Update on the Turkish Protests

So where are we this week? So much has happened, is happening. Where do you start? I'm sorry but I have no pictures this week--maybe later. But I felt the need to get down what was happening NOW. I have included come Youtube video links that tell part of the story.

Tencere ve Tava Proteso (The Pots and Pans Protest)

On Sunday night, June 2nd, we were sitting in the living room, watching TV with Grandfather, Delal’s aunt, and a friend visiting from Silivri. Suddenly, a noise rose up from the street, growing louder and louder. We all went out onto the balcony to find our whole neighborhood hanging out the window banging pots and pans. The clamor came from every direction—from Çamlica in the west and Ataşehir in the East. I swear to God the very air seemed to be alive and vibrating. We ran in and got our own pots and pans. ‘I feel like I’m getting something big off my chest!’ our aunt said as she pounded away on a frying pan.

And so weren’t we all, the entire city.

Last year, during the height of the Kurdish hunger strikes, we joined a civil action campaign to turn off the lights and put candles in the window for all the prisoners. I remember how miserable and alone I felt—our window the only dark one as far as they eye could see. You felt targeted, marginalized. Now everyone was on the same side. We felt safe, empowered. Cars poured out into the street honking horns. The gigantic apartment high rises in Ataşehir blinked on and off like Empire State Christmas trees. Behind them a storm was pouring in over the mountains, tall black thunderheads—lightning darted behind the hills. It seemed even God himself had joined in. And this was in a neighborhood known for being staunch supporters of Erdoğan’s party, the AKP.

Every night at 9:00 since then, the same thing has happened. Last night in Kadıköy the workers at the Opera House from actor to concession stand worker poured out into the side streets armed with giant pots. Taxis honked at them as they went by.

But I will add one thing—Grandfather would not come out with us. At first he protested, ‘No, don’t go out. It’s rude! You’ll wake people up.’ We laughed, we insisted, we pointed out everyone was doing it and finally he emerged with the biggest pan of all, but then almost unconciously, immediately crouched behind our balcony walls, instinctively afraid. In his 83 years he has seen enough of Turkish state oppression—he perhaps had the sense to be scared.

Here’s some videos of similar pots and pans protests around the country.

Aydin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5dDvqExnas&feature=youtu.be

Ulus (Istanbul)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53M1hUA1y_g

Ankara

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ty78ZqaSez4

A song by the popular group ‘Kardeş Türküler’ about the pots and pans protest

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-kbuS-anD4

A week of tense calm

The KCK show trials continued this week—all of our time has been occupied with that and so we did not have time to go down to the protests this week. But lots of things have been happening. On Wednesday, in Izmir, police arrested38 people for messages on their Twitter accounts—this AFTER Bulent Arınç, the Deputy Prime Minister, made a somewhat conciliatory announcement that made it seem as if the government might back off a little. Newspapers (official ones) started spreading rumors that foreign agents were provoking protests and then arrested foreigners in Istanbul and Ankara, claiming some of them had diplomatic passports. The suggestion was—we’ve caught them! This turned out to be false. They were all hapless Erasmus students.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0YcEUHxTuY

In Hatay and Eskişehir two students have been beaten to death—most likely by undercover cops. Our friends protesting in Beşiktaş report gangs of what look like undercover cops harassing protesters, cutting lights, and at times luring people into alleys and beating them. Rumor? Wild guessing? Maybe, but this is a country where hundreds were disappeared by similar people in the 90s and I have seen the undercover cops at Kurdish protests myself, so, it’s certainly possible.

Protests in Beşiktaş (Çarşı)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvHqXODRbV0

On Tuesday, Erdoğan told the protesters that ‘he could barely restrain 51% of the country (from attacking them)’ and then went on a North African tour. When he arrived back last night hundreds of his supporters met him at the airport. They ecstatically chanted his name and told reporters that they wanted to go down to Taksim and drive the protesters out.

A friend of ours at school was riding in a taxi last night when the driver told her a story—he was shaking, nervous, she said.

‘I was at the Marmara Hotel, waiting on a customer when I overheard this conversation between some officers and their chief. ‘What’s going on in the square?’ asked the chief. ‘Nothing much,’ an officer answered. ‘People are just wandering around basically.’ ‘Send them some gas,’ the chief said. The officer refused, ‘Didn’t you hear me? I said they were just wandering around.’ The chief got angry, ‘I said send them some gas!’ The officer turned to his fellow policemen, cussing under his breath and said, ‘You heard the order! Toss them some gas!’

