Under the Shadow: Rage and Revolution in Modern Turkey - Brossura

Genç, Kaya

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1784534579 ISBN 13: 9781784534578

Casa editrice: I.B. Tauris, 2016

Riassunto

Turkey stands at the crossroads of the Middle East--caught between the West and ISIS, Syria and Russia, and governed by an increasingly hard-line leader. Acclaimed writer Kaya Genc has been covering his country for the past decade.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Kaya Genc is a novelist and essayist from Istanbul. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Financial Times, and New Humanist.

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Under The Shadow

Rage and Revolution in Modern Turkey

By Kaya Genç

I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd

Copyright © 2016 Kaya Genç
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78453-457-8

Contents

Preface, vii, 
Introduction Speaking Out, 1, 
Chapter One Young, Turk and Furious, 23, 
Chapter Two Turkish Rebellion as a Fine Art, 73, 
Chapter Three All the Anger That's Fit to Print, 131, 
Chapter Four Rise of Turkey's Angry Young Entrepreneurs, 185, 
Epilogue, 000, 
Further Reading, 215, 
Index, 219, 

CHAPTER 1

Young, Turk and Furious

In Turkey, it is considered uncool to not be a rebel at college. The law-abiding student who follows every rule is called an inek (cow). Girls like rebellious boys; boys fall for rebellious girls. The future prospects of a rebel are seen as more attractive than those of an academic achiever. The classic 'how we met' story of the parents of my generation (and the parents of most of the interviewees for this book) features a rebellious boy and a rebellious girl who meet in the classroom or the canteen of a college. They attend marches together; they look after one another under the oppressive regime of this or that prime minister or general; they get married under interesting and dangerous times, backgrounded by their country's politics, which they recount to their children when old age presses upon them.

Remember: this is the country where the jeunne Turks phenomenon was born. The term originally referred to a new generation of Ottoman citizens who wanted to reform their country before Young Turk gained an international meaning. 'A young person eager for radical change to the established order' is the definition offered by the Oxford Dictionary: to be a young Turk means to be ontologically a rebel.

Today, if a Turkish citizen thinks of her ancestors who lived a century ago, it is this image of a jeunne Turk that materializes in front of her: being a rebel in our youth is in our genes, as it were. All the best minds in Ottoman society and the Turkish republic, at least those in the school books, were rebels. Although they had diametrically opposing views – from defending shari'a rule to arguing in support of a working-class dictatorship inside Turkey – those figures have been fighting the state and risking prosecution and long prison sentences for defending their views for at least a century. The call of the rebellious spirit is rarely unanswered here: only the dull and the uninspired do not rebel in their youth. Such is the conventional wisdom.

When young people rebel here, the elderly and the powerful are expected to listen, which they only very rarely do. The Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid did not listen to the republican youth when it rebelled; the president of single-party rule, Ismet Inonu did not listen to the communist youth when it rebelled; the 60 years of Turkish democracy have seen youth and state in constant struggle, which has been mostly an outcome of this denial of having a dialogue with the youth.

Not that Turkey's youth is eager to compromise in any political debate: doing so is seen as weak and unacceptable. Omurgasiz (spineless) is among the worst things you can be called in Turkey; selling out one's youthful ideals, making u-turns, succumbing to any form of compromise are seen as dastardly acts. People with passionate, uncompromising and never-bending wills are preferred over those with more conciliatory, diplomatic and seemingly opportunistic characteristics. The same applies to private relationships (thus the attraction of the rebellious youth) and the political sphere alike: leaders, of both left- and right-wing ideologies, are expected to have perfectly consistent life stories wherein the devotion to their political cause is not once compromised.

Such is the environment into which young people are born in Turkey. No wonder the country's young progressives and conservatives are so stubborn in their defence of their political ideas: anger, rebellion and youth have become synonymous in the historical and political psyche of Turkey. The jeunne Turk spirit of the 1900s had stood the test of geography and time.

* * *

On the night of 27 May 2013, a 21-year-old college freshman was returning to his flat in Istanbul's old Armenian neighbourhood Samatya when he received some alarming news. Minutes earlier a demolition machine had attempted to cut down a tree in a public park in Taksim that the freshman, Cenk Yürükogullari, had spent the past week campaigning to save. Upon seeing the news on his Twitter timeline, Yürükogullari instinctively checked his watch; it was 11.30 p.m.; the last buses from Samatya to Taksim had already departed. But he could still take a dolmus – one of those large cars, a mixture of a cab and a bus, that only starts when it is filled with passengers. Yürükogullari, a student of conservation, telephoned a friend, a master's student in the field of archaeology who lived close by in the same neighbourhood, to ask whether he would like to come with him. The answer was positive; their dolmug moved from Samatya at midnight; half an hour later they reached Taksim. Most residents of Istanbul use those vehicles to return home from their night shifts or to go to Taksim for a bit of late-night entertainment. Yürükogullari and his friend's ride to Taksim was about quite a different matter. Those two angry young men were about to start the biggest protest Turkey had ever witnessed in its modern history.

