Turkey’s Writers Face Yet More Trials. By Aysegul Sert
On a sweltering
afternoon in Istanbul last summer, loud noises woke the Turkish novelist Aslı
Erdoğan from a nap. “Open, police! Open, or we will break the door,” a voice
called. When Erdoğan, an award-winning writer, unlocked her door, the cold
muzzle of an automatic rifle was placed against her chest. Soldiers in black
masks and bulletproof vests barged in, shouting “Clean!” as they moved through
each room. Erdogan, who is fifty years old, was alone in her apartment. The
men, Turkish special forces soldiers, left after the arrival of dozens of
members of the Turkish counterterrorism forces. As Erdoğan watched, men scoured
every corner of her apartment.
Erdoğan, who is not related to the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was informed that she was going to be charged with supporting terrorism. The basis for the criminal case, she was told, was her five years of writing articles and serving on the advisory board of a daily newspaper, Özgür Gündem, which the Turkish government said was linked to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, and which was shut down in 2016 but later reëmerged under a different name. After spending seven hours searching through the thirty-five hundred books in Erdoğan’s home library, the officers took six books on Kurdish history with them as evidence.
Erdoğan, who is not related to the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was informed that she was going to be charged with supporting terrorism. The basis for the criminal case, she was told, was her five years of writing articles and serving on the advisory board of a daily newspaper, Özgür Gündem, which the Turkish government said was linked to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, and which was shut down in 2016 but later reëmerged under a different name. After spending seven hours searching through the thirty-five hundred books in Erdoğan’s home library, the officers took six books on Kurdish history with them as evidence.
“Later, the judge
asked me about those books,” Erdoğan recalled in an interview earlier this
month, in Istanbul. “Is it a crime to read about Kurds in this country? Aren’t
they a part of this nation? Not to read about them should be a crime,” she
said, as she calmly smoked a cigarette.
When Erdoğan was
arraigned before a judge and told the charges she faced, she fainted. She was
charged under Article 302 of the Turkish penal code: disrupting the unity and
integrity of the state. She was held in solitary confinement for the next five
days - the first two of which she was deprived of water - and then jailed with
other female prisoners. On Erdoğan’s hundred and thirty-third day in prison,
she was given her first opportunity to defend herself in court. Looking thin
and tired, she delivered a statement to the judge hearing her case: “I will
read my testimony as if there is still rule of law in this country,” she
declared. The courtroom microphone was off, though, and the journalists present
could barely hear her. Later that night, Erdoğan was released from the Bakırköy
state prison, in Istanbul, to a cheering crowd of family and friends. She is
out of prison but barred from travelling outside the country, and her trial
resumed last week. It was her fourth court appearance since December. She faces
a life sentence if convicted.
In a separate trial
that began last week, seventeen journalists stand accused of serving as the
media arm of the
failed July, 2016, coup. They include Ahmet Altan, age sixty-seven, a
prominent novelist and journalist; and his younger brother, Mehmet Altan,
sixty-four, a distinguished academic and the author of forty books. Prosecutors
initially accused the Altans of sending “subliminal messages” to the plotters
of the failed coup. “It was the first time in my career that I heard this
term,” their lawyer, Veysel Ok, told me, smiling. “It was probably so for the
prosecutor who wrote the indictment as well.” All told, the brothers
have spent nearly three hundred days in jail awaiting trial… read more:
