Turkey

The Insane and the Melancholy

Ece Temelkuran, Zeynep Beler

• Editorial: Zed Books
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783608911
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Geschichte
• Categoría: Geschichte des 21. Jahrhunderts

Starting with the basic question "what is this place?", award-winning journalist and novelist Ece Temelkuran guides us through her "beloved country". In challenging the authoritarian AKP government – for which she lost her job as a journalist – Temelkuran draws strength and wisdom from people, places and artistic expression. The result is a beautifully rendered account of the struggles, hopes and tragedies which make Turkey what it is today. Lamenting the commercialisation and authoritarianism which increasingly characterises Turkish society, Temelkuran sees hope in the Gezi Park protests of 2013, the electoral breakthrough of the progressive HDP party in 2015 and in the simple kindness of ordinary people. Much more than either straightforward history or memoir, Turkey: the Insane the Melancholy is like sitting with a friendly stranger who, over raki or coffee, reveals the secrets of this rich and complex country – the historic "bridge" between east and west.

TODAY/MORNING

“Geography, what do you want from me?” – Graffiti, 2015

“Welcome to the land of the stimulus addicts! This is elsewhere, and not the world itself!” – Engin Geçtan, Professor of Psychiatry, Life, 2002

“İdare et!”

Could it be a coincidence that, in Turkish, the word for “managing” and the word for “letting things slide” are one and the same? Or could it be that, over time, as the act of managing became tantamount to letting things slide, this turn of phrase came to describe both acts? And why must I go through the nightmare of arrest for the third time? My journals read aloud in court every time. Shame and fury … at the very least I don’t think I’m paranoid anymore. Or it’s knowing that, for the past couple of years, such nightmares have been beleaguering almost everyone. If it’s paranoia, then it’s collective. In the mornings, my friends and I relay our “courtroom memories” to one another and giggle over them.

“Today” I woke up with all this on my mind and implemented the only regimen I know of that can help me rid myself of such inextricable worries: going for a run! I’ve been running ever since the novelist Haruki Murakami wrote that, since writing novels is such an unhealthy occupation, it’s necessary for novelists to lead healthy lives, to go for runs. I have yet to see any physical improvement, such as a dramatic increase in my book sales, but it’s amusing enough just to irritate my friends, almost all of whom are depressed enough already due to the state of the nation. Where I run is on the European side of the Bosphorus, on the shore between the districts of Ortaköy and Bebek. The road inclines from the middle class to the upper. This is a road on which kokoreç and doner kebab shops eventually give way to steak houses, fishing boats to luxury yachts, traditional coffee houses to seaside “lounges”. So there is no problem with me wearing the leggings I bought for running. One thinks of such things without realising. I wonder how a woman’s psychological health is affected by the thought or the smidgen of anxiety lurking in her head, even if only subconsciously, that something might happen to her if she wears leggings? Or her intellectual capacity, for that matter? If a woman in Turkey were to try to make an inventory of the things she unconsciously worries about, calculates and mulls over on a daily basis, the list would probably be as endless as the numbers stretching to the right of the number pi. Hearing this might cause a Westerner whose experience with Turkey is limited to bathing suit and bikini-clad vacations to take us for paranoid lunatics. We have good reason for our paranoid delusions, however. For we’ve heard the story of a young woman named Didem Yaylalı. Epitomising present-day Turkey and the lives of many women, at first this story might seem to contain too many details. But trust me, this brief story encompasses quite a few of Turkey’s issues.

A WOMAN’S “UNINDICTABLE” MURDER

“She was only a sweet, charming girl! It’s only that she didn’t live the way they wanted her to.”

So claimed Evrim, best friend of Didem Yaylalı, who committed suicide in 2013, as she wept on the phone. The young prospective judge had been found in a hotel room having taken her own life. The cause of death of the red-haired, cheerful future judge was disclosed as “leggings”. Although she had completed all the prerequisites to start in her profession, the High Council of Judges and Prosecutors just would not make the decision to appoint her. But, naturally, this is not all there is to “a woman’s unindictable murder”. Let us read the story as it was told in the letter sent to me by Evrim, an engineer and Didem’s roommate, the one who wept on the phone:

I would like to recount to you the murder of Didem Yaylalı, which was professionally orchestrated to drive her to suicide. Up until last year, when she found out she would never become a judge, Didem had been a very happy, vivacious and competent legal professional who worshipped the practice of law and knew by heart and kept track of every changing piece of legislation. From the moment she found out that she had not been appointed, Didem was consciously and deliberately thrust into a Kafkaesque world. She was neither fired nor appointed. In a hazy world, they worked at blurring her sense of what she was fighting against and how. Every time she hopefully knocked on their door, our very esteemed (!) judges at the High Council of Judges and Prosecutors told her, however indirectly, that she must abandon her principles and kiss their hands, or she would not be appointed.

One day when I got home from work, she asked me, “Evrim, what does conservative mean?” When I replied, “It means to be reactionary, Didem, why do you ask?,” she said, “A judge at the HCJP told me that that’s how I have to be, that this is why such things keep happening to me.” During her final months, in a bid to salvage her honour, Didem had been planning to work for just one day as a judge before resigning, in the event she was appointed. They would not even allow her to do this. They left Didem in purgatory. She was not even allowed to work as a lawyer.

She had plans that, as soon as she was let go, she would start interning as a lawyer. Since they would not let her go, however, she couldn’t move. They tied her up and left her immobile. They consciously and willingly thrust Didem into a dead end. She had another friend, Nebi, whose dismissal on other grounds was then on the table. Nebi was dismissed last month, but no statement was ever made concerning Didem. Eagerly awaiting the dates on which the results were to be made public, Didem returned home in disappointment each time. If she was indeed at fault, why was she not being dismissed? They knew that dismissing Didem would mean rewarding her.

Only two of her friends from her class attended her funeral. Her friends (judges and prosecutors who had been appointed) did not, because they were afraid. They all knew about Didem’s – legitimate – side of the story but wanted to secure their own futures. In a scaremongering, conservative society, voices such as Didem’s, which rightfully clamoured for their freedoms, were muted. Didem had had many friends from her own class and those above her, prospective judges and prosecutors. They all drank and constantly said, “Just make sure no one sees or hears about it.” Didem was unable to be so duplicitous.

Because they left Didem with no other option but suicide, because they deliberately killed a competent legal professional like Didem, because they have removed the word “freedom” from their lexicon, we know who they are and that they are guilty.

Tolga Onur, a friend of Didem’s and another future judge who was not appointed due to not being “conservative” enough, has written the following, recounting the details of the Kafkaesque murder of a young and educated woman:

This is how the procedure goes: you are the subject of constant persecution, during which they do their best to find shortcomings. They want to find a rationale. The reason for that is to create an atmosphere of fear. You don’t need to be on any one side. All they need is a piece of intelligence that you are not on theirs. So they go through Didem’s files and find a report from months ago. She went to the hospital complaining of pneumonia. While the report had the hospital stamp and registry details, the doctor neglected to sign it. Just for this, they halted her advancement in rank as a punishment. In turn, the HCJP decided to “unappoint” her on the grounds of this punishment, just a week before she would have been appointed. A member of the HCJP apparently told her that she “must be conservative”. When she was uncomprehending, they told her: “You need to be prudent. A judge doesn’t go around in leggings.” Didem was shocked because she only ever wore leggings at the weekend. Another member of the HCJP asked her: “Is there any chance you got pneumonia because you had been drinking? Are you having personal problems?”

In short, it is entirely possible to murder a woman with a pair of leggings and not leave a trace – you don’t even have to strangle her with them either. Reported murders of women in Turkey have risen dramatically in the past decade. So much so that you might think that war has been declared on the women of Turkey. At least one such mind-bogglingly horrific murder takes place every day and rocks the nation to its core. But to commit such an invisible murder! That requires a small change in the Constitution. How?

In 2010, Turkey moved towards an amendment of the Constitution that came with the military coup of 1980. It sounded sweet to the ears: finally, “the Constitution overshadowed by the coup was going to change considerably”. To be more accurate, that was how the amendment was presented to the masses by AKP. Although many changes had been made to the Constitution since 1982, AKP built its propaganda operations around the theme of “Turkey finally made democratic”. The smidgen of truth in the propaganda was this: the coup leaders would finally go on trial. The act in the Constitution maintaining that the coup could not be prosecuted was being abolished. As you know from the previous chapter, no one was ever brought to trial, but this wave of giddiness was encouraged right up to the referendum. Tayyip Erdoğan, Prime Minister at the time, worked his hardest for an amendment that all the other parties either opposed or were sceptical about. He even held one of his public rally crying sessions, which, as later research revealed, he unfailingly performed before each election. The worst part of it was that he cried over a subject that everyone in Turkey who had worked for justice, equality and freedom had also shed tears over.