It was a warm and damp night, heady with the scents of the 606 trees that filled the 98,000-square-metre park lying in front of them, concealed in darkness. As they walked among the black trees, Yürükogullari and his friend saw shadows moving swiftly from one tree to another. More than two dozen people had congregated near the exit of the park. As they neared those shadows they distinguished shapes of construction workers behind demolition machines, who were arguing with protestors. Now Yürükogullari was able to identify those shadowy figures: over the course of the previous week he had worked with them near the entrance of the Taksim subway station, distributing handouts which demanded an immediate halt to the construction, inside Gezi Park, of an Ottoman-style barracks that would serve as a shopping mall – a weird and unpopular idea which they were sure would upset the public if only people heard about the project through their protest movement.

Having temporally stopped the workers, the 30-strong group of protestors started holding a small forum to discuss what to do next. While that happened, Yürükogullari and his friend pitched two small tents inside the park. They joked about possible parallels between what they were getting ready to do (occupy Gezi Park) and Occupy protests in Wall Street, New York. 'Just imagine our protest snowballing into something like Occupy Taksim!' Yürükogullari joked. 'How about Occupy Istanbul?' his friend joked back. 'No way,' Yürükogullari responded, 'that would never happen.'

After the forum about future strategies, one protestor removed a canvas signboard placed there by municipality workers. When Yürükogullari got his hands on the object, he couldn't help but smile – the young man had been doing graffiti since his high school years. He disappeared into the darkness, only to return moments later with a can of paint. It was recycle time. Yürükogullari sprayed the words 'We Are On Duty To Protect Gezi Park' on the canvas. This was the first graffiti of the movement – there would be many more.

That night the young conservation student tried to sleep in his small tent where there was little space and air. He decided to get out and take a walk in the park. The trees and the sky seemed mysterious and beautiful. In a contemplative mood, Yürükogullari wondered what he was doing in a public park in the wee hours of a weekday. How had he reached this point? A shiver went down his spine as Yürükogullari remembered the machine-gun-carrying riot cops who had been living in a makeshift police station installed in the park during the past month. He still remembered how they intimidated passers by (mostly tourists walking to or from their hotels adjacent to Gezi) merely by the look of their riot gear. When he saw some lights in the distance Yürükogullari feared that they came from the cops ... but no, they were nowhere to be seen. He felt tired; it had been a long day of travelling from one neighbourhood to another; the discussions with activists in the forum continued to echo in his mind. Yürükogullari started dozing off.

When he woke up at 6 a.m. to the sounds of twittering birds, the young man realized he had visitors. Complete strangers on their way to work had stopped by the tents, leaving pastries and plastic plates filled with warm pogaga, the kind of cheese-filled scones Turks love to have for breakfast. Many of those pogaga-bringers had heard about the protestors through social media and came to say hello.

'I started that day greatly motivated', Yürükogullari tells me in a posh cafe called Kitchenette a few hundred metres away from the park. He wears a colourful pullover and together we watch the snow as it falls on the beautiful winter day outside. Gezi Park is, once again, deleted from our view – this time under a blinding whiteness rather than the darkness of that May night. I am mildly surprised to hear Yürükogullari had never come to Kitchenette before.

'It is not easy to remember exactly how things happened after all we lived through', he says, his hands around the coffee cup. Because of the chaotic way in which the Gezi events ended, Yürükogullari finds it difficult to focus his mind on the first hours of the protests.

'It was around noon when we saw around a hundred municipal workers and riot cops walking towards our two tents', he remembers. In minutes Yürükogullari found himself getting punched in the face by one of them, the shock of which made him collapse on his tent. 'They then took our tents and walked away.'

But removing their two tiny tents helped little in stopping the protests, rather it had the opposite effect. More people started heading to the park, pitching new tents. Yürükogullari was no longer alone with a handful of people: he was now one among many.

In his second night there, a delivery man arrived carrying two sandwiches and a plastic bottle of water.

'Cenk Yürükogullari!' he shouted.

'This must be a misunderstanding', the young man replied. 'I didn't order any sandwiches.'

The delivery man handed him a piece of paper. He said it was a note from the buyer. 'Cenk Bey [Mister Cenk],' it read, 'I study engineering at Kutahya Dumlupinar University. I am not a rich man and this is the most I could do for you. I just wanted to show I am in solidarity with you. I can't be with you there now but my heart is with you. Afiyet olsun [enjoy your meal]!'

The next day a Domino's delivery man arrived. With 250 boxes of pizza next to him, the guy seemed to be on the first stop of a long list of deliveries.

'Cenk Yürükogullari!' he shouted.

'This must be a misunderstanding', the young man replied.

'I'm totally broke, man. Not a penny in my pockets. I eat pizza maybe once a month. How can I afford 250 boxes of pizza?'

'The payments are all taken care of', the delivery man said. 'Some people created a special account for protestors who stay at the park. You can have all the 250 boxes for free.'

The rest of the day was spent distributing slices of pizza to protestors.

'Everyone seemed ecstatic', Yürükogullari remembers, sipping his coffee and looking in the direction of the park. 'It was as if we didn't have a worry in the world.'

