5 Jun 2017 | News and features, Turkey, Turkey Uncensored
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Journalist Murat Aksoy has been detained since his first arrest on 3 September 2016. Above, Aksoy with his wife Şehriban, daughter Zehra Duru and son Ali Emre.
Journalist Murat Aksoy was arrested twice during the government’s investigations into Turkey’s failed coup of 15 July.
On 6 June, prosecutors filed an indictment seeking two life sentences for Aksoy and 12 other defendants.
His first arrest was on 3 September 2016 on suspicion of being involved with the Fethullah Gülen network — an Islamist group allegedly behind the attempted coup, officially called the Fethullahist Terrorist Organisation (FETÖ) by the regime.
A court ordered Aksoy released on 31 March pending trial, but before he even left Silivri Prison he was detained again along with 13 others, this time on charges of “attempting to overthrow the government”.
The charges are baffling, according to his wife of 17 years, Şehriban Aksoy. “When the headscarf was banned, he always wrote articles against the ban. We are speaking of a man who stated at every opportunity that the state doesn’t have the right to interfere in anyone’s outfit.”
Except for a brief period at the Millet newspaper, Aksoy did not work at any news organisations believed to be affiliated with the Gülen group — something that is now considered a crime. He wasn’t even religious, according to Şehriban.
“Our families are from Tunceli, we are Alevi,” his wife says, referring to a religious minority group in Turkey, whose practices and beliefs often fall outside the scope of Islam, although there are those who argue that it is part of the faith. “Being an Alevi, he defended people’s right to wear the headscarf; their freedom. This [imprisonment] has happened to someone defending [this right]. He hasn’t written a single line in his entire life praising FETÖ.”
He has worked for many outlets. When they conducted the first wave of the post-coup arrests, he hosted a radio programme on YÖN FM, a pro-Republican People’s Party (CHP) radio station. A government minister once featured on his programme. He also worked for eight years at Yeni Şafak, a pro-government daily.
At the time of this dismissal, the couple’s son Ali Emre had just been born. “We needed an income. That’s why he agreed to write for Millet when the newspaper made an offer,” Şehriban said. The outlet was shuttered under the first cabinet decree issued under Turkey’s state of emergency rule, which was introduced after the coup attempt.
A life of journalism
Aksoy was born in 1968 in Erzincan, although his birth year on his ID card is 1972. It is a common practice in rural Turkey for children to sometimes be officially registered a few years after their actual birth.
According to his wife and many others who know him, Aksoy is a sentimental and emotional man who easily gets teary-eyed. This may be because of his background, Şehriban says. When Aksoy was young, his family moved to Istanbul where his father owned a grocery store. When he was in the first grade, his mother died after a long illness. With his father busy working, Aksoy was often left in the care of his father’s sister-in-law.
The family lived in Okmeydanı, a predominantly Alevi neighbourhood in Istanbul. This is where Aksoy and Şehriban met as children. “We both lived on the street where Berkin was shot,” Şehriban remembers, referring to Berkin Elvan, a 14-year-old boy who was injured during the Gezi protests when a police officer aimed a gas canister at his head. Elvan died following 269 days in a coma.
Aksoy attended the Kabataş High School in Istanbul. After graduation, he studied business management at Erciyes University in Kayseri, although he never worked in business. Shortly after graduating from the university in the early 1990s, he worked briefly for the newspaper Radikal, and then at various civil society organisations. During his time at the Islamist Yeni Şafak, where “he never hid his true identity [as an Alevi],” according to his wife.
Days filled with work and kids
Aksoy was fired by Yeni Şafak in the constrained atmosphere in the months after the anti-government Gezi Park protests of 2013. In the columns he wrote at the time, Aksoy had criticised the government’s brutal approach toward peaceful protesters. “They first cut his column down to fewer days. Then they slowly drove him away just the way they slowly drove us away from Silivri Prison that night,” his wife says.
He was finally terminated by the paper in early January 2014 when he expressed an opinion about the government’s handling of a political crisis following a December 2013 corruption scandal in which four ministers and members of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s family were implicated.
After he left Yeni Şafak, Aksoy worked exclusively from home. He would get up at around 7am, read the newspapers and take notes while having breakfast, and then send his daughter to school. He later worked in his study, writing articles or preparing for television programmes where he often appeared as a commentator. He would go grocery shopping or go on walks with his wife. When his daughter got home from school, Aksoy usually helped her with her homework.