I don’t know how much you can trust a taxi driver’s story. There’s a rumor that many are undercover cops. They have been known to say provocative things to lure people into talking and ‘revealing their true colors’.

That’s where things stand. Meanwhile the park seems a happy and hopeful place. People put up memorials to Hrant Dink and the Robowski Massacre. The plant trees. Restaurants are bringing food to protesters. Volunteers come by with medical supplies, tampons, vitamins, rain coats, whatever is needed.

A friend shared another inspiring story—she was on the metrobus when a gang of Çarşı (Beşiktaş football hoodlums) got on wearing bandanas over their mouths. An old woman approached them and without a word pulled each of their faces to her and kissed them on the forehead. She knew they were going into battle with the police (Çarşı youths famously stole one of the police vehicles and used one of their own water cannons against them) and was sending them on their way.

People are hopeful. Tremendously hopeful.

This Way to the Revolution---

 

                Last night, we were coming home from an eventful day on Taksim Square. Just to wind down, we’d gone for Turkish coffee at a street cafe in Kadıköy and were trying to catch a taxi home—it was 1 AM and no public transport was available. Four taxi drivers refused to pick us up—they either sped away immediately or else stopped and said our group was too big. There were four of us—me, my wife, her sister, and her diminutive friend. It was hardly a large or threatening group. Finally a young man picked us up and told us there had been ‘incidents’ on Acibadem Boulevard and that the taxi drivers were cautious. We weren’t buying this exactly since what kind of incidents might come from 3 tiny Kurdish girls and a middle aged foreign man? ‘He doesn’t like our type,’ the girls complained.

Marchers in front of Dolmabahçe
 

Marcher's from Beşiktaş Wharf

Marchers coming up through the park

 

 

 

At a corner near the Acibadem ‘Karakol’ bus stop, some hooligans with Turkish flags had formed a human roadblock and stopped a PTT truck (the Turkish postal service—a government official and I guess therefore a target). Except for these riled young men, the rest of the road was empty. Boys with flags chanted about being soldiers of Ataturk while others forced the man out of the truck. I did not like the look of the frenzied ‘patriots’ as the poor old man stepped into their midst. Our taxi driver sped up and made a hurried, but whispered phone call.  To the police? To another taxi driver?

I’m starting at the end because of something my 6th grade history teacher taught me—‘Think about the meaning of the word ‘revolution’ she told us. ‘It means, originally, a 360 degree turn. You end where you began.’ In other words, the popular uprising against the dictator often results in a the popular appointing of a similar dictator.

The background is this:

For several days now, protesters have occupied a park here in Istanbul called ‘Gezi Park’. The park was approved for leveling by the government. In it’s place some kind of mall/mosque combination has been planned—the latest in a series of mega malls and mosques across this sprawling, traffic choked mega city of Istanbul. Gezi was the last green space in that part of the city and people decided to take a stand. The government’s response was what it always is--police attacks with gas, tanks, and water cannons. But instead of dying out, the protests grew. Sırrı Surreya Önder, a BDP parliamentarian, joined the protesters and stood in front of a bulldozer to protect one of the trees. The police ‘intervened’ and he was hospitalized—but he had already become one of the galvanizing symbols of the protests. As did the poor Moroccan girl who was rushed to the hospital after being attacked by police. Protests have spread to Ankara, Diyarbekir, Edirne, Konya, Antep, Kütahya, Aydın, Bodrum, Bursa, Eskişehir and Izmir—and internationally. I just saw a picture on Facebook of a solidarity protest in Bangkok.

The park was a neutral issue in a way, not tied to any one party or ideology, and in a country where each group is diametrically opposed to every other, that is critical. It meant everyone could rally around this cause. And of course, it grew beyond protecting Gezi Park. It was a protest against all the policies the government was pushing through despite opposition. It was a reaction against the third bridge—a project which threatens not only to destroy the region’s last forests, aquifers, and waterways but choke a city whose resources are already taxed by a population three times the size that most city planners deem as sustainable. It was a reaction against the bizarre scheme to build a canal from the Black Sea to the Marmara. To build a giant mosque on Çamlıca (another green space in a city sorely in need of them). To build a mall over the parking lot next to Fenerbahçe stadium. It protests the recent laws enacted against alcohol and the innumerable tax hikes on alcohol put into place this past year. It protests the Uludere massacring of 34 civilians by the military on the Iraqi border and the shady circumstances around the 50+ deaths in Reyhanlı this past month from a car bomb. It protests the way Erdoğan runs his government—like a kingdom where one man can deem a sculpture ‘an eyesore’ and personally command a construction crew to tear it down despite all opposition.  They are protesting the prosecution of Fazil Say and Sevan Nişanyan for ‘insulting Islam’. They are protesting the political official Mustafa Macit who said that ‘atheists should be destroyed’ and Fehmi Kaya the Ministry of Education official who said that autistic children are going to hell because they are ‘natural atheists’. They are protesting the inaction around the abuse of women and torture under police custody. And finally they are protesting the arrests of hundreds of journalists and political activist around the country.