* * *

Yürükogullari was born in 1991 in Istanbul. He defines his family as working class – 'but like most working-class families, they thought of themselves as middle class. They are middle class in terms of cultural affiliations and working class in terms of their actual income.' Yürükogullari's parents sent him to schools in Ortakoy and Levent. They picked those neighbourhoods so that he stayed out of trouble and remained 'clean'.

Despite their attempts at keeping him away from trouble Yürükogullari found himself attracted to rebellious ideas. In high school he refused to read the national anthem during Monday ceremonies; he was irritated by what he saw as the militarist tone of the school discourse. 'For nationalists and Muslims all is well since they find it easy to express their views', he tells me. 'If you have even the slightest objection to the nationalist discourse, if you are just a tiny bit egalitarian and libertarian ... then you are in trouble.'

Most boys at Yürükogullari's high school dressed up like figures from the popular television show Kurtlar Vadisi (The Valley of the Wolves) in which macho, mafioso figures in black suits kill enemies of the Turkish state, so as to protect it from heinous enemies.

Not long after he started high school Yürükogullari, too, wanted to belong. He became a member of a political group called Devrimci Liseliler (Revolutionary High Schoolers). The group rejected wearing uniforms and opposed the unfairness of the exam system, the homophobic undertones of textbooks and the gradual privatization of the school system. 'It was a network, a protected space against oppression', Yürükogullari remembers. 'We published magazines, distributed stickers and reached people like us.'

In January 2007, when he was 16, Yürükogullari came across shocking images on TV. An ultra-nationalist assassin had put a bullet into the head of the editor of the Armenian-Turkish weekly newspaper Agos metres away from its offices. Dink had long been under attack from Turkish secularnationalists who had despised his critique of the treatment of Armenians at the hands of Ottoman Young Turks in the 1910s. On the day Dink was shot from behind, Yürükogullari decided that enough was enough. He got hundreds of stickers from a civil society group called 'Hrant's Friends' that supported a thorough investigation of Dink's murder. 'What Happened on January 19?' asked the stickers he carried home. When Yürükogullari started sticking them inside his high school, a group of ten pupils attacked him. His complaints to his supervisors came to nothing. Days after the murder, Yürükogullari not only had to put up with being beaten, but also had to listen to history classes whose nationalist Turkish narrative – 'We never murdered Armenians. They murdered us' – Dink had critiqued in his writings.

When they learned about his political views, Yürükogullari's parents were somewhat anxious about their son's activism, but they did not oppose him. 'At the end of the day they knew I was searching for truth', he says. 'In high school they were like, "oh don't do this stuff now, Cenk, you can always do it later at uni". Then when I started college they were like, "oh don't do this stuff now, Cenk, you will do it later when you get married!"'

During those years Yürükogullari was reading two newspapers: the liberal Taraf and the left-wing Radikal. He had questions in his mind: was Turkey's main opposition party CHP (the People's Republican Party) a left-wing party or a nationalist one? Soon afterwards CHP and Kemalists organized the so-called Republic Protests; what should he do, attend or stay at home? 'I thought hard about this and came to the conclusion that what people attending those marches demanded was a military coup', Yürükogullari says. 'Their demands stood against my libertarian stance. So I decided against attending.'

In 2010, having thought long about Turkish nationalism, Yürükogullari made another decision, this time a more crucial one that would have a lasting influence on his life: he became a conscientious objector. This takes guts in a country where military service is mandatory (around 6 months for college graduates and 16 months for high school graduates) and where pupils are taught at school, Her Türk Asker Dogar ('All Turks are born as soldiers'). 'I just don't feel like part of any state in the world', Yürükogullari explains. 'I imagined a world without any states ... And I did not want to kill, or die, for anyone. At high school we were raised with the motto "May my existence be a gift to the Turk's existence!" For me, betraying this motto was the most ethical thing to do. That's why I have became a conscientious objector.'

Yürükogullari found similar-minded people at college. 'We talk to friends who had experience in working life . they tell us about how people working in offices are unable to talk critically about life', he says, not at all looking forward to a white-collar career in an office. 'It felt better to part of the student movement in Istanbul University which dates back to Ottoman times. There I find people with similar concerns and thoughts. But I am aware that once I get out of that bell glass, there won't be many people like me outside.' But then he can always find protestors outside, as he did in Gezi Park.

A few years ago, Yürükogullari developed a habit: he started painting on the carriage walls of public trains. He liked the adrenaline that came with the experience. It was around this time he became active in protests against the gentrification of Istanbul. 'I realized that Turkey has long stopped being a lawful country', he says. 'Before the protests, I attended a concert inside the park to protest its prospective destruction. They have set up this police station at the heart of the city. Their station was kind of a panopticon overlooking the park.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Under The Shadow by Kaya Genç. Copyright © 2016 Kaya Genç. Excerpted by permission of I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: I.B. Tauris
• Data di pubblicazione: 2016
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1784534579
• ISBN 13: 9781784534578
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 240
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile