant police attacks throughout the country. Arrests have started. Some people have disappeared. Hundreds have been hurt. The government is blaming Jews and foreign conspiracies and riling up its followers with outlandish stories of attacks on mosques. The commissioner to the EU Egemen Bağış is arrogant enough to issue threats to Angela Merkel for question police tactics--'People who try to mix in Turkey's affairs,' he said of her, 'Do not meet an auspicious end.' People are desperate--the protests can't just fade away as if nothing was wrong. I think in part people wanted something to happen tonight, something to show to the cameras of the international press that waited on the roof of the Burger King that things had not gone back to normal, that the same government that attacked its own citizens was still in place and eager to attack again.

Flowers were offered. In answer, a batallion of police broke through the crowd at the steps and marched into the square—people scattered in a panic. A TOMA tank appeared pointing its water cannon at random groups. Everyone had seen on the news how police added liquid pepper spray to the tanks, and how that spray caused severe burns. The square emptied--it looked like a stampede—and then the water cannons fired. I was hit in the leg—there was a slight burning sensation in my nose. I think they added gas but not much—and we dashed into the Ottoman Palace hotel. This is where I saw the second picture that symbolizes this whole movement.

2

In the doors of the hotel, a Saudi woman in black was screaming hysterically at the sight of the TOMA tank coming down the road. She had a chubby little boy in front of her who was crying and looking all around him as if for a way out of the panicked people pressing in on them from the outside. Inside another Saudi woman and a little girl were watching the first woman and sobbing. Someone tried to pull the first woman inside—the doorman I guess—and the woman fought him. ‘Get away from me!’ she shouted in English. ‘Get away from me!’ A crowd managed to pull her back into the lobby and sit her on a couch, and there, the four Saudi tourists gave full into panic, shouting and sobbing and staring fearfully out at the streets. ‘My son is out there!’ the woman started screaming. ‘What’s wrong with you people? I lost my son out there!’ A group of protesters taking shelter from the water cannons tried to calm her. Others went out to look for her little boy. The hotel doorman seemed irritated. ‘Would you please calm down! You’re making a scene.’

It wasn’t that he was cold or unfeeling I think. But we were all so used to these scenes by now. Nothing struck any of us as all that out of the ordinary. The first question was 'why was she screaming?' The second question was 'Why weren't we?' This panicking Saudi family had the normal reaction—the shrieks and screams and tears were far more reasonable than our urgings for her to calm down.

The boy was found—he was with his father. They came in and joined the women and after hugging each other tightly for a second they went back out into the street—their hotel was elsewhere it seemed. We asked the woman if they had to go—it could be dangerous outside. She started to cry, ‘I don’t know!’ And she went out anyway.

Clashes went back and forth all night. While we sheltered in the hotel, a gas attack came up from the direction of Istiklal Avenue and another wave of people ran into the hotel. The gas was trapped in there, however, and pretty soon we were all choking, our eyes red. We ran outside for the relatively fresh air. By this time, my wife and I just wanted to go home. Line upon line of police blocked every exit to the park. The same ambulance kept circling the square—it went by six times--sirens blaring as if it carried a patient. Later , according to a Twitter report, 12 police were seen climbing out of the back. There were undercover cops everywhere. One boy in a yellow ‘Qatar’ jersey sheltered in the lobby of the hotel we were at. An undercover cop in a black hat was yelling at him. ‘Look at you! You were supposed to wear a Fenerbahce jersey! Take it off and turn it inside out!’ ‘But why?’ the boy protested. ‘If I walk around with a shirt inside out, I’ll stick out even more!’ ‘Do it because I said do it!’ the policeman barked. ‘And wear your undershirt over it!’ ‘They’ll know me,’ the boy said, but did as he was commanded and went out into the streets with an inside-out Qatar journey worn beneath his undershirt. Taxi drivers waited calmly in their cabs as tanks chased protesters and gas plumes billowed around them. Cops, too? Dozens of undercovers reportedly pose as cabbies.

The crowd's chants changed.

'Police, don't betray the people!' they cried
'Don't throw stones!'

At some point, during one of the gas attacks, an aging, moping street dog loped into the hotel and cowered just behind the sliding glass doors. No one chased it out. The doorman called it over away from the door and the brunt of the gas and let it stay inside until the air cleared and the crowd went out again. The dog reluctantly followed them with an air of quiet resignation. I’ve seen pictures of the horrible effects of the gas on street animals. Kittens blinded, cats and dogs choked to death, dead birds.

The police filled the side streets. They were arresting people, according to rumors on the street. Istiklal Avenue—the main shopping artery—was filled with gas a mile down toward Tünel. Police were using rubber bullets again—I saw a rifle in one young officer’s hands. We hesitated going home—not wanting to get rounded up or stuck in a cloud of CS. Then we discovered, strangely, that the metro was still open—and made for the entrance. We reached home without incident--you would never know from the rest of the city the chaos at Taksim.

 

3

The final picture I would like to share is one that I wrote about in an entry a week or two ago, but one that keeps coming to mind again and again. A journalist friend said to me today that ‘As crazy as this is, this is still a first world police intervention, not a third world one.’ There were no massacres or disappearances or deliberate murderers. For the most part, no one was using real bullets. ‘But the third world part,’ I said. ‘The really scary part is not necessarily all this police violence, but the arrests that follow. People are starting to disappear into the jails in successive waves—and we know that with all the falsified evidence, the kangaroo courts, the fanatical judges and secret witnesses that they will never come out. Hundreds of people to disappear into Turkish prisons.’

Remember, please, the new courtroom I saw in Silivri during my father-in-law’s trial. In the old courtroom, there were about 80 seats for the press to the right of the prosecutor’s podium. Now the seats for the press are in the back corners, slightly lower than the rest. About 45 seats have been added for defendants—there were already over 200 in the old one. In the old courtroom there were about 150 seats for defense lawyers to the left of the judge—a huge number yes, but in the new courtroom, on each side of the judge are 180 seats for defense lawyers. A total of 360 seats!  This is a symbol of the future as the AKP would have it—gigantic mass trials, with the press given a symbolic but marginal place in the back, out of the way and without dignity. This is the fate awaiting all the doctors and lawyers rounded up by the police for helping protesters (in the government’s increasingly fanatical minds—terrorists helping the ‘interest lobbies’ and ‘dark foreign powers of infidels. Even now the PM is giving a speech in Samsun where he rants at a crowd of true believers about the heathens who go into mosques with shoes and get drunk and attack head scarf women. 'One of our prayers' he shouts. 'Can defeat all of them.)

A sketch I made of the courtroom--cameras are forbidden--three judges up front, the prosecutor (savcı) to the right.

3 defining pictures. A triptych of the State to come. The sterile, empty, newly planted park; the panicking Muslim tourists and jaded locals; the restructured courtroom. We will do our best to look just to the outside, mocking you in the process, and rending all justice forever out of reach of those who oppose us. We will accustom you to this treatment so that you find it normal. You will forget what you are entitled to. And in the end, we will judge you. You will come to our courtrooms and we will lie about you and no one will question us.

And you will never leave.

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.

 

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