                But this movement is disorganized and all encompassing and includes everyone opposed to the policies of the current government. Everyone. Which means there are also those protesting the compromise with the Kurds, the admission of the Kurdish language as a legitimate tongue, the relaxation on discussion of taboos such as talking about the Armenian Genocide or the Dersim Massacre or the Madımak hotel massacres or the disappearances of the 90s. It means there are those  protesting the relaxation of laws against ‘insulting Turkishness’ and the weakening of the army to prevent the endless coups—all the hallmarks of the previous dictatorship.

                So it’s a volatile mix.

Media van--it reads 'Media has sold out.'

A police van in Gezi Park

 

                My wife and I went down with a Brazilian friend around 10:00PM on Friday night to join the protests—this was May 31st. We walked up from Karaköy wharf and then took the tramway—surprised all to hell that all public transportation to Taksim was working just fine since on May 1st they closed down the whole city to prevent people from going there. When we arrived in Tunel—the far end of İstiklal Boulevard from Gezi Park and Taksim Square—it was Friday night business as usual with foreign tourists and young Turks filling the clubs and cafes. Just past Galatasaray High School things began to change—we ran into a wall of protesters chanting ‘The Government Must Resign’ and joined in.

‘Hükümet Istifa! Hükümet İstifa!’

It was cathartic at first—hundreds of us chanting in unison. I looked over the heads of the crowds toward Taksim Square and saw a sea of people that ended in billowing white clouds. Tear gas—for hours the police had been shooting cannister after cannister at protesters and we smelled it all the way from the ferry a couple of miles away. There was a riot tank with a spotlight that cut through the gas and every once in a while it would move forward and the crowd would panic and charge backward.

                One thing about this first night, the 31st, that struck me was the absence of flags—at least where we were. And I mean flags of any kind—almost no Turkish flags, union flags or party flags. It was almost like there was an unspoken agreement—this was a movement springing out of the whole society and we’re not going to play politics. I know the BDP made an active decision not to get involved officially for fear that it would look like they were using the protests to further their own political ends and thus be divisive. It looked as if the decision was mutual on all sides.

The crowd invading the construction site

People lowering themselves down into the construction site

The end result was electrifying—I felt at least empowered. We had all found a common ground and were united at last against the man we regarded as a dictator. From a personal point of view, in addition to all of the other issues, we were united against the man whose government had ordered the arrest of my father in law and thousands of others and turned our lives upside down.

The crowd after taking Gezi Park back from the police 

 

Then the police attacked in force. Gas cannisters fell all around us-we were wrapped in an yellowish cloud and I saw police beating down people with billy clubs. We ran down a sidestreet and there were people waiting to give us milk which would help against the burning effects of the gas. I put a bit on my face and eyes and it only made it worse. I stumbled through the street choking and blinded. There was something sticky all over my face and people said this was different from the usual gas attacks. We heard later that the police were using a new kind of gas called ‘portakal gazı’ that the usual methods were powerless against—no water or milk or lemon juice. There were people milling through the crowd with bottles of vinegar and a liquid made from stomach antacids. A young woman sprayed my face with the stuff and the sting immediately began to fade.

This woman was only one of hundreds. I was impressed with the solidarity everyone was showing. It was about one in the morning at this point and tatooed men came out of bars to pass out napkins and water to those fleeing the police. An old woman was handing out milk from her window (before we knew it would only make things worse) and shouting at us to ‘keep resisting’. A young man was giving people gas masks and all along the streets taxi driver and minivans and busses were honking their horns in support. Back in Kadıköy things were just getting started. At 2am people were pouring into the streets with pots and pans and banging them together chanting ‘We are all Taksim’. At 3am, from our balcony at our house in Üsküdar, we heard another pots-and-pans protest moving through our quiet, conservative neighborhood. There were reports coming in from all over of similar protests around the city. By dawn, thousands of marchers had blocked the Bosphorous Bridge on their way to Taksim.

And police attacks continued.

I woke up the next day around 12 and immediately got on Facebook and Twitter simultaneously following the news and getting the word out.

Rumors and fear and hearsay—people seemed to be Tweeting in a panic. The police were using Agent Orange, they said (not true). 3 people have lost their eyes and four are dead. Haberturk announced  the government was going to cut the Internet. Indeed at around 3 o’clock I could no longer access Facebook or Twitter and text messages from friends confirmed they were having the same problem. Was this because the government was blocking it or because the net was choked with traffic? In a speech, Erdoğan said ‘You can bring a hundred thousand but we will bring a million against you!’ The TV showed the police were retreating from the park in defeat. Apparently a group of BDP parliament members including Sebahattin Tüncel (Rep. Kadıköy) Sırrı Surreya Önder, as well as officials from labor unions, the socialist party and the Freedom and Democracy Party—had again marched on Taksim to be with the protesters. ‘I’ve decide to let them be!’ Erdoğan announced. But text messages from friends said they were still being attacked. ‘They’re spraying us with red water!’ my friend wrote. ‘What does that mean?’ ‘Simple,’ I told him. ‘They’re marking you to find you later.’ But the TV continued to show police retreating from the square. Was it a concession? Or a trick?

We didn’t wait around to find out. We left the house and caught a bus for Taksim—again, running freely despite the violent crackdowns. The roads were spookily empty. Only once we crossed the bridge and pulled into Beşiktaş did traffic come to a halt from the protesters filling the streets.

                We were forced to get off the bus. We couldn’t get any farther. Now the distance from Beşiktaş wharf where we got off to Taksim square is, I would say, around two miles. The entire two mile length of road was jammed shoulder to shoulder with protesters. Tens of thousands of people marching on Taksim Square—but this crowd was different from the one we had marched with the day before. Everyone was carrying Turkish flags, most with pictures of Atatürk in his classic Cossack hat. They were chanting ‘We are all soldiers of Mustafa Kemal’ and singing military marches. Vendors were hawking Atatürk figurines, banners, buttons and scarves. There had been a CHP (The venerable Republican People’s Party) meeting in Kadıköy and officials had canceled the meeting and redirected their people here.

The construction trucks

 

                I don’t know quite how to explain the CHP. I am only a five year resident of Istanbul but I have been here long enough to form a very negative impression. They seem a milder version of the rabidly fascist MHP nationalist party—violently secular and Turkish in the way the Iran is violently Islamic. As a Kurdish inlaw I felt very uncomfortable marching among them. For years, they had insisted Kurds didn’t exist. They were mountain Turks and terrorists. One of their politicians had recently proclaimed that the ‘Kurdish minority could never be equal with the Turkish nation.’ Still, we decided to focus on our collective cause. ‘Olsun! Olsun!’ Delal said. ‘There must be representatives from all segments of society.’

When we hit the turn off toward Beşiktaş station a couple of police vans came barreling down the hill. The CHP marchers jumped to attack—throwing everything they could find, rocks, water bottles, sticks, sandwiches. The response of the police wagon was to floor it, knocking several men in front of the car sideways into the street. The crowd leapt on the van in what looked like a scene from Night of the Living Dead—completely enraged.

                Instead of taking the road that wound around past the stadium, people swarmed up through the park like ants in a beeline toward the square.  We converged on Taksim with tens of thousands of others only to find everything in disarray. A police van sat near a side street completely gutted. People were still yanking off parts and smashing stray bits of window. Media vans sat abandoned in a sea of people—their antennas painted with black graffitti that read ‘Medya Satılmış!’ The medya has sold out. My friend who was somewhere in the square said that Channel 8 had been attacked by a mob. I wasn’t surprised—the main Turkish news had been either ignoring the protests (one channel broadcast a piece on liposuction as Taksim burned) or presented things as the beleaguered police defending themselves from what Erdoğan called ‘extremists groups’.

                We located our friends on the far edge of the square at the entrance to Gezi Park and were dismayed to see them with Turkish flags. We had been marching among Kemalists for about an hour and half at this point--trying not to feel threatened or anxious and only then, I think, as we emerged out of their midst did we allow ourselves to feel the tension. Of course, my American friends thought we were overreacting—and understandably so. For an American it is hard to realize what the political symbols here mean. For a Turk even. When I first got here, I bought a Turkish flag to take to national football game and it made Delal extremely uncomfortable. I didn’t get it—I had bought it for a football game after all, not a political rally. I was fully aware of the extremities of Turkish nationalism and had spoken out against it. The flag didn’t mean the same thing to me as it meant to the nationalists. But what did wielding such a symbol here, today mean? After most protesters in previous days had foregone bringing any such symbols with them? And in recent days who has been brandishing the flag and Atatürk’s picture?

