Day 6-7 The KCK Show Trials

Atticus would have been flummaxed

July 9th and 10th (previous days are in earlier entries)

I think I am getting a taste of what it must have been like to sit in a courtroom in the Old South. The overwhelming sense of unfairness, the verdict a foregone conclusion because of race, the whole weight of a century’s old benighted system that just won’t die. The evidence laughable to anyone looking in from the outside.

From Thursday afternoon onward, the 2400 page KCK indictment is read aloud. And I mean that in the passive—no one particularly important (like the prosecutor who wrote it) reads the indictment. The court pulled in two TV anchormen to take turns at the mammoth text—they go until they give out, voices hoarse, at which point the other takes up the task. It’s sometimes comical—like when they read through the phone conversations in their sports announcers’ voices, playing both parts at the same time with the same dry monotone. Most people snooze or knit or read a book—the woman down the aisle from me is engrossed in the Turkish version of the latest Stephanie Meiers novel.

But occasionally one of the defense lawyers, our would-be Atticus Finches, stands up to lodge formal objections against the nature of the indictment itself.  Essentially, their argument is this:  It violates all known and acceptable criteria for evidence and consists mostly of hearsay, speculation, and anonymous accusations.

Here are some examples of the problems:

Number 1: It’s often gibberish—passages cited as evidence of terrorist activity are so filled with parenthetical (Incomprehensible)s that they are nonsense.  For instance….

‘(Incomprehensible) Now, after the woman’s natural community was brought down...(incomprehensible) and while there the issue at hand was the destruction of woman, society, and nature, I think that we need to consider that, together with these things, and actually, I mean, in fact, the correct place…(incomprehensible) in other words, it’s not just the fall of woman, the basis of it is also the whole fall of society and nature.’

Number 2: The wild guesses of informants are often taken as fact. Here’s this tidbit from Delil Botan Kahraman who is describing his first visit to the BDP academy in Ümraniye and his first encounter with Mamoste, Kemal Seven.

‘The rooms used for academic purposes at the building were normal. There were several photographs on the bulletin boards. Though I didn’t know these people personally, I guessed that they were members of a terrorist group, because they wore the sort of clothes that terrorists wear.’

One of these photographs he’s referring to is of Musa Anter, the Kurdish journalist murdered by the Turkish government in the 90s. I have no idea what he means by ‘terrorist clothes’ unless it is the traditional Kurdish shalvar and keffiyeh.  The absurd thing is that this statement is taken at face value. Imagine being dragged into court because your neighbor thought that you had pictures of people with the kind of clothes rapists wear, and that this was considered hard evidence.

Number 3:  Guilt by association? This term is not even accurate. Guilt by virtue of being present in the room while the accusations are read aloud is the correct description.  Pages 69 through 167 of the indictment are devoted to a play-by-play of the foundation of the KCK and its evolution through time and includes the organizations charter article by article. No names of the suspects appear in any of this. Then from page 168 to 186, the indictment lists internet sites that they believe have terrorist propaganda—again with not one suspect’s name appearing anywhere.  The justification for 127 pages of dry history lesson is this (from page 186)

‘The sites under discussion can be summarized as follows—they made propaganda for the PKK and it’s leader Abdullah Öcalan, they praised splittists and divisive terrorist activities, and by abetting the spread of detailed news of their activities to the masses and the public and of publishing the notes of the contents of Öcalan’s meetings with his lawyers as instructions for the organization, presented the convict Abdullah Öcalan as someone to be addressed as a head of state. By using the model of Democratic Confederalism to compromise the unitary structure of Turkey, they aim to break off parts of the countries East and Southeast and subsume it into a structure known as Kurdistan. This data is not the civil initiative of the KCK and DTK but merely a different extension of a terrorist organization and the details and matters presented within the scope of this indictment are not assertions but facts.’

