Death in Turkey
This week, fifteen year old Berkin Elvan died at a hospital in the Okmeydani section of Istanbul. For those unfamiliar with the story, last summer, when Berkin was fourteen, he was shot in the head with a canister of tear gas while he walked to buy his mother a loaf of bread. He was shot – accidentally – by police who had gathered to quell the Gezi park protests which roiled the city last May, June, and July. Those police had been given orders by the government to break up the protests at any cost, and unfortunately, that cost was eight lives and thousands of injuries. Turkey, and especially Istanbul, has responded to Berkin’s death – he’d lay in a coma for 269 days – with rage and solidarity. In fact, the depth of the response has been somewhat surprising. All over Beyoglu, Taksim, and Okmedani, storekeepers have hung photos of Berkin, many of them adorned with different slogans: ‘We won’t forget you’; ‘Berkin’s killer is AKP’s police’; ‘Berkin is immortal now.’ Even in traditionally conservative strongholds, like Uskudar and Umraniye, I’ve witnessed a stunning amount of graffiti lamenting the tragic death.
Turkey is no stranger to death – even to accidental, random, horrible death. The country is only a decade and a half removed from a devastating civil war between the secular military and Kurdish separatists – the PKK – which killed over 40,000. Various spasms of violence have flared up in the years since.
Last May, 53 people were killed in a terrorist bombing in the southeastern city of Reyhanli, in an incident viewed as a spillover of the brutal Syrian civil war just across the border. The incident caused serious strains between two populations – Turks and Syrians – who have lived and traded together for centuries.
Not all of the deaths have come from acts of terrorism – or from external sources. In the midst of an unprecedented construction boom, spurred on by unprecedented economic growth under Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, over 1000 workplace deaths occur every year in the country. Safety regulations haven’t yet caught up with the pace of construction. The mosques, shopping malls, and condos that are transforming Istanbul’s skyline have not only been paid for through the loss of historic buildings and artifacts, but through the loss of Turkish lives – and, overwhelmingly, these lives have been working class or poor men.
And throughout Turkey, over 200 women, on average, are murdered in honor killings every year. These aren’t just limited to the more rural, conservative parts of the country – an average of one honor killing a week occurs within Istanbul.
Yet nothing in recent memory has struck the collective consciousness quite like the death of Berkin Elvan. Why has this specific death resonated so deeply? Why have so many people, from so many different backgrounds, been mobilized?
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To begin understanding Turkey, one must first understand its emphasis on community. The biggest difference between East and West is not consumption or faith. In Turkey, an overwhelming majority of the products available in the West are available here, and they’re consumed just as readily. And Islam plays a role very similar to the role of Christianity in the US. It’s less visible in the major cities, and although it is the bedrock of life in the more rural areas, it’s not the be-all, end-all. At the end of the day, though Turks are religious, they’re also pragmatic. They want opportunities, they want basic services, and they want to live in peace and security.
Community plays a role in Turkey that is hard for those in the West to understand. What I mean is this – the communal good is, more often than not, placed before individual desires. There are many different levels of communities in Turkish society. There is the family, often the closest and most inviolable community (Turks tend to live much closer to their parents and siblings than people in the US and Europe). Family honor is still very important in Turkish culture.
As is respecting the hierarchical, often patriarchal, nature of families. Children do not question their fathers and do not disrespect their mothers in the home. A Turkish friend of mine once endured his father’s unwashed socks for weeks on end – simply because it would have been unthinkable for him to even suggest that his dad wash his feet.
There are obligations that Turkish families have to one another. Just as the children show respect, the parents give them a place to live – and often, an allowance. It’s not uncommon for a newly married Turkish couple to move in with the husband’s parents. If they don’t do that, they’ll move close by, and they’ll be expected to have an open door, to host their parents frequently for endless tea and conversation.