The monument on Taksim Square with LGBT, BDP, and TKP flags

Protesters on side streets--the expats join in

 

                In Kadıköy it has been the ‘Genç Türkler’ whose brochures rail against the ‘blood sucking, baby killer’ Öcalan and assert that any compromise with Kurds is treason and part of a plot to divide the country. It was pinned to the lapel of the woman at work who told me in no uncertain terms that my wife was Turkish first and the Kurds were not really a different people. It is on the cover of the textbook that proclaims the need to fight Turkey’s ‘secret internal enemies’, the textbook that teaches my sixth grade students to want to jail anyone who speaks out against Ataturk and to say things like ‘you should never have married a Kurd’. On the news, a woman speaking to an IMC reporter said that she had seen a gang of men with these flags in Kadıköy shouting slogans against Armenians, Kurds,a nd Alevis—the nationalists are angry that anyone even mentions these minorities. The same woman claims she saw a head scarfed woman cornered by another group of flag bearers in Üsküdar and nearly attacked.( I don’t completely believe that she was an eye witness, but it’s impossible to be sure.  Rumor and hearsay have become pervasive. At the same time another woman tweeted from Taksim—‘Don’t listen to them! I am a covered woman and have been in Taksim for hours. No one bothered me at all!’)

It says--Look what a few trees can do.

All together or not at all

They had set up a make shift bar/pepper gas first aid in the street.

 

                We entered Gezi park and walked past a burning building, more demolished peace vehicles and then sat down under some shady sycamores among thousands of others to savor the trees we’d helped save. The police were long gone but the sting of tear gas lingered—I doubt it will leave for a long time to come. The police supposedly exhausted their supplies. Suddenly, everyone around us stood and started singing the national anthem, some of them holding up giant portraits of Atatürk. (Who brings this stuff?) Where were the non-nationalists? And what did these people want—a return to the days when you get prosecute Elif Şafak and Orhan Pamuk for insulting Turkishness? More assassinations of ‘traitors’ like Hrant Dink? More disappearances of Kurdish dissidents like happened in the 90s? More army coups where thousands of people are tortured in prisons? It was this mentality that set up the dictatorship that Erdoğan has so neatly stepped into.

                A walk down İstiklal was just as worrisome—a mob mentality seemed to have set in among some. Young men were spray painting buildings with curses. ‘Suck my dick, Tayyip’. ‘You’re a son of a whore!’ Some boys were smashing a window only to be stopped by some older men pleading with them to calm down. ‘Provocateurs’ someone said. ‘They’ve been planted.’ Possible, but then just as possible that they were just stupid angry young men. The ATMs of Akbank were smashed and spray painted with the words ‘Chemical Tayyıp’. Windows everywhere were broken. We heard about some businesses helping the protesters and some helping the police. Protesters, for example, were given refuge in Starbucks, but turned out of Burger King who instead sheltered the police. There was rubble and broken glass and grafitti everywhere. All I could think of was this would give all the people who claimed that the protests were mainly the work of drunks and extremist groups ammunition.

                There were more rumors. Beşiktaş was under attack and police weren’t letting anyone out (Turned out to be true—the attacks are still going on as far as I know). I called a friend to confirm and the conversation was cut short by screams and a sudden cutting of the line. People said tanks were returning to Taksim (this didn’t happen). At the ferry dock in Karaköy people were jumping the turnstyles and shouting ‘Don’t pay! Fuck the government!’ As if suddenly any kind of destruction of public property or flaunting of the rules were supporting the protests. Again, lots of people pleading with them to stop but to no avail.

                And then we witnessed the attack on the mail man.

                I had a dream last night that I was fleeing with my American family from a city under attack and we ended up in another town that was being attacked by a different group with gas bombs. We had fled from one nightmare into another. The symbolism of the dream seemed simple enough. People are now fighting the AKP but to put what in its place? A return to the military dictatorship? Would we replace the pretend democracy of these quasi religious capitalists with the pretend democracy of the secular militarists Kemalists? Is there any real alternative? In Diyarbakir, a friend there told us that police had not intervened at all in protests. ‘They say that with the peace process under way here, the AKP doesn’t dare do something like that. All hell would break loose!’ One of the Kurdish leaders, when asked if he thinks the toppling of the AKP would lead to the end of the peace process and more misery for Kurds said, ‘Democracy is not only for us, but for everyone. If that’s necessary, I say, let it happen.’ I compare that with the kids holding up Ataturk’s giant portrait as another spray painted ‘AKP whores’ on the side of a historical building.