Do you remember the name Erdal Eren from the previous chapter? From the lectern of the National Assembly, Erdoğan once again expertly confronted his dissidents with an ethical choice as he tearfully read the last letter of Erdal Eren, hanged at seventeen after his “bone age” assessment was tampered with, as well as the letters of the other prisoners who were hanged in the coup of 12 September. Did we not also want the perpetrators of the coup to be brought to trial, for the torturers to be exposed? We did. But in return we had to give Mr Erdoğan what he wanted. And what was that? We must allow him to change the composition of the Constitutional Court’s members to favour the administration. We must also bar the Council of State from meddling with Erdoğan’s affairs. Also, if possible, we must allow the administration to determine who joins the High Council of Judges and Prosecutors, which up till now had been autonomous. Meaning, if we would like to see Erdal Eren’s killers in court, we would have to give him Didem Yaylalı. So we did. What occurred on the road to the referendum was a bit nauseating, to tell the truth. Those who claimed that this amendment would “compromise the division of powers principle” were accused of being “coup fanciers”. Intellectuals were once again divided, as they had been since the day AKP came to power, yet much more sharply this time. There were those who smiled sardonically before accusing dissidents of being “coup fanciers”, and those who scrambled in vain to explain to the oblivious public what the HCJP was and what the composition of this committee would entail. One slogan came to epitomise this period:

“Not enough, but yes!”

This meant: “Although this Constitution change falls short, we must still say yes.” It was a discourse propagated by the highbrow liberals who lent intellectual validity to the administration. The administration on its own could never have passed the constitutional change by the public in regular circumstances, but it was approved in the referendum thanks to this brilliant method of propaganda. Didem Yaylalı wasn’t the only one to die: soon enough, people pursuing their own lawsuits – political or otherwise – would openly advise one another at the courtroom entrance:

“If you’re not one of them, they won’t rule in your favour even if you’re in the right.”

Having had complete hold over the administration and legislation thanks to the Turkish electoral system, the party in power now had control over jurisdiction as well, the state’s only remaining independent power. If you were to ask, as an outsider, “How on earth is that possible? How can you fool an entire country?”, this is what led up to it all: Gleichschaltung!

And among intellectuals Gleichschaltung was the rule, so to speak. But not among the others. And I never forgot that. I left Germany dominated by the idea – of course somewhat exaggerated: Never again! I shall never again get involved in any kind of intellectual business. (Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, 2005)

Gleichschaltung … for non-German speakers, it is impossible to even read at first, let alone enunciate. Yet it is a concept that, once defined, many people in Turkey would react to with, “Oh, right! That business!” Let me divulge the explanation made by the editor of the book cited above:

“Political coordination. A term that describes widespread surrender to the changing political climate of the Nazi era (in order to secure one’s own position or find a job).”

Hannah Arendt, the political theorist and writer who witnessed the Nazi era, adds that the surrender in question is not made under duress imposed by the administration but completely willingly. It is this willingness that brought Arendt to the point of saying, “Damn all intellectuals straight to Hell!” It is the kind of willingness that anyone with a modicum of common sense who was close to the Istanbul intelligentsia during the past decade knows all too well. The literates who give oral reports no one asked for, the intellectuals who get in line without being commanded to, the “administration appraisal contests” that baffled even the powers that be. Gleichschaltung is a rather stale subject for us since the intellectual and political hegemony created by these “volunteers” was – thankfully! – eradicated by the Gezi protests. Stale, but still relevant.

My journalist friend Nick Ashdown, who works in Turkey, told me one day:

“Turkey’s like a prison.”

I thought he was going to talk about being oppressed, the violation of human rights or something of that sort. But what he said was something different:

“Just like in prison, you have to become a member of a political gang to save your life!”

Absolutely correct. There is, however, another important issue.

Those who’ve mingled with the Istanbul intelligentsia will know. There is actually only one major group. It is the gang of the Wholehearteds, those who are keen to ride whatever political or intellectual wave is currently trending. The Wholehearteds gang has fought tooth and nail since AKP’s first day in power to advertise the ruling class as harbingers of democracy. After the Gezi protests, they are no longer held in the same esteem. So much so that even Neil Faulkner, in the introduction to the Turkish edition of his book A Marxist History of the World, says:

“Turkey will not return to its pre-Taksim routine. A new age of protest has begun.”

In the years before Gezi, however, when AKP was intellectually relevant as well as in power, as thousands were prosecuted and imprisoned unlawfully and in political trials, it was all very hazy. Many intellectuals, writers and journalists feared not the wrath of the ruling elite but excommunication from the intelligentsia. Being the spoilsport while everyone else...

Índice

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Yesterday
• Today/Morning
• Tomorrow: “What will become of this bridge of ours?”
• Index