I like that bit at the end—almost like a protesting child anticipating that no one is going to believe his wild story. ‘It’s not just assertions but facts! I swear!’ As if just saying so makes that the case—an argument you would expect from a ten year old but not a court of law.

This is essentially like me sitting you in a courtroom and reading an entry from a murderer’s diary and then saying you were the murderer because I read it with you present.

Number 4-the informants

Only when you reach the government’s hand-picked informants do you start seeing the names of any actual suspects, and while I can only speculate, some of the language of these ordinary people sounds too much like legalese for them to be word by word transcriptions (and in light of the Balyoz case, I simply assume them to be made up). Informants describe colleagues as ‘şahıs’, a police term for ‘individual’ or ‘personage’, for example.

Here’s a little sampling rendered in English:

First Witness Haydar’s statement given (21.04.2010)

For a long time I have worked in the terrorist organization, the PKK/KONGRA-GEL, as the person responsible for the DYG township and implemented its operations at various levels of the BDP organization. In particular, I wish to explain what I know in regard to the operations and activities in Istanbul by the KCK during the period I implemented these operations and activities.

Number 5 Another problem is the complete lack of objectivity—a presumed given in a court of law.

On page 72, when it’s trying to explain the bewildering number of acronyms (KKK, PKK, KCK, KONGRA-GEL) the indictment says,

‘The terrorist operations perpetrated by the terrorist organization the PKK for more than 30 years has hit dead ends from time to time and they have sought a way out. One of these methods is name changed by which they strive to hide their ugly face with camouflage.’

Number 6--And then there’s the good old fashioned circumstantial evidence (itself based on an informant’s questionable testimony) Where supporting the party of someone present in the same area as suspicious items that you have no idea how got there is considered admissible evidence of your terrorist activities.  Here is the first ‘Action’ described by informant Erkan Yanıt,

ACTION 1

On 24.05.2009 at 17:00, in Çağlayan Square, in Şisli, in an outdoor meeting of the DTP (predecessor to the BDP) called ‘Don’t Silence the DTP, Silence the Guns!’, in a clump of bushes to the right of the number 9 security check point, were found 20 flag staffs, 2 posters of Öcalan, 1 flag of a so-called terrorist organization, one flag belonging to the youth group of a so-called terrorist organization, 5 small knitting needles, 10 switch blades, 1 exacto knife, and one screw driver. It was not determined who left these items. Certain leaders of the Esenler branch of the DTP were announced…The DTP representative Sebahat Tuncel also joined.

No one knows how those items got there (hell, the police might have planted them!) but the future BDP parliamentarian Sebahat Tuncel was in the vicinity and they suspects in the courtroom support the BDP so they must be terrorists!

Back to inconsistency in tone and content.  Erkan Yanıt’s testimony, for example, starts off rather ordinarily, a young man explaining how his family came to Istanbul and got caught up in the activities of the BDP’s predecessor, the DTP.

“My older brother is Erol Yanıt and we came together from our fillage in Mardin to work in Istanbul. In the Mimar Sinan neighborhood of Esenler I took up residence and after working in a textile factory in Bayrampaşa for 1.5 years, I took a job at the Tadım Köfte restaurant.’’

He goes on to give very detailed accounts of appointments to the field by ‘the terrorist organization’ and despite being an uneducated villager from Mardin, continues later in a diction and tone that sound suspiciously like the prosecutor himself (from page 551)--“They organized the distribution of the so-called flag which symbolizes the Confederalism of the PKK/KONGRA GEL terrorist organization and the posters of Abdullah Öcalan. These posters and so-called flags came to this personage and other young personages from the youth of the DYG received materials from this personage.’

That phrase ‘so-called’ is a favorite of the Turkish government when describing almost anything they don’t like and not the day to day language of a waiter from a village in Mardin.

The defense team objected, and to all of the objections, the prosecutor, through his conduit Judge Ali answered with the same ‘Reddedildi’. (Rejected) (We hear this phrase so much that several of us in the audience develop quite good imitations of the squeaky Judge Ali delivering it).

