The Lion and the Nightingale by Kaya Genç

Author:Kaya Genç [Genç, Kaya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781788316996
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2019-11-28T06:00:00+00:00

3

A summer of dissent

One hot morning in late June I was lying by a swimming pool in Tuscany when a novelist I admired rushed to tell me that ‘Erdoğan has just fainted’. The president, he said, felt unstable during prayer in a mosque. He collapsed in front of the other worshippers. Then he got up. He was healthy and he was ready to go back to the political scene. I was surprised that the Turkish president’s health was a concern even among foreigners. That story managed to reach me at a writers’ retreat far away from home where I was determined to keep news about Turkey out of my system.

Meanwhile Erdoğan’s thirst for stratagems seemed unwavering. In the first week of July, his main rival Kılıçdaroğlu reached Istanbul. Turkey arrested a second Amnesty International activist, mainly to supplement the narrative of ‘continued foreign meddling in Turkish affairs’. Over the past two decades, Kemalists had scrutinized NGOs like Greenpeace and Amnesty, and public figures like George Soros and his Open Society institutes. They accused anyone involved with them of being stooges. Kemalists characterized Erdoğan as a politician in the pay of such ideological groups. So he knew how to use that rhetoric. He had been victimized by it in the past.

The New York Times had published an article by Kılıçdaroğlu, titled ‘A Long March For Justice in Turkey’, in its 7 July edition. Erdoğan asked Turks to interpret the attention shown to Kılıçdaroğlu in respected American papers as part of foreign interventionism. In the first decade of his rule, when the New York Times, the Financial Times and The Economist supported Erdoğan, opposition parties had used the same argument. They presented themselves as nationalist foils to the foreign-backed leader.

And so, one week before the first anniversary of the 2016 coup, Erdoğan took up the reins once more. He rekindled public fears of foreign meddling in Turkish affairs. Many had forgotten about the Justice March by the time the president materialized at the foot of the Martyrs Bridge on the night of 15 July – the anniversary. Millions joined the nation-wide celebrations. Erdoğan thanked them for beating well-armed soldiers. He reminded Turks how thirty-four people died on the bridge, stuck in between Europe and Asia, and between those who wanted to upset the regime and others who wanted to defend it.

Now it was Erdoğan’s turn to march. He walked with families of the dead from his house in Kısıklı toward the bridge. He called coup soldiers unbelievers. ‘Just like today, they only had flags in their hands,’ he said of Turks who resisted them. ‘But they had an even stronger gun. Their belief.’

Meanwhile the feud with Germany escalated. Foreign minister Sigmar Gabriel demanded that Turkey free Peter Steudtner. This German citizen had been arrested alongside Amnesty International activists and other human rights defenders. ‘We are reorienting our policy toward Turkey,’ Gabriel warned.

Indeed that was what many other countries had been doing in the past year. Meanwhile citizens of Turkey were doing their best to reorient their lives to these new realities.

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