This culture of respect spills over into the larger Turkish communities – the mosques and the workplace, the teahouses where older men spend their afternoons playing tavela (backgammon) or the kitchens where older women gather to cook and talk. Signs of respect are a built-in part of Turkish life. When greeting a co-worker, it’s custom to refer to the men as “abbi,” older brother, to the women as “abbla”, older sister, and to your bosses as “bey,” the equivalent of mister. A lack of such mannerisms can be viewed as being deeply, deeply disrespectful – though non-Turks are often excused from such formalities.
Just as there are these titles, there are also good wishes for almost every occasion. Kolay gelsin (roughly, “may it come easy”) echoes around almost any office like birdsong. There are good wishes for Friday, good wishes for a journey – even good wishes for getting your hair cut.
The presence of this order ensures the endurance of a family – and of a culture. It creates a language that can be passed down through the centuries and the generations. And in Turkey, that language was born, and finds its best voice, in tight knit communities, communities that survive because of the rigid expectations they adhere to. These communities have shaped and nurtured Turkish identity – which is a concept that the state establishment - the ultimate community - insists is cut and dry, but which has a very fraught, uncertain history.
Since the founding of the Turkish republic, in 1923, Turkey has struggled mightily with the concept of Turkishness. In the hopes of building a strong, modern country, Ataturk prohibited the state endorsement of religion – in Turkey this was Sunni Islam – and dissolved the millennia old Islamic caliphate. But Ataturk understood that religion served as a unifying cultural force in a way that few things could. In lieu of faith, his government espoused the idea of a supreme “Turkish” race. Anatolia was their home, their divine right.
It was an appealing idea for many. Still wounded from the breakup of the Ottoman Empire – a humiliation that haunts Turkish identity and politics to this day – many Turks latched onto the idea of a chosen-people myth. And those that didn’t were forced to choose exile, or to undergo a process of “Turkification.” Armenians, Greeks, Kurds, and other minorities were forced to adopt Turkish last names. Their hometowns were changed to reflect the character of the new Turkish nation. Many groups were forcibly resettled, and article 301 of the Turkish penal code made “denigrating Turkey” a crime.
Like almost all nationalities, Turkishness is more an idea, a concept, than a reality. Despite the war for independence, which had pushed back Armenian and Greek forces (not to mention a host of European occupiers), and despite Turkification, the young republic was still a vast pastiche of cultures and ethnicities, groups who had settled in Anatolia over many centuries of trade – the silk road connecting East and West passed right through Anatolia’s heart – and multiple different empires. The Byzantines, Ottomans, Seljuks, Crusaders – all have had a foothold in Anatolia over the centuries. When the dream of the Turkish state became a reality, there were not just Turks in Turkey, but Kurds and Alevis, Greeks and Armenians, Jews and Christians.
The story of the republic since then is, in many ways, the story of the state’s struggles to eliminate those groups or to assimilate them into their monolithic community of Turkishness – and these groups’ efforts at resisting such assimilation and elimination, their struggles to claim equal rights under the law, and to maintain their cultural heritages in face of the hegemony of “Turkishness.”
These conflicting narratives have oftentimes resulted in violent clashes. In 1942, the Varlik Vergisi (wealth tax) was instituted by the government to purge the country of its Armenian, Jewish, and Greek minorities. It resulted in riots, labor camps, and ultimately, succeeded in greatly decreasing the presence of non-Muslim minorities within Turkey – especially in Istanbul.
Though Muslims were the majority, they, too, were routinely persecuted by a state that wished to enforce its idea of a cosmopolitan, modern, laicist country. Coups in 1960, 1971, and 1980 – and a “soft” coup in 1997 – were aimed at bringing the country back in line with Ataturk’s Turkish ideal. With the rise of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP, the country’s Sunni majority has suddenly seen its voice not just restored, but become the new status quo.
As this majority has slowly become the dominant block within Turkey, the major schisms have been between it and the two Muslim-minorities within the country – the Kurds and the Alevis.
The conflict between the Turkish government and the Kurds - an ethnic group who has long sought its own country at the intersections of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria - is long established, its parameters well known. Stern Kurdish resistance to Turkification began in the 1930s and has never really receded, despite the state’s repeated efforts at assimilating Kurds into Turkish culture - through forced re-location, through bans on the Kurdish language (especially following the 1980 coup), and oftentimes through violence.
In the mid-80s, led by Abdullah Ocalan, the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) declared war on the Turkish government, and the conflict, which raged until 1999, resulted in atrocities on both sides, further straining an already tense relationship. After Ocalan’s capture, a tenuous ceasefire was established, and though violence has routinely flared up, it hasn’t again reached pre-1999 levels of seriousness.
The quiet suffering of the Alevis has gotten far less attention, likely because they haven’t undertaken an armed rebellion (it should be noted that some Alevis are also Kurds, and vice versa). Making up approximately 15% of the Turkish populations, Alevis represent a cultural branch of Shia Islam, usually more moderate than the Hanafi Sunnis who dominate religious life in Turkey. Alevis have combined their unorthodox practice of Shia Islam - they don’t fast during Ramadan, don’t believe in the hajj, and alcohol is not forbidden; their women aren’t required to cover, and men and women worship together- with various strains of Sufi mysticism (and even aspects of Orthodox Christianity), creating a diverse, hybrid form of cultural religion that oftentimes appears mystical or blasphemous to many practicing Sunnis. Frequently persecuted during Ottoman times, Alevis became loyal to Ataturk and his CHP (People’s Republican Party) when he abolished state religion. Like the Kurds, they’ve long been associated with leftist politics - both groups fought the ferociously nationalist Grey Wolves in the late 70s. With the rise of the AKP and political Sunni Islam, Alevis have found their place in Turkish society increasingly threatened. Rumors abound about the police and judiciary being purged of Alevis by AK Party. Despite repeated requests, the Diyanet, or Turkish department of religious affairs, refused to recognize Alevism as a religion equal under the law with Sunni Islam.
Kurds and Alevis pose the greatest existential threat to the modern Turkish identity. With their differing faith practices, and their claims to various parts of Anatolia, they undermine the carefully crafted myth of the Turkic culture’s regional dominance. And this myth isn’t just a vital part of the republic; in many ways, it is its very foundation.
The possible fracturing of that uniform identity recalls the equally traumatic, and humiliating, fracturing of the Ottoman Empire. For anyone who doesn’t believe that those wounds are still alive and well, just listen to Prime Minister Erdogan or his foreign ministers. They are keen to refer to the “great restoration” where Turkey “need(s) to embrace fully the ancient values we have lost.” If that language is too coded, pay a visit to the city’s new Marmaray stations, their interiors faux Ottoman in design, or take a look at the now-abandoned plans for Istanbul’s Gezi park - a shopping center built to resemble Ottoman barracks.
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Just as the Kurds and the Alevis threaten the homogeneity of Turkish identity, the Gezi protests marked the most credible threat to Erdogan, and his party’s, supremacy over recent Turkish politics.
With his trademark bellicosity, Erdogan responded to the protests by blaming a slew of forces for the upheaval. Instead of dousing the fires with a needed dose of humility, Erdogan fanned the flames by creating a vast list of “others” who were plotting to undermine the Turkish state: the interest rate lobbies, an international conspiracy, the US, Israel, Fethullah Gulen’s Hizmet movement, Germany, the CHP, and vague foes “both internal and external.”
His intention was clear: to cast himself and his supporters as defenders of the Turkish state - a state that, it goes without saying, is ethnically Turkish, religiously Sunni, and culturally conservative - and to cast the protestors - many of whom were minority groups, including Kurds and Alevis, who finally felt their voices empowered - as threats to that state.
