8.11.2013 DEMOCRACY IN TURKEY? WHERE IS IT?
Between hannah festivities and the actual wedding of my niece, they left one day for resting! How thoughtful… We will start the day with a breakfast. One of the best parts of Turkish cuisine is its breakfasts. When I first moved to the USA, lack of access to proper Turkish breakfast items was a killer in terms of our adaptation to our new home. Our olives and various kinds of cheeses, with savory pastry and breads that go along with them were not easily available. Neither bagel and cheese, nor other sweet American breakfast items were cutting it for us. Until internet shopping was invented! Then, Turkish, Armenian, Palestinian food stores all over the country came to our help and America became truly home.
My maternal aunt Filiz, her daughter Muge, and grandson Bora had stayed at my brother’s house after the hannah night. Thus we made a plan to have breakfast at my mother’s/my house to start the day and left the rest to the spur of the moment. My aunt is a pharmacist, the only college graduate in my mother's family of their generation. Her daughter is a chemist, who is working on work place safety project, recently, I found out. Other than my core family, they are the only people I feel close to in my entire extended family, with whom I can share both intellectual and personal experiences. I got up early to make sure our breakfast was rich and healthy. Since nobody went to bed before 1-2 am the night before the breakfast started around 10 am and lasted until noon.
After breakfast we start discussing what we could do for the rest of the day. When my brother Mehmet and his wife Kezban come up with the offer of going to Karaburun for a beach day, I am ready with my bag as Kezban will later put it "in 30 seconds". We leave home in 15 minutes to head to a beautiful beach, secluded by an island right across from it, dividing a wide opening to the Aegean into two narrow canals. The water is crystal clear. Behind the narrow beach is a cafe, where we claim a table for drinks and snacks, and shade. Kezban's sister Sehnaz and her husband Ertan and their two adult daughters join us at the cafe. Sehnaz and I have a unique history. I not only know her from our community organizing days through common friends, but and as a result of that I later on, became the pediatrician for her children, who are now sitting across from me, elegant, intelligent, beautiful women. I first took care of Cansu, who is now a high school teacher and has become an activist herself! Later, I also took care of Goksu, her sister. They tell me the only reason they are at the beach is to see their "auntie Resmiye", that’s how they addressed me throughout their childhood. It is such a delight to have political adult conversations with both of my girls that came to my hands as newborns and grew up in and out of my practice for years before I left Turkey. They leave with the promise that we will stop by at their summer house for a cup of coffee on the way back.
Karaburun as we are leaving for Izmir
I had also called my best friends, who have a weekend house in one of the villages in Karaburun, where they not only spend most of their summer days, but also almost all their winter weekends as well. I am delighted to see them join us at the cafe after I have my first swim reaching out half way to the island (couldn’t dare heading to the island by myself in the choppy waters). I call somebody a best friend when you don't see them for years, perhaps, but once you get together, you catch up in a few minutes and move on as if that space in time never existed. That is the kind of friends Yildiray and Aysegul are for me, whom I have known for 25 years; we raised our children (Umut and Zeynep) together for ten years until I left Turkey for the USA. Umut, now is a rising star at Siemens working in Austria, and an eternal brother to my daughter. Yildiray is a physician specializing in occupational health, his wife is a special education teacher for autistic children. Whenever I see them, I like to discuss with them the politics in Turkey, since I trust their interpretation of events to the fullest.
Yildiray and Aysegul, being part of the same activist movement I was in, three decades ago, have started organizing the farmers in the Karaburun peninsula, who will have a demonstration against the government and its policies, which is full fledge exploiting the environment and selling public forests and beaches, and islands to their supporters left and right. I am proud of my friends. They tell me all about what happened during the Gezi Park protests that spread to the entire country after the police attacked the peaceful environmentalists in Istanbul in late May. They tell me about waking up at 2:30 am following the Gezi Park crackdown with the noise protesters had created in their residential neighborhood. I asked why at 2:30 in the morning: because the youth is online until late at night and social media had mobilized masses with some lag time. Following the crackdown, the Turkish media, almost fully controlled by the government and its partners/supporters was in deadly silence until a week after the protests. The only communication mode and information source was the social media for a long time.
They tell me how they rushed outside to join the young protesters and started walking toward the main road. After a while they headed downtown Izmir to discover there were thousands and thousands of people on the roads. This was only the beginning... They tell me about their own observations of police brutality, how police were cornering people in small groups to be able to beat them up to potential death, if not that, surely to significant injuries. They tell me about men with bats in hand hunting for protesters, especially female protesters to beat up. They are believed to be fundamentalist religious warriors, paramilitia, supporting AKP, Tayyip Erdogan's ruling party. We talk about what little we could do from the USA to contribute to the protests. We discuss how creative the new generation that we, the generation of 68 and the next one had lost hope in due to globalization and consumerism's take over. As much as we appreciate their creativity, my friends are as much worried about the lack of political leadership to bring all this reaction under one banner to tackle down the current rule and bring true democracy to Turkey. Our discussions generate more questions than answers, of course... However, it is still refreshing to hear my thoughts and concerns reflected back at me by my trusted friends, which bring a heightened awareness and knowledge to the table, on my part.