Now if you sat through all that about the indictment, here is a more human switch—the only time the courtroom came to life during this monotonous reading was at the breaks when the prisoners filed in and out. This was the time when I saw the tragedy of all this most clearly—that wall of hopeful faces that rushed to the back row of the suspects’ section searching our faces for friends and loved ones. There was a big bosomed woman with a short haircut; she looked like she belonged in a commercial for frozen pizza playing an Italian grandma. There was the frizzy haired girl student and the skinny old man who wore a sky-blue suit way too big for him. There was Mamoste himself, sixty years old and adjusting his bifocals so as to see us better, and then the mother daughter team who blew kisses at a nine year old chubby girl to my left who kept calling out ‘Grandma! Grandma!’. There was the skinny waif of a boy in a rock and roll T-shirt and the moustachioed Kurd who spoke no Turkish and understood nothing of what was going on. There was Ragip Zarakolu, who looked like a bushy haired guru from an Ashram and the old lady with her hair pulled back in a tight bun, and the elegant professor Büşra Ersanlı.  Everyone called out ‘Hello!’  ‘How is everything at home?’ ‘Are you coming tomorrow?’  For me, the most compelling of all was the face of family friend Zekiye Ayık, a woman with long silver hair and big brown eyes who wore an elegant brown scarf loosely over the back of her head. She has been in and out of the hospital for heart trouble. She had trouble seeing, and though we called her name over and over, she could not quite make out who was in that crowd waving at her. ‘We get our morale from your visits,’ Mamoste had said. ‘When we see you in the audience supporting us, we know that everything has not been in vain.’ And yet Zekiye could not see who was in the audience supporting her. Her slightly bewildered smile as she waved first too far to the right of us, then too far to the left haunts me. This is the face of a terrorist for the Turkish government.

This is the witch hunt, this is the justice system in the South before the Civil Rights movement. 

While the reading of the indictment slowly progressed (100 pages a day on average—meaning at least 20 more days to go), some events on the outside promised to affect things on the inside. The first was the announcement by the Turkish government of changes in the judicial code. One change abolished the special authority courts, one of which we were attending.  (Replacing them with Regional Courts in the South East with Special Authority to Handle Terrorist Cases—the difference?  Who knows?) This had the absurd effect of making us present at something that technically didn’t exist.  At one point, a lawyer lodged a protest, saying, ‘We don’t even know if you will exist next week.  Even if you make a judgment, what authority can it possibly have?’

A second provision was a limit on the time that someone can remain in jail without trial and the declaration of ‘making propaganda’ as an ‘unjailable offense’.  Suspects in the Ergenekon trial quickly applied for release in light of the new codes, and our lawyers followed suit. Judge Ali announced a decision would be reached on Friday.  The result of all this was that we guessed some people might be released on Friday.  Tahliye.

(Now here’s another language lesson—the word tahliye is listed as ‘release’ in most dictionaries but it only means released on bond. Anyone who is tahliye-ed still stands trial. A full pardon is a beraat.)

Another important development regarded the professor, Büşra Ersanlı. I have tried to stay away from Professor Ersanlı if only because she is the most famous of the group and the media seems to cover only her and Ragip Zarakolu, as if their release would mean the end of the injustices. But Prof. Ersanlı gave a very moving interview in the Radikal—in which she described her despair and her lost hope in the justice system of Turkey and the future of democracy here. She sounded absolutely crushed. Inexplicably, the Foreign Minister Davutoğlu made a public statement saying that he did not believe Ersanlı was a terrorist (of course he had to say so--he had appointed her to her position at the University) but added that the courts were independent of the government and he could not intervene. (What the hell? Since when?) Announcements like this are not accidents in Turkey—everyone felt that Professor Ersanlı would be released one way of the other. Telling if she were as her crimes match Mamoste’s. If she were released, he should be too.

Which brings me to my final subject—the prosecutor himself. While Judge Ali hung out all his laundry on a personal site, prosecutor Adnan Çimen keeps his cards close. I could find absolutely nothing on him on the internet except that he authored the KCK indictment (probably more directly than anyone knows) and that he had once prosecuted cases against ‘Al Qaida and other right wing movements’. There was a curious tidbit relating to a bodyguard scandal, in which the state removed one body guard from his two person entourage and also took away the privilege of his armored car—he was reduced to using a service bus.  Everyone was speculating on what this meant. Had he lost favor with those in power. Were they showing him the big stick under the robes (a Turkish idiom not a phallic reference)? I find myself wondering as well. Does this mean I’ve become a local now that I seek the hidden meaning behind everything?

The fields of sunflowers this last week of the trial are blooming fiercely. What was just two blossoms is now wide stripes of yellow. Utterly beautiful.

Mamoste Update--No Friends But the Mountains Part 2

HEPİMİZ HRANT DEĞİL MİYİZ?  OR  So what was that apology about a couple of weeks ago?

As Mamoste’s trial approaches, we have started to plan how we are going to arrange our summer around it. No one really talks much about the emotions involved. And why should they?  There’s nothing we can do about anything. I sometimes wonder if (or fret that) the little bit I’ve written here and the interview in Radikal somehow made things worse. Perhaps that’s why the name ‘Kemal Seven’ pops up so much in almost a third of the 2500 page indictment—the government is punishing him for the small bit of publicity whipped up by his son-in-law. Unlikely, but it crosses my mind.

Occasionally, the topic of anger comes up between me and my in-laws. When I watch the news with Delal, or any of the various talk shows where the shrieking talking heads blather about their benighted political reviews or when I read newspaper articles by Westerners that, after talking about the detention of elderly Kurds for ‘terrorism’ or the massacre of the thirty four teenagers of Uludere, feel obligated to say ‘The PKK is recognized as a terrorist organization by the U.S, the E.U., and Turkey’—I feel such anger as I’ve never felt before. The city would burn to the ground if my anger could get out of my head. My family here inevitably says they’re used to it—it’s been happening all their lives in one way or another and ‘You develop a thick skin’. But what’s under that thick skin? We’re all outwardly calm, but I have dreams sometimes, where Delal and I are hunted by brownshirts or else trapped in a room and killed with cyanide gas. The dreams usually revolve around my failure to protect her.

Recently I have gotten in a few arguments with a few yokels who tell me that I have no right to stick my nose in this KCK business. As one commentator on a blog site said,

‘Jeff, I know some of those people arrested through KCK case. Turkey, unfortunately or fortunately, is not as powerful as those outside-looking super powers. Otherwise, Turkey would have its own Guantanamo base. And, outside-looking Turkish people would not dare to talk about it. Instead they would focus on the jails in other countries.’

Even if this KCK case and Mamoste’s arrest had no direct effect on my life or my emotions here, the effect it had on my wife (who is my soul mate, lover, best friend etc. etc.) just might move me a little bit—not to mention the effect it has on all my in-laws, whom I happen to love. I may be foreign, but the imprisonment of one man in Turkey is far more relevant to me than anyone incarcerated in the United States right now.

Someone else told me I don’t have the right to meddle in Turkey’s business recently; someone rather unexpected and in a rather backhanded way. For a few months now I have been translating Tuba Çandar’s biography of Hrant Dink, Hrant. A journalist friend of mine was fortunate enough to interview Ms. Çandar and passed my name on to her as someone who might write an article that could drum up interest in an English version of her book. Maureen Freely (Orhan Pamuk’s translator) had been signed on as translator and had drawn up a proposal but it was drawing little interest in the English publishing world, and maybe a few articles or reviews here and there would help. I wrote Ms. Çandar explaining who I was and what I wanted. I ended with the web address of this blog and said that out of enthusiasm for her work, ‘I have translated maybe 60 pages on my private blog—but always with your name attached and if this makes you uncomfortable in anyway, I will immediately erase them.’

Five days passed before she wrote me back and it was a very angry and aggressive email. Her first point was understandable. She said I had used her material without her permission, which was a violation of copyright. I could see why she was upset about that, which is why I posted the apology a couple of weeks ago and erased all the translation I had done. It had simply never struck me as important before because, let’s face it, my blog is read by a small group of family and friends and by the occasional Google searcher who types in ‘Peacock enemies’.  But there were more than a few things about her letter that struck me as odd, above and beyond someone who feels that the right to their work has been violated, and I wanted to discuss them here—not because I want revenge (though I am angry and it may come out, so be aware) but because it might have something larger to say about the whole situation here in Turkey.

The first thing she wrote was this,

Hello Jeffrey Gibbs,

I received your mail and your evaluation of my biography really caught my attention. Especially, ‘It’s truly one of the most brilliant examples of oral history I have ever seen’ and It’s not just about Hrant, but about a country’s history that has been deliberately forgotten, hidden, or erased ‘,’ I was powerfully moved by your book, and particularly impressed by its structure’ and ‘I consider it an imperative that the English speaking world know this story ‘. Upon reading such sentences, I began to be persuaded that you had correctly evaluated the work that I did.  But then, when I went to your blog I did not run into any lines like the above but rather the opposite.  "Tuba Candar does not so much write the book, as shape what already exists. The writers are the hundreds of friends ... They write his story from his birth to death...." or "I started reading Hrant Dink's biography, put together by Tuba Candar..." and other such lines that made me doubt your intentions.

Her first and I guess foremost beef with me is that I did not give her credit for being the writer of the book, just the compiler. She went on to say that if I had bothered myself with reading the prologue of her book I would have known just how much work had gone into it. Well, I did read the prologue which is what gave me the idea that this was not the kind of biography where the writer takes the front seat.

‘This is not a classic biography,’ she writes in About the Book. ‘There is no omniscient narrator who, after reading a ton of research and investigations and books full of anecdotes, after making inquiries and research into a life, after reading letters and diaries and using every detail that happened to get recorded somehow places herself inside that life and writes, as if she is a first-hand witness, ‘the story of a life’.  And it was a deliberate choice...Hrant Dink was an archive of oral history. As to the voices in the book besides Hrant, I spent three years talking with the owners of those voices one by one and recording what they said. Then I arranged them according to chronology and theme. Connecting them as they moved from one to anther was almost like weaving a piece of lace...But as far as contents, not one word that they didn’t say has been added.’

She seems to feel my failure to praise her enough connects to secret intentions to steal her book. She goes on to say that much of the style I incorporate into this blog, in particular the italics I use and the method of narration, is plagiarism. She says she has serious doubts about my intentions, that what I have translated amounts to a book on its own.

When I first read all this I was, to be honest, heartbroken. I so much wanted to make a connection on an issue I felt very strongly about. I’ve always followed the Armenian issue since before I even came here, and moreover, her book on Hrant had helped me to see just what my Kurdish family here was facing—they don’t want to talk about it so much—it’s too immediate--but these people in Hrant were talking about it. When Hrant Dink wept as the court sentences came down, I thought I caught a glimpse of what Mamoste might be feeling as he sits in prison for being in the wrong political party, charged with betraying the society he wanted to help, a victim of page after page of false and deliberately misinterpreted evidence (all elements very similar not only to the Hrant Dink trial but countless others).  But this, according to Çandar, was another big mistake.

‘And while you are using the English translations on your blog, at first you say ‘Tuba Çandar’s biography of Hrant,’ later you don’t see fit to say anything.’