Erdogan’s rise to power has been marked by an impressive synthesis. He’s co-opted the state apparatus - once dominated by the secular military - for his traditional Anatolian politics while simultaneously opening up the country to the globalized economy. He’s married traditional Turkishness with Western capitalism, creating a culture that straddles both East and West - sacrificing neither competitiveness in the open market or cultural purity at home.
Although, judging from election results, Erdogan’s new Turkey represents a majority of the population, it has further marginalized those groups that were already excluded by the laicist state apparatus - especially the Alevis and the Kurds. While “traditional” Turks were suddenly faced with great economic and educational opportunity, Kurds, Alevis, and other minorities were only able to access those same opportunities if they broke with their own heritages. Their communities were not given an equal place at the table.
It was a desire to have their voices heard that drove so many Kurds and Alevis - as well as women, gays and lesbians, young people, and other exploited groups - to protest last summer. Instead of listening to their voices, and perhaps creating space within the Turkish identity for them, the state - under Erdogan’s stewardship - responded the same as it has so many times in the past: with a violent effort to squeeze out any alternative narratives. And, tragically, Berkin Elvan walked into the midst of this violent struggle for narrative control - a young boy simply trying to buy a load of bread.
~
Berkin Elvan and his family were Alevis. Did this fact contribute to his death? Not at all. His death was, by all accounts, bad luck. The result of what happens when you give young men weapons that, if used improperly, can be lethal, and give them an open mandate to use those weapons, without fear of repercussion. It if hadn’t been Berkin Elvan, it would have been Abdullah Cömert or Ethem Sarısülük, Mehmet Sarı or Ali İsmail Korkmaz. If it hadn’t been them, it would have been others. When state actors are given the freedom to assault their own people, some of those people are going to die.
But the fact that Berkin was an Alevi may well contribute to the perception – fairly or unfairly – that justice, in his case, has not been pursued to its fullest extent.
There are two recent parallels to Berkin’s death, though both were overt acts of hate crime instead of accidental.
In January 2007, Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was murdered by 17 year old nationalist, Ogün Samast. Dink published the biggest Armenian language paper in Turkey, Agos. He was an outspoken critic of the myth of one ‘dominant’ Turkish identity and an advocate for minority rights in a country that so often tramples on them. He refused to be silent about the Armenian genocide, despite repeated death threats and multiple criminal charges of denigrating Turkishness, under article 301 of the Turkish penal code.
Dink was a writer and a journalist, a man who embodied the all-too-often clichéd tropes about a writer’s courage and integrity in the face of suppression and danger. His words carried weight because he bore the burden of that weight – he embraced the responsibility for his words.
Samast, Dink’s killer, had been an active member within Turkish nationalist circles, the ideological heirs of the violent Grey Wolves, true believers in the purity of the Turkish identity, who viewed any “others” as threats to that identity. In a way, Article 301 served as a convenient tool for ultra-nationalists to identify their targets. When Samast was arrested, the police and Gendarme who took him into custody took photographs with him - and they were smiling.
Though Samast was ultimately sentenced to upwards of 20 years in prison, the murder was seen as a failure of the Turkish system. Its focus on cultural purity at all costs - including the many minor trials under Article 301 (of which Erdogan himself was once a victim) - had allowed an intense hatred of the “other” to fester in many corners of the country. It had taken the life of a prominent intellectual, and more importantly, a father and a husband.
~
Just a few months after Dink’s murder, in April 2007, in the south-central city of Malatya, three men who worked at the Zirve Publishing house - a Christian publisher that printed Bibles and other religious texts - were murdered. Necati Aydın, Uğur Yüksel, and Tilmann Geske were first tortured and then killed by five ultra-Nationalists. Aydin and Yuksel were Turkish nationals who had converted to Christianity, and Geske was a German missionary.
There are two recent parallels to Berkin’s death, though both were overt acts of hate crime instead of accidental.
In January 2007, Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was murdered by 17 year old nationalist, Ogün Samast. Dink published the biggest Armenian language paper in Turkey, Agos. He was an outspoken critic of the myth of one ‘dominant’ Turkish identity and an advocate for minority rights in a country that so often tramples on them. He refused to be silent about the Armenian genocide, despite repeated death threats and multiple criminal charges of denigrating Turkishness, under article 301 of the Turkish penal code.
Dink was a writer and a journalist, a man who embodied the all-too-often clichéd tropes about a writer’s courage and integrity in the face of suppression and danger. His words carried weight because he bore the burden of that weight – he embraced the responsibility for his words.
Samast, Dink’s killer, had been an active member within Turkish nationalist circles, the ideological heirs of the violent Grey Wolves, true believers in the purity of the Turkish identity, who viewed any “others” as threats to that identity. In a way, Article 301 served as a convenient tool for ultra-nationalists to identify their targets. When Samast was arrested, the police and Gendarme who took him into custody took photographs with him - and they were smiling.
Though Samast was ultimately sentenced to upwards of 20 years in prison, the murder was seen as a failure of the Turkish system. Its focus on cultural purity at all costs - including the many minor trials under Article 301 (of which Erdogan himself was once a victim) - had allowed an intense hatred of the “other” to fester in many corners of the country. It had taken the life of a prominent intellectual, and more importantly, a father and a husband.
~
Just a few months after Dink’s murder, in April 2007, in the south-central city of Malatya, three men who worked at the Zirve Publishing house - a Christian publisher that printed Bibles and other religious texts - were murdered. Necati Aydın, Uğur Yüksel, and Tilmann Geske were first tortured and then killed by five ultra-Nationalists. Aydin and Yuksel were Turkish nationals who had converted to Christianity, and Geske was a German missionary.
When asked about their motives for the crime, one of the suspects, Yunus Emre Günaydın, stated that they were told “… Christianity and the missionary work done in its name had the goal of destroying the motherland.”
All the suspects readily admitted their guilt, and yet their cases were linked with the Ergenekon trials of the same year. Ergenekon was a shadowy, paramilitary operation accused of operating deep within the Turkish state and plotting to overthrow the government. Both the Dink murder and the Zirve massacre were linked to the group, and although the Dink trial was ultimately prosecuted separate from the larger case, the Zirve murders were tied in with the larger conspiracy case, and subsequently lost within the labyrinth of the Turkish judiciary.
In many ways, Ergenekon is the perfect case for Erdogan’s Turkey. Depending on one’s perspective, it was a nefarious, devious plot from deep within the bowels of the Turkish state to supersede the democratic will of the people - to preserve one of Ataturk’s six founding principles (laicism) at all costs; or it was a trumped up carnival, a disastrous prosecution full of forged evidence and specious claims, created to consolidate AKP’s hold on power.
Unfortunately, one’s perspective in Turkey is liable to frequent manipulation and recalibration. The media is bought and paid for by special interests, but what those interests want can change on a dime. One day, a paper is pro-Erdogan, and the next it is virulently anti-Erdogan. The country is full of rumors and conspiracy theories, and many of those rumors are passed off as legitimate news by some sources. Many of the military officers that the government worked diligently to put behind bars for threatening to undermine the state are now being released by that very same government, and being hailed as victims of a vast conspiracy. The zigzags and contradictions within Turkish politics are enough to render even the most astute observer speechless.
While many of the suspects in the Ergenekon case were being set free last week, so, too, were the suspects in the Zirve massacre. While their case languished amidst the judicial uncertainty and upheaval of the last few months, AKP passed a new bill, setting free anyone who had been detained for five years without a final verdict having been decided on their case (the previous statute had been ten years). This bill - along with multiple other bills the party has passed in the wake of the December 17th corruption charges leveled against it - degrades the rule of law in Turkey, chiseling away at the judiciary’s independence. Above all, it means that the five men behind the murder of three Christians were set free.
~
Today, on the day when tens of thousands turned up to bury