In addition to writing for various newspapers, Aksoy worked as a consultant for the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and he was on the parliament payroll. This was an important means of financial support for the family, but it was cut off after his arrest by the parliament administration. Şehriban, who has to take care of two small children, doesn’t have a job.
The case against Murat Aksoy
Although Aksoy was arrested for aiding FETÖ through his work, his accusers “can’t cite a single article which serves this alleged purpose,” says Şehriban.
He is being represented by a prominent human rights lawyer, Yaman Akdeniz, who was nominated for a 2015 Freedom of Expression Award for his work defending online rights. Aksoy was also accused of having prior knowledge of the coup plot because he had warned viewers in a program on pro-CHP Halk TV that there were rumours of a coup preparation.
The night when Şehriban and her family waited for Aksoy’s release in vain has been a major trauma for the family. “It took me a full week to recover. You have these crazy thoughts, you say to yourself ‘let this end now’. It was like a nightmare,” she says. “While they were kept in police custody for 15 days in between their release and second arrest, I thought at least we could talk on the phone every two weeks when he was in prison, but they don’t let you do that in detention.”
For many of the families caught up in the coup trials, the hardest part is managing the feelings of their children. Aksoy and Şehriban have two, a son and a daughter: Ali Emre is two-years-old and Zehra Duru is 10.
Ali Emre’s second birthday took place about a month after her father was arrested. “He has been growing more quickly after his father’s arrest. He sometimes takes his father’s photograph to bed with him and kisses is,” Şehriban says. “The children miss their father immensely. I take them to see their father once a month during open visits.”
Aksoy also misses his children. “The last time we visited, Ali Emre bit his ear, but his father didn’t notice; he was so thrilled to be holding his son. I gave him a tissue, and he asked me why. He had no idea his ear was bleeding,” his wife says.
For the first few months of Aksoy’s imprisonment, the family told Duru that her dad had gone to a writers’ camp to work on a report with fellow writers. Into the fourth month, they had an honest conversation with her. “I explained to her that her father is a good man and he is in prison because of a thought crime. Now she knows, she says that her father is in prison because he defended what’s right,” Şehriban says.
The family was lucky in comparison with many others who were imprisoned in the coup-related trials: Duru’s friends at school didn’t stop talking to her.
The night when her father wasn’t released despite the court ruling was among the hardest moments for the little girl. “Duru wanted to drive with me to prison to pick him up. I convinced her to stay at home, and I said ‘your father will be here when you wake up in the morning’. I promised her,” Şehriban says. “The next morning, she woke up and started going into every room inside the house, looking for her father. It was perhaps more difficult than when he was arrested for the first time. Then she started yelling at me: ‘You are a liar, you lie!’ Our relationship was horrible for an entire month.”
Şehriban is thankful her husband isn’t mistreated in prison, but quickly adds that he and his fellow inmates don’t trust prison food. At meal times, they buy ready-made soup mixes and canned food from the prison cafeteria.
Not everything has been nightmarish through the ordeal. Opposition politicians have been supportive. CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu publicly said of Aksoy: “I am as certain that he [is not related to any terror groups] as I am certain of myself.”
“But when they were arrested for the second time, I knew that this was something else. They couldn’t satisfy their wrath. They should just tell us that he is in prison because of his critical views. They did the same thing to Sözcü,” his wife says, referring to recent operations where two employees of the newspaper, which is staunchly secular and also outspokenly anti-government, were arrested on “FETÖ” related charges.
Sunlight in the doctor’s office
Although Aksoy was never subject to any physical abuse, he has had difficulty coping with being in prison. “He cried a lot,” remembers Şehriban.
Like most other journalists imprisoned in the coup investigation, Aksoy cannot see the other journalists kept at Silivri Section-9. He shares a cell with singer-turned-journalist Atilla Taş and journalist Gökçe Fırat Çulhaoğlu, and those are the only two people whom he can have conversations with. They are allowed in the open-air briefly in very tiny courtyards, which are covered by wired fences all around, making it impossible to get a full view of the sky.
Aksoy has started seeing the prison psychiatrist. He finds the sessions helpful, but what he enjoys most is visiting the doctor’s office. As Şehriban explains: “You get to see a different scenery. For example, there is an artificial plant in the room, which makes him really happy. There are medicine cabinets; files with the names of his fellow journalists on them. Also, at the doctor’s office, he says gets a lot of sunlight. He says he deliberately places his chair in the sun; that he regrets those days when he never once even looked up in the sky when he was free.”[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]
Turkey Uncensored is an Index on Censorship project to publish a series of articles from censored Turkish writers, artists and translators.
