Erdogan’s governmental crackdown expands itself every morning that Turkey wakes up to. He is demonizing every single intellectual that does not support him. Journalists, politicians, academics are getting arrested, more than 100.000 public officers lost their jobs and more than 50.000 people got arrested for being Fethullah Gulen supporters, who is a preacher, living in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania, supposedly to be the organiser of the failed 15th of July coup attempt.
Lastly, Osman Kavala, a well known Turkish businessman, civil society activist and human rights defender both in Turkey, in Europe, in the U.S. and also in the Middle East got detained by the police in an airport in Istanbul. After being held in custody for two weeks, he got arrested and now locates in the most popular prison, Silivri, where nearly all the journalists, writers and academics are being held.
One of them is Ahmet Sik. He is an investigative journalist, reporting for the alternative-Nobel Prize winner daily, Cumhuriyet. It is his second term in prison under Erdogan’s regime. First was back in the days when Erdogan was in a coalition with Fethullah Gulen. Together, they opened up cases called “Ergenekon”, “Sledgehammer” and so on so forth, to arrest the secularist military officers, academics, journalists and politicians, blaming them with planning a coup attempt against Erdogan’s regime.
Ahmet Sik wrote a book which enlightened the links between Erdogan and Gulen, also exposed Gulen’s supporters power in the Turkish Police Department. Erdogan declared that “some books are more dangerous than bombs” and did not let Mr. Sik publish his research; in fact, he got arrested. That is why Ahmet Sik’s case today is absurd.
After the failed coup attempt, Erdogan personalised governments and State’s power and became the one and only leader of Turkey. Nowadays he is using this power to silence all the opposing voices against him. Their stories or backgrounds does not matter. Reality is only an allusion for Erdogan, he does not care about it at all.
Osman Kavala, for example, always was who he is today. After the 1980 coup, he as a leftist helped opposing socialists and liberal democrats to publish their books and was one of the founders of Iletisim Publishing, which still is one of the biggest publishing houses in Turkey. He stood up for human rights, a cultural dialogue between the State and Kurds always pointed out the importance of democracy and represented his country in the West. President Erdogan is accusing him now to be the “Turkey’s Soros”. He possibly did forgot, but in his early years he sat down with Soros in a Davos meeting and talked about a westernised, democratic and religious Turkey, Osman Kavala did not.
Mr. Kavala is charged him with trying to overthrow the government and “attempting to abolish the constitutional order.” This accusation to the man, who always underlined democracy’s value in a country that suffered because of coups (and attempted coups) must be an insult for his personality.
Osman Kavala’s friend Doni Rodrik, who also have exposed the produced evidence of the old cases like Ergenekon and Sledgehammer, wrote an article for The New York Times. He described Mr. Kavala using these words: “As teenagers in Istanbul, Mr. Kavala and I were schoolmates. He distinguished himself at school with an interest in social causes and exuded an infectious enthusiasm about the possibility of making things better.” And evaluated his arrestment: “Someone like Mr. Kavala becomes a target precisely because he represents everything that Mr. Erdogan’s regime is trying to obliterate: a thriving and independent civil society, tolerance for intellectual diversity, cultural autonomy for Kurds and other minorities, cooperation with nongovernmental networks abroad.”
Whatever reason they produce, it is clear that Turkish intellectuals are the targets of Erdogan’s expanding crackdown. Ahmet Sik and/or Osman Kavala are just minor examples. Every morning we wake up to another news that is making our chests tighten. Who will be the next?
Photography: Wiktor Dabkowski/Deutsche Presse-Agentur, via Associated Press
