On a sweltering afternoon in Istanbul last summer, loud noises woke the Turkish novelist Asl Erdoan from a nap. Open, police! Open, or we will break the door, a voice called. When Erdoan, 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 Erdoan watched, men scoured every corner of her apartment. Erdoan, who is not related to the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdoan, 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, zgr Gndem , which the Turkish government said was linked to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party, and which was shut down in 2016 but later remerged under a different name. After spending seven hours searching through the thirty-five hundred books in Erdoans home library, the officers took six books on Kurdish history with them as evidence.
Later, the judge asked me about those books, Erdoan recalled in an interview earlier this month, in Istanbul. Is it a crime to read about Kurds in this country? Arent they a part of this nation? Not to read about them should be a crime, she said, as she calmly smoked a cigarette.
When Erdoan 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 daysthe first two of which she was deprived of waterand then jailed with other female prisoners. On Erdoans 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, Erdoan was released from the Bakrky 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. Based on the charges currently filed against them, the brothers each face three life sentences if convicted. They stand accused of attempting to overthrow the Turkish Grand National Assembly, attempting to overthrow the Government of Turkey, attempting to abolish the constitutional order, and committing crimes on behalf of an armed terrorist organization without being a member. Prosecutors are using phone records, and articles the Altans wrote about various topics, among other things, as evidence against them. The oldest article dates back to 2012, four years before last summers failed coup. After five consecutive days of hearings, the judge ruled last Friday to continue the pretrial detention of all defendants. The trial is adjourned until September 19th.
Writing in Turkeychronicling current events in particularhas always been a dangerous undertaking. But the crackdown carried out by the Turkish government since the failed coup is the largest one in decades. There are an estimated hundred and sixty-five journalists, writers, and other members of the media behind bars in Turkey today. The government has shuttered close to a hundred and seventy-nine newspapers, magazines, radio stations, and TV channels. Turkey ranks a hundred and fifty-fifth, out of a hundred and eighty nations, in the 2017 World Press Freedom Index, compiled by Reporters Without Borders. Government officials can call a media ban at any time, severely crippling peoples access to information. Access to Wikipedia is currently blocked nationwide. Access to Twitter and YouTube has been blocked in the past.
Cumhuriyet , one of Turkeys oldest newspapers, and one of its few remaining opposition-news outlets, is also under assault. In a separate trial, set to begin July 24th, nineteen staff membersmost of whom have been held in pretrial detention since Octoberwill stand trial, accused of links to terrorist organizations.
Eugene Schoulgin, a seventy-six-year-old Norwegian novelist and the vice-president of PEN International, has observed the trials of journalists, human-rights activists, and writers in Turkey over the last twenty-five years, and said that his meetings with government officials and civil-society groups during his most recent trip, in February, left him bereft. There was a time when I had found a glimpse of light. Turkey was a country which I imagined was going, although slowly, in a democratic direction, Schoulgin said in an e-mail. What I saw was both the same as in many years yet at the same time something completely new. In the short run, I have nearly no hope for Turkey.
Other segments of Turkish society have been targeted as well. An estimated forty-seven thousand people have been arrested since the failed coup. At least a hundred and forty-five thousand people working in various fieldseducation, law enforcement, civil-society institutionshave been fired or suspended from their jobs. Many Turks today live in a constant state of vigilance. Who might be targeted next?
The state of emergency that overrides certain judicial procedures and was declared after the coup as a temporary measure is still in effect. Last month, President Erdoan said that it would be lifted when the country achieved welfare and peace. Ok, the Altan brothers attorney, told me that new regulations on prison conditions have gone into effect as well. He said that lawyerswho previously had unlimited access to their clientsare now entitled to one video-monitored hour a week, with a guard standing by.
During the interview, Asl Erdoans hands were seldom still, either motioning while she spoke or cupping a pack of tobacco. At her trial this week, she demanded the right to travel abroad, which was granted. But it remains unclear whether the government will return her passport. In September, she is to receive the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize, in Germany; previous winners include the Belarusian investigative journalist Svetlana Alexievich and the Syrian poet Ali Ahmad Said Esber, who uses the pen name Adonis. With the travel ban, the humiliation lingers, Erdoan said. Her trial will continue on October 31st.
After her release from prison, Erdoan told me, she didnt return to her apartment for several months. Nightmares hindered her ability to write. In prison, she reread poems by Rainer Maria Rilke and Paul Celan, and from the prison library she borrowed Shoah, the text of Claude Lanzmanns documentary about survivors of the Holocaust, from 1985. Some of her own books were available at the prison library, too. Lately, her work has found new readers at home and abroad, and the Times profiled her this spring. Her book The Stone Building and Other Places will be published in the U.S. in November.
At the end of our interview, I asked Erdoan about her state of mind. I keep asking myself, What is this hatred that this country has toward its writers? she said. If a country has begun to be fearful of its writers, it means it has a serious problem with facing reality. Only heavily totalitarian regimes burden themselves with their writers. By cutting off the writer, the academic, the journalist of your countryyou actually cut off your own language. So, I ask: What is this hatred about? By hating me, you actually show the hate you have for yourself. Because I am you. Whether you like it or not. I am Turkey. Whether you accept it or not, we are the language and the conscience of this country.
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Turkey's Writers Face Yet More Trials - The New Yorker