My brother and I talk a lot about Turkish politics, too. The so called "Ergenekon" crisis created by the government "came to an end" after many years of litigation before I left Turkey this time around. AKP created this conspiracy theory that the military, the academics, artists, journalists, the only common denominator among which was vocally opposing government policies had created a terrorist organization called Ergenekon and they were all were working on a plot to topple down the government. As a result of this theory, scores of men and women were incarcerated and kept in jail without a trial for years, some close to a decade. My brother tells me about the government agents hacking accounts of people and inserting provocative, conspiratorial files into their accounts to make them look like they were indeed part of a large conspiracy. He tells me, the defense had proven that there was electronic evidence that such material was inserted into accounts several years after the claimed dates of events (such as the files claimed to have been written in 2003 displaying the formatting of windows 2007, etc). Still, the judges were ignoring such evidence. This is how democratic Turkish political system is and free the judicial system is.
In my disbelief about "How can that be?" after his initial frustration with me such as "abla, you have become too Americanized, how can you believe that law prevails in Turkey with so many violations to democracy?". After calming him down with "Ok, brother, explain to me how this can happen, since they do claim Turkish state is a state of law". He then tells me very familiar stories on: judges who did consider such evidence, being excused from presiding over the Ergenekon trials and being exiled to the most remote provinces of the country, their promotions being delayed; attorneys defending Ergenekon defendants being harassed, even being incarcerated with imaginary ties to Ergenekon, themselves, to deprive those defendants of their rights to an attorney; prosecutors recognizing all false allegations, keeping their charges to lesser ones also being exiled, on and on, and on...
Ergenekon trials finally ended couple days ago, which led to another bout of demonstrations. Numerous individuals were convicted to a life term, couple of them to "two life term sentences" (!). Mehmet Ali Haberal, world renowned founding president of Baskent University in Ankara, was released due to a lesser conviction, for which he had had more than enough jail time during the stagnant trial process.Tthis is how democratic even the judicial system is in Turkey right now, under this government, which eliminated the separation between executive and judicial powers with the most recent fraudulent constitutional referendum.
Democracy? the west has been blowing AKP's whistle for a decade now claiming AKP is THE chance for Turkey to embrace democracy.... They either don't know AKP is abusing democracy as a tool for its own benefits, or are ignoring what AKP truly represents just because it serves the west's best interest, economically, for the time being. AKP represents Islamo-fascism as democratic and liberal Turkish people have been experiencing for a decade now, which the world has also witnessed during the last several months through government led, encouraged, applauded police brutality around Gezi Park and national uprising of late.
We almost bring the sun down to the horizon with all these discussions, when my brother announces it is time to return home. Understandable since we will make two more stops before arriving home near midnight one more time. we first stop at Mordogan, a lovely fishing coastal town midway between Karaburun and the highway leading to Izmir. Kezban's sister Sehnaz and her family have a summer house at a complex in the middle of olive groves in Mordogan, where multiple family members as well as many friends of theirs from the activist movement of the 70s have secured a summer home for themselves. It is in summary, a truly communal community, the culture of which prevails over the rest of the residents. The main characteristic of the community is openness and sharing in every way. Dinner tables are set in front of homes, all of which face each other across 4 feet wide alleys. Sharing food, mezes, grilled meat, is the mainstay as well as raki toasts. The cultural reminders make me recall Nazim Hikmet, my most favorite Turkish poet's lines: "sharing everything, everywhere, all the time, other than lover's lips...."
We pay a bayram visit to Kezban and Sehnaz's mother and father, who also have a summer home in the same complex. After enjoying a cup of Turkish coffee, each, we head to a fish restaurant. Every fish restaurant in Turkey is a festivity in and of itself. Most of them are very modest places, very consistent with the beautiful simplicity of beach life, preserved in places like Karaburun, Mordogan, Seferihisar, still resisting to savage commercialization of our beaches. The most spectacular aspect of each of these fish restaurants is their fridges in which the catch of the day is kept and displayed through transparent glass walls. My brother picks a huge six-pounder (over 2.5 kg) sea bass, which lives in the rocky shores of select coasts like Karaburun's. It is a beautiful creature, indeed and its taste, we will all testify to as “beyond this world”. I think of my dear friend Nukhet as I savor the fish, who would definitely say "it is mind-boggling" or "akla zarar", in Turkish. I smile, thinking, how world-wide even my free associations are... I concur one more time, I thoroughly enjoy being a world citizen, feeling at home in Turkey and Greece and Portugal and Guatemala and the USA, among other places I have been to, alike.
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| After devouring a 6 lb sea bass, everybody is content |