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24 Apr 2017 | News and features, Turkey, Turkey Uncensored
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With the hollowing out of the Turkish media landscape in recent years, honest coverage on the night of the historic referendum was rare. Only an hour or so after the polls closed, viewers across the nation left most of the sycophantic television networks and focused on the only one they believed was airing content worthy of their interest.
Murdoch-owned Fox TV’s openly secular and mildly nationalistic anchormen broke the news that there was something seriously wrong with the vote counting. Hour after hour, they featured the leaders of the No camp – those opposed to significantly increasing the powers of president Recep Tayyip Erdogan – and allowed them to speak critically about the results.
What these journalists did should not be considered extraordinary. They were simply doing their job by giving the referendum the fair and diverse coverage it deserved. But in Turkey, this was extraordinary: a single TV channel broke from its shackles, defied self-censorship and ended up with record-high ratings. Fox TV’s staff knew there was a growing public appetite for real news.
I personally witnessed this hunger on several occasions. Some of the news analysis posted on my personal blog, NAR, in which I dug into the emergency rule and the purge drew tens of thousands of readers from all directions. Most recently, my article about the content of a top-secret EU report on the coup at the Cologne-based Turkish-Kurdish independent news site Artigercek was read by more than 100,000 people in 48 hours.
It’s no wonder then that Fox TV was bombarded by AKP supporters who took to social media both during and after the broadcast, calling its coverage “treason”. These trolls demanded public prosecutors investigate the content. Their anxiety was, from their vantage point, justified: in a society where up to 88% of the public get news from TV sources, the Fox broadcasts would have an impact, penetrating the seemingly solid ground on which Erdogan and his supporters stand.
Yet it was only a glimmer of hope for the bulk of Turkish society, separated into two distinct camps by Erdogan’s ruthless desire for authoritarian rule. But the Fox referendum coverage at least gave optimists the ability to think that no matter how hard the oppression becomes, Turkey’s resilient journalists will do their best to resist.
The referendum race took place on “unlevel ground”, as international monitors described it, because Turkey’s media landscape has been warped. As a vital part of his strategic plan to take Turkey on the authoritarian path, Erdogan and his team, backed by the increasingly subservient judiciary, and sycophantic media proprietors, have meticulously and systematically narrowed the space for independent journalism since Gezi Park protests.
Since the summer of 2013, we have been forced to witness mass layoffs, detentions and the brutal shuttering or seizing of nearly 200 privately owned media outlets were brutally shut down or seized. The punitive measures had two key components: TV broadcasts were kept under strict scrutiny and the proprietors of the channels were either bribed with large contracts or simply threatened with closure. There was also a deliberate move to demolish the Cihan News Agency’s powerful network, which had been key to an independent monitoring of earlier elections. Both actions worked successfully for Erdogan’s autocratic architecture.
As of 16 April 2017, the only two independent TV channels remaining are Fox TV and Halk TV. The vote counting was covered only by the Anatolian Agency, which is entirely under the rigid control of the ruling AKP. It was still remarkable that Turkey’s crippled and tarnished journalism could find a breathing space and reach out to public.
One wonders what the result of the referendum would have been if proper and balanced media coverage had taken place. Most probably the No camp would have benefited. But the ugly reality is that self-censorship has become normal and internalised in Turkey, especially since the last summer’s aborted coup. Neither investigative reporting nor public debate now exists.
The overwhelming majority of journalists who have been jailed – including the recently detained Die Welt correspondent Deniz Yücel – dared to dig into the corruption schemes that include, allegedly, the president and his family. Nearly all those behind bars – excluding Kurdish journalists, who find themselves targetted for many additional reasons – are editors, columnists and pundits who have tried to keep corruption and abuses of power under the spotlight.
In the post-referendum era, the restrictive conditions will remain unchanged or get worse. Erdogan will inevitably see the media as being responsible for his narrow victory of 51.4 %. Rather than ease his iron grip on journalism, the president knows he has to win the elections in August 2019 to secure his way to one-man rule. He has an invaluable instrument with which to strangle the media, which became more obvious when, following the referendum, he extended emergency rule by another three months. Have no illusions that the state of emergency will be discontinued before the next election and expect even greater pressure in the coming months.