                On Mis Sokak, a bright orange graffitti said ‘Revolution This Way!’ I hope that this little revolution follows a wiser path than others. That we don’t turn in circles. That we actually continue on the way we started instead of falling into mob mentality and looting before setting up another dictator or falling in line with this one all over again.

                In a last bit of historical perspective, IMC news reported today on the history of Gezi park--it used to be an Armenian Cemetery appropriated by the government and then turned into a barracks. Apparently the Armenians had 'abandoned' it. There is something poetic in the fact that we were protesting on top of forgotten Armenian graves.

It reads--Capital OUT! Taksim is ours.

 

Crazy's on the Rise!

Don't Stab the Kissers!

There is a strange wind blowing in Turkey these days--someone write in and tell me I'm being paranoid. Last week in Ankara, a subway announcement chastised a couple they'd caught kissing on their security cameras. The disembodied voice demanded the 'act in accordance with moral rules.' A kissing protest was held this past Saturday on location--as couples kissed a small group of young men (what is wrong with young men?) chanted Allahu Akbar! in a very threatening manner. Apparently one of the kissers was even stabbed! One wonders what in the world these guys were doing at a kissing protest? Couldn't they find something a little more meaty? See here.

Like the drunks. To 'save the children', the government has passed some new laws regarding alcohol and cigarettes. No longer will stores be able to sell alcohol after 10:00PM. Advertisements are illegal and any mention of alcohol in movies, TV shows or media is forbidden. One part of the law, targeting cigarettes, prohibits 'separation of one piece from a whole packet'--in other words, you can't sell individual cigarettes to people, but it apparently applies equally to alcohol which, according to some, means you could prohibit the sale of individual drinks in bars and restaurants. To protest, I went up to my local tekel (convenience store) and bought a beer--Efes's new 'Unfiltered'. A funny looking man was in front of me--a bit chubby, in a Mormon style shirt and tie, with a hair combed straight down on all sides. He seemed very nervous, glancing around and paying with a trembling hand. I thought he might be mentally handicapped--but the tekel owner told me different.

'He's so nervous about being caught drinking! He insisted I put it in two black plastic bags so that no one would know he had bought alcohol--he wanted to make sure you couldn't see through it. But then a plastic bag means you've just bought alcohol so everyone knows anyway!' He then put my beer in a black plastic bag. I had never really thought about it before--why in the world does my beer have to be in a special bag? I'm friends with the tekel owner and asked him how the new law will affect him. 'This is our livelihood,' he said in frustration. 'They've raised taxes so many times in the past year and now this! And here these people have started coming in wanting two plastic bags because they are afraid of their neighbors!'

Another significant addition to all this is the government's sentencing of Sevan Nişanyan for blasphemy against the prophet Mohammed. Nişanyan, as an Armenian, already has a strike against him--two if you count all he has said against the Kemalists as well. Now the third was his line in a column where he was defining the term 'hate speech' not as something you thought insulted you but as something that threatened a minority group's physical safety. Therefore, attacking an entrenched majority groups beliefs, while perhaps insulting, was not hate speech. And then he gave an example, saying, "mocking an Arab leader who centuries ago claimed to have contacted God and made political, financial and sexual benefits out of this is not a crime of hatred." This prompted an AKP politician, Mahmut Macid to say that he thinks 'all atheists' whom he calls 'raped people' should be destroyed.

And this is a guy who makes policy.

And this is after Fazıl Say, the famous classical pianist was prosecuted on similar charges.

And though it is not directly related to religious fanaticism, I can't help but think of my father-in-law's trial which resumed today. The 2 year visitation band, the sham evidence, the kangaroo court--all run by what is most likely a Fethullah Gulenist prosecutor and judge. I was not able to go this week (I will go next) but my wife tells me they actually gave testimony in Kurdish today--something utterly radical and unprecedented. What can it mean though--when in every other respect tolerance is eroded and rights are taken away and the noose gets tighter?

Religious fanaticism? Dictatorship? What's down the road?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

An Addendum to Yesterday

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

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

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

And this guy is absolutely write:

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

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


 

The Newest Boston Massacre

 

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

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

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

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

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

And now I have to be honest about something ugly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

The devil evilly typing the evil W into every noble Nevruz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!

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

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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