Not true by the way. I mentioned her every time except for once, on April 1st. She continues,

Let’s say, you jump right from a BDP meeting into my book and by mixing in my text with part of your own story, render it a part of it?....These are all legal issues but there is also a moral dimension that does not stop with stealing my labor. You are stealing Hrant’s life and using it to create your own story. You are forming parallels between your father-in-law and Rakel Dink and her father Siament and rendering them part of your own life. Did you ever wonder how they would feel about you comparing your marriage with theirs? Did you talk with these people and get their approval? Whenever I spoke with them I was terrified of touching their wounds. Are their incomparable lives, so full of pain and suffering story material for you to use and insert yourself into however you please?

This accusation also pained me very much. Every writer must confront this question. Am I just using someone else’s pain for my own benefit? I imagine Çandar herself asked herself this several times and very well should have, because even the best of us can get overenthusiastic about the writing part and forget about the people part. But no matter how much this particular paragraph upset me, it also made me angry. The problem, it seemed, was that I had dared to compare myself with the great Hrant Dink. His family and their pain were untouchable. As much as I admire Hrant Dink, I do not think his and his family’s pain is unique or untouchable, not in this country where political assassinations of minorities, show trials, and media attacks organized secretly by the government have been the norm for decades. I thought that was one of the strengths of the book—it certainly was a source of comfort for me. You’re not alone. Someone else has been through what your family is going through. There are others out there.

I can’t quite figure out what the problem is. Is it that I, a tourist and overfed Westerner dared to compare myself to one of Turkey’s martyrs? One of the ‘superpowers’ who ‘insist on focusing on the jails in other countries?  One of Erdoğan’s ‘secret outside forces’ causing all the problems with our meddling and our encouraging of caesarians? If so then I answer what I did to that blog commenter.  When you take my nearly 60 year old father-in-law out of prison, stop the heartache my wife and her family are suffering, and stop insulting them daily in the press—then I’ll shut up about the unjust prison system here. On a personal level, I have my rights as a reader, as a human being. I had a very confusing time getting engaged and I did not really understand any of the unspoken things happening around me—reading about Rakel’s father and the difficulties they had gave me a clue. Mine and Delal’s story is very different from Rakel and Hrant’s, and was much less of a struggle (I said that explicitly when Iwrote about it, too--link here) but I do know what it’s like to be the wanna be son-in-law coming into a closed society that has been harassed for decades and fearful for its existence. And I imagine that if Rakel Dink is anything like she seems, if her and Hrant’s example served as comfort and inspiration to us, she would be pleased. I do not consider Delal’s and my love as anything less than theirs just because we are not famous, just because we did not suffer in the same way.

Or maybe the problem is that anyone compares themself to Hrant Dink? This is a country where idols are made. Before the AKP, you could not say a word that might even be construed as partly negative about Mustafa Kemal Ataturk without serious repercussions. Now it looks like Erdoğan is trying to set himself up as the same sort of figure—people are arrested and charged and persecuted and fired every day for criticizing him. Does Çandar unwittingly want to make Hrant and the Dink family the same sort of untouchables? I wish the Dinks were unique. I wish there were not seven thousand or more people in jail for their political beliefs, maligned by the press, lied about, blackballed, turned into traitors. I wish their families did not suffer so. All the little no names that no one is signing petitions for--I see this now—of all the thousands arrested in the KCK operations, the only one that gets attention is Buşra Ersanlı. Is her life more valuable because she is known? Ragip Zarakolu was released most likely because of the international outcry.  What about the 7000 without the international outcry? (7 more arrested yesterday by the way—I haven’t checked today, but there’s always someone) Do you have to be Ataturk, or Dink, or a public figure to be worth anything?