The signs in that direction are strong enough: four consecutive indictments in the past two months targeting various groups of critical journalists – most of them now in jail – have seen calls for aggravated lifetime imprisonment. The case of Cumhuriyet daily is a prime example: the court was remarkably slow in defining a date for proceedings and then set the date for late July. All those in jail awaiting to be trialled in this case will now spend an additional three months behind bars. Meanwhile, the arrest of the newspaper’s accountant implies that the authorities are intent on weakening it — perhaps to extinction. Similar pressure should also be expected over the already strained Doğan Media Group.
Whether or not Fox TV will also be punished for its election coverage remains to be seen, but take it for granted that no critical pocket of journalism will remain unharmed. No wonder why many independent journalists are busy these days contemplating whether or not moving their base beyond Turkey’s borders will save their noble profession.
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Turkey Uncensored is an Index on Censorship project to publish a series of articles from censored Turkish writers, artists and translators.
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3 Apr 2017 | News and features, Turkey, Turkey Uncensored
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Enough is Enough, a play formed as a gig, tells the stories of real people about sexual violence, through song and dark humour. It is written by Meltem Arikan, directed by Memet Ali Alabora, with music by Maddie Jones, and includes four female cast members who act as members of a band.
While touring Wales recently with my new play Enough Is Enough, I thought about what I experienced with my earlier work in Turkey. But which Turkey?
In the so-called “New Turkey”, everything is being surveilled by the government, from plays and books to everything you share on social media. There were no undercover Welsh police or prosecutors sitting in the audience in Newport or Pontypridd.
We designed Enough is Enough as a touring project. We went to 21 different Welsh venues in 21 different places, north, south, east and west, in less than a month. Audience members had strong positive reactions and some suggested that the production should be taken into schools. In the New Turkey even thinking about taking the play to schools would be enough to be accused of something unimaginable. If you dared sing the songs sung in Enough is Enough, you can be sure you would receive a violent reaction.
When you confront reality in a direct way, even if it is through art, governments around the world do not want to hear your voice. The New Turkey’s government is only an extreme example. When you speak truths, governments do not want you to be heard – they do not want you at all.
Yet when you show reality in a direct way, when you slap the audience with pain, the reaction becomes the same everywhere. First they are shocked, then they find you unusual, but in the end they compliment you for doing it.
During our tour of Wales, people let us into their hearts, looked after us and many venues promised to invite us again. Audience members shared their stories with us. Many wanted to work with us, others supported us unconditionally.
After every performance we had “shout it all out” sessions. We heard repeatedly how many of the issues we confront on stage – sexual violence, oppression and misogyny – are being swept under the carpet because people don’t like to discuss them.
These sessions took me back to a time before I wrote Mi Minor, the play accused of being a rehearsal for the Gezi Park protests in 2013. A time before I had to leave the country because of those accusations. A time before the innovations in the New Turkey was not as horrifyingly obvious as they are now. A time when the AKP, the ruling party of Turkey, was backed not just by the liberals in Turkey but liberals around the world. Back then I was told I was wrong about the government. It was in 2007 that I wrote a play entitled I am Breaking the Game.
That play premiered in Zurich and toured to Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Istanbul and Ankara. No matter where it was performed there was a particular reaction that stuck with me: “These issues are not our issues, they belong to the East.”
I was inspired by the stories of people I know personally. I was in touch with the victims of domestic violence, honour killings, rape, incest and sexual abuse. I knew all stories were true. So I wasn’t sure why then so many didn’t see these issues as theirs. I searched and searched for this place far away from everyone and everything, where all these horrible things keep happening, called the “East”. Eventually I found myself in the West.
After graduating from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, actor Pinar Ogun felt inspired by Breaking the Game. She felt angry that the run of the play was short in Turkey and she became passionate — almost obsessed — to stage it in London. She tried to convince her instructors at LAMDA, artistic directors of various venues and theatre friends to make it happen. She even introduced me to a couple of people who showed interest, but the reaction was again the same: “Of course these issues are very important but these issues are not our issues, they belong to the East. We resolved these issues in the 1970s. Such plays, performances have been done in the past. These are very old discourses.”
Laurie Penny was one of the only people who had a different reaction. She interviewed me nine years ago: “However much she is hounded by Turkish authorities and tutted at by European theatre goers, one thing is certain: Meltem Arikan is not about to roll over and hush. And thank goodness for that.”
When slapped in the face does it hurt less in the West than in the East?
Why is it considered a social phenomenon when women are killed in the name of honour in the East but an individual crime when women are killed in the name of passion, obsession or jealousy in the West? Child marriage in the East is seen as a nightmare. But, in the West, does calling pregnant children “teen moms” prevent their lives from turning into a nightmare?
After I was forced to leave Turkey and began living in Wales, Ogun restarted her campaign to stage I am Breaking the Game. A year ago, I finally said yes. I’ve been observing a West that has been dazzled by the light of past enlightenments, alienated from its very own issues, attached to the chains of concepts and utterly disconnected to its reality. With Ogun’s company, Be Aware Productions, we applied to Arts Council Wales for research and development funding. But even after the grant was awarded, I was afraid I would still hear the echoes of the long-dead rejection: “These issues are not our issues, they belong to the East”, “the stories of the East”, “The East…”
My rejections, my questions, my issues.
During our research process we met with Welsh sex workers, organisations that help and support women facing violence, and victims. My initial idea was to replace these new stories with the stories in the play, but then I decided to write a new play entirely.
I developed the play with stories of abuse, rape and incest from Britain, all true stories, all had actually happened in these lands. Sometimes I used the exact words of the victims, sometimes I made them more poetic, but most importantly, in order to reach the hearts of the audience, I decided to use the magic of music and that’s how the idea of making it a gig-theatre came to be.
My rejections, my questions, my issues.
When writing Enough is Enough, my intention was to become a megaphone to the people who are facing violence here, to point to the elephant in the room by talking about incest and to underline the fact that when it is about the existence of women and men, those in the West and those in the East were the same.
I dare to say this because I can see blatantly that no matter how much cultures, cuisines, languages, clothes, ethnical backgrounds have managed to differentiate each and every one of us, no matter whether we were born in the West or in the East, we’re all forced to have the life forms designed by the patriarchy and so we are all dominated by the same fears for thousands of years.
Just like the East, the West also lives in its own virtual world built on the concepts of the patriarchal culture. And the relative comfort of this world doesn’t mean a thing for the victims. Just like Turkey, just like France, just like Yemen, just like the USA, women, children and men in Britain become victims. Abuse, rape and incest endlessly continue to exist with all its savagery within society, behind closed doors. The pain and consequences of this ongoing violence continue to be ignored. And while children become the children of fear, not the children of their parents, all around the world violence continues to beget violence. Those who face their pain empathise with victims, whereas those who escape their pain empathise with the perpetrators.
During the Wales tour, the reaction from people who were violated, who knew what violence was, who did not escape from their pain, who faced themselves, who were not in denial of their experiences, in short, the reaction from people who knew the pain of reality, was warm, open and stripped-down. We received the biggest support from women’s organisations, women, some brave men, young people and the LGBT community.
On 8 April 2017 at the Wales Millennium Centre and from the 26-29 April at Chapter Arts Centre, we will continue to say “Enough is Enough”. This time our goal is to reach promoters and artistic directors for an England tour. We want to make our voice be heard in England, and shout “Enough is Enough” together with the English audience.
I really wonder about the reaction of the audience in England. Will they be as open as the Welsh audience or will they keep repeating their apologies while saying these are the East’s problems. The irony is that this time we will be coming from the West, at least west of England.
Yet, whatever the reaction of the audience in England may be, I know for sure there won’t be any audience members who try to organise a mob against us.
Whatever the reaction of the audience in England may be, I know for sure the play would never be banned with the accusation of “disturbing the family order”.
Whatever the reaction of the audience in England may be, I know for sure that newspapers won’t run a smear campaign against the actors because of our play.
Whatever the reaction of the audience in England may be, I know for sure I won’t receive any death threats just because I dared to address violence against women. [/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]
Turkey Uncensored is an Index on Censorship project to publish a series of articles from censored Turkish writers, artists and translators.
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27 Jan 2017 | News and features, Turkey, Turkey Uncensored
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Turkey Uncensored is an Index on Censorship project to publish a series of articles from censored Turkish writers, artists and translators.
[/vc_column_text][vc_video link=”https://youtu.be/LzWBgzJrQdo”][vc_column_text]As tens of thousands of women took to the streets around the world on 21 January, another woman, the Turkish MP Şafak Pavey was being treated in hospital for injuries sustained during a physical assault on the floor of the Grand National Assembly during debates on constitutional amendments.
Pavey had just delivered a moving speech in which she warned that the presidential system being considered would bring about unchallenged one-man rule. The “bandits”, as she called them, a group of women MPs belonging to the ruling AKP, attacked her and two other MPs, Aylin Nazlıaka, an independent, and Pervin Buldan from the Kurdish HDP. The AKP MPs were said to be acting under a male colleague’s orders.
The attack contrasted sharply with the pictures of enthusiastic women from around the United States and the world committed to sisterhood and equality. The distance between the two extremes might seem to be yawning but isn’t. In Turkey, the gap opened up in just four short years.
The empowered mood created by women marching for equal rights and uniting their voices in opposition reminded me of the heady days of 2013 when the anti-government Gezi Park protests rocked Turkey. Like the demonstrators in DC and London, people all over Turkey took to the streets to raise a chant against our own Trump: President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In Gezi, the seeds of dissent spread through social media and bloomed across the country just as the women’s march did across the globe. It was just the beginning, or so we thought.
After a brutal suppression that left at least 10 dead and over 8,000 injured, the Gezi spirit, that united voice, faded away. The most significant political heritage was the “Vote and Beyond” organisation, which launched an incredibly effective election monitoring network during the June 2015 elections. Thanks to that group and the popular young Kurdish leader Selahattin Demirtaş’s energy, the outcome of the polls reflected the full and complete picture of Turkey’s population in parliament. The combined opposition parties were the majority in the assembly and to continue governing, the AKP would be forced to form a coalition. Then things happened.[/vc_column_text][vc_single_image image=”85130″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][vc_column_text]As the ceasefire with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) collapsed and armed conflict resumed, coalition negotiations ground into political deadlock as the summer wore on. Erdogan called a snap election for that November that lined up with his political ambitions. Less than a month before the election, a staggering terror attack rocked Ankara and ongoing deaths of security personnel in the country’s south-east added to a grim mood. At the polls, the AKP regained its majority in parliament. Though the governing party was nominally back in full control, it lacked political legitimacy and popular support, both of which would be delivered by the rogue military units that staged the failed July 15 coup and paved the way for Erdogan’s emergency rule.
Witch hunts are a strange thing. Even if you spot one when it’s getting underway, it’s always too late to stop it.
After the election, the political opposition was locked out of enacting change through parliament. It was further paralysed by Erdogan’s “shock and awe” tactics, which saw the leaders of the parties assaulted on the floor of the assembly or imprisoned on fabricated terror charges. Opposition voters are too depressed now to remember the confident and exhilarating days of the Gezi protests.
It would be a mistake to dismiss Turkey’s experience as a unique case. There are parallels with the unfolding situations in Russia, Poland, Hungary and now the USA. The bullies of our interesting times are singing from the same hymn sheet, using identical language and narratives — power to the right people, experts and intellectuals are overrated, overturn the establishment. The forces of resistance must now share strategies as well. Opposition to the growing threat of illiberal democracy needs to network and be vocal or else our initial responses to the horrors and human rights violations — including the purge of Turkey’s press under emergency rule — would be a waste of time.
Here’s a small taste of where we failed in Turkey — a warning to Europeans and Americans of what not to do.
“No” is an intoxicating word that gives emotional fuel to the masses. After swimming in the slack waters of identity politics or concerning yourself with whether or not your avocados are fair trade, taking to the streets en masse for a proper cause is like a fresh breeze. But as we learned in Turkey, “No” can also be a dead end. It exists in a dangerous dependency on the what those in power are up to. It shouldn’t be mistaken for action as it is only a reaction.
“No” is unable to create a new political choice. It is an anger game that sooner or later will exhaust all opposition by splitting itself into innumerable causes intent on becoming an individual obstacle to the ruling power.
Make no mistake: the bullies of the world are united in a truly global movement. It is sweeping all before it. And it’s not just Putin, Trump, Erdogan or even Orban, it’s their minions, millions of fabricated apparatchiks that invade the political, social and digital spheres like multiplying gremlins.
What the opposition must do — what Turkey’s protesters failed to do — is strengthen the infrastructure, harden networks and open strong lines of communication between disparate groups whether at home or abroad. All those lefty student movements, marginalised progressive newspapers or resisting communities that are labelled as naïve or passé until now must coalesce around core campaigns and goals.
Failure to move beyond “No”, in Turkey’s case, has made alternative and potential political movements all but invisible. There are just three leftist newspapers in Turkey, three ghosts to break news about women MPs being beaten up. And that’s because we can’t move past “No” when others were shut down or silenced.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1485771885900-d32a2643-5934-8″ taxonomies=”8607″][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][/vc_column][/vc_row]