Musa Anter--assassinated in September of 1992

Or is the problem that I compare Hrant, the book and the man, to Kurds? She seems particularly taken aback by the BDP meeting (which, by the way, though strongly affiliated with Kurds and Kurdish issues and populated by a majority of Kurds—is actually a coalition party). There may be a reason for this I was not aware of initially.  Back in February, apparently, her husband Çengiz Çandar was on schedule to be arrested in one of the KCK round-ups for a forward he wrote in a book about Abdullah Öcalan. Perhaps me going on and on about Tuba Çandar at the same time as I discussed BDP party meetings freaked her out. I’ve read political indictments here, and it would certainly serve as an acceptable piece of evidence that she was planning on blowing up the Earth with her splittist ideas. Or maybe she herself just doesn’t like Kurds, or at least the ‘bad Kurds’ who refuse to behave properly. She once said, according to family hearsay—I can’t find the quote--that when Rakel first came to Istanbul, her ‘wild look’ somehow made her look Kurdish.  She has said other things that makes me think she disdains Kurds. In an interview on the internet magazine T24 she said this,  (link here in Turkish)

‘I think Hrant was killed for his truthfulness. You can see, there are so many Kurdish intellectuals and politicians, but you will not find a Hrant among them. Hrant wanted a this country to turn into a transparent civilian democracy, both for Turkey and his own people. This is a difficult thing. Kurdish leaders can’t do this. They remain silent about the problems concerning themselves. But Hrant said, ‘I don’t want to talk about the problem of the dead Armenians, but the problems of those that survived.’

Which implies numerous things—that Kurds are not brave enough to speak out. That Kurds cannot speak the truth—Selahattin Demirtaş and Gültan Kışanak (chairmans of the BDP party) immediately come to mind as contemporary contradictions, but the comment insults a number of the Kurds’ butchered and martyred. Of course, there were tons of Kurdish journalists especially in the 90s whose chance to speak out were cut short with murder. The writer and journalist Musa Anter is the first to come to mind—a man called ‘a militant of Turkish-Kurdish brotherhood’ who was assassinated by a former member of the PKK hired by the Turkish secret service.  He spent a large part of his life in and out of jail—once just for writing a poem in Kurdish (Some of his books have been re-banned by the government this year—I tried finding one yesterday and was told it’s now impossible).  Watch the film Press for the story of the Özgür Gündem newspaper whose writers, editors, and distributors were assassinated willy-nilly by government agents or whose assassinations by Hizbollah were officially tolerated and encouraged. Or look up Ahmet Kaya, a singer whose music is still loved by Turk, Kurd and Armenian. Like Hrant Dink, he was hounded by the media as a traitor to Turkey in a government organized campaign to destroy his name—false evidence, doctored photographs, misquotes. What had he done?  Threatened to sing a song in Kurdish. Unlike Hrant, Ahmet Kaya fled the country and died of despair in Paris.

Or maybe her English simply was not good enough to properly read the tone and intent of my blog and she filled in the gaps with paranoia. So many people here over estimate their English.

Maybe it’s just a perfect storm, a fruit cake mix of all of the above.

But I had not thought all this through after getting her first email—I just felt chastened for having used her material without permission and so I wrote a letter of apology. I felt extremely bad about what had happened. I never meant any harm and would immediately erase the translations. I still hold your work in the highest respect and certainly didn’t mean to imply you had not done any work. Etc. etc.

Her first response to the apology was clearly not to me. It said simply, ‘What are we going to do with these two retards?’ (The other retard being the friend who put me in touch with her). ‘Reading this, I was so enraged I couldn’t even laugh!’ (She wrote geri geri zekalı—and misspelled it in her rage—which the Zargan dictionary translates as ‘stupid’ or ‘retarded’ though it literally means ‘Backward intellect’. The repeated ‘geri’ must be like saying ‘super retard’).This was followed by an email in English that said this, ‘Your so-called intentions are irrelevant, since what you've done in your blog for months, proves the opposite.’  There follows a repeat in English all the things she had written in Turkish (which led me to think this is all some weird English hang up) and finally a threat of legal action if I did not publically apologize. I no longer felt all that contrite, but indignant and angry and a bit afraid in an odd way, because it felt like I had somehow struck up a conversation with a crazy person and now would never get rid of them.

I found the statement ‘Your so-called intentions are irrelevant’ odd, given that she wrote a book because she was inspired by a man who defended the intentions behind a sentence he wrote that was taken out of context by the press.  Intentions didn’t matter to the court, intentions don’t matter to her.  I would think intentions were paramount—but then of course she saw conspiracy and plotting and whatever else behind all my reassuring words (of course, to be logical, why in the world would I have notified her if I had intended on stealing her work?) Equally odd was her desire to file suit against a man who only wanted to help her. This threat of legal action was also ironic, it seemed, coming from someone who had involved herself so intimately with a man who had been ruined by legal actions. But I suppose it was all justified in her mind because she was right, she had discovered my evil intent, my true self hiding behind the words—all of which sounds agonizingly familiar if you have read any statement on official dealings with Hrant, Armenians, Kurds, or the imaginary ‘internal enemies’ that Erdoğan feels is encouraging abortions and caesarians.

In any case, I will restate here.  I apologize for using Çandar’s material without asking, but the to-do made about it was way beyond what it deserved. It was just some guy’s private blog in the end, and if anything, it would have helped her name and the name of her book get out there.  Still, her reaction to that is totally her business. However the rest seems rather demented—all that misplaced rage, a storm of insulting emails, legal threats.  She would have been only a little less logical writing the same things to a street cat.  It all seems a distilled example of all the paranoia, sense of persecution, and ego that can be so endemic here. I’m still baffled and a bit bereaved. I still think her book is a brilliant achievement. It took a lot of work and she did it incredibly well—maybe it’s just best not to ask too many questions about the creator of any piece of art.  It can taint the whole thing. The work stands apart from them and is not sullied by anything they do...hopefully.

One last thing—the reason for the title. For me, the biggest shock was that I reached out to someone who I thought should be an ally, and found an enemy.  Anyone who had dared to spend three years writing about an assassinated Armenian in Turkey, who, inadvertently or not, had discussed the genocide, who would put themselves in that kind of risk—had to be sympathetic to the mass arrests of Turkey’s other maligned minority. There’s so few people here you can talk openly with. And yet she went, to put it bluntly, nuts. I am not convinced Tuba Çandar has anything against Kurds—she was going to write the biography of Mehmet Uzun (the famous exiled Kurdish writer) before he abruptly died after returning to Diyarbakır. That’s impressive. She was even quoted in the Hurriyet as saying ‘He was a warrior who fought for his identity and culture by writing all the time.’ And yet, she made such a point of me lumping her in the same entry as the Kurdish BDP. It is like hearing a trusted and beloved family member suddenly tell a ‘nigger’ joke—there’s this punch-in-the-gut disgust and a profound disappointment. 

Maybe it’s nothing to do with Kurds (though she might tell herself the ones in jail or all PKK and therefore okay to hate) I suppose it might be just partly paranoia, partly ego, and partly a fight over her ownership of a martyr. And yet, and yet. There’s that phrase associated with Kurds, ‘No friends but the mountains.’ This is the first time I’ve ever had my hand bitten by someone who should be an ally--but for my in-laws, it’s a commonplace occurrence.  The people that hate you, hate you. The people that should like you, hate you. Where to go? Who to turn to? In her book, Blood and Belief, Aliza Marcus discusses the Kurds disillusionment with Turkey’s leftist movements—who promised the usual blend of equality and brotherhood and justice. She quotes Kemal Burkay as saying, ‘The Turkish left was heavily influenced by Turkish ideology and could not openly come up with a Kurdish solution.’ They, too, were in the end nationalists. The right wing Turks preach of Muslim Brotherhood—but they, too, are ultimately nationalist when it comes to Kurdish identity.  There are at times, it seems, no friends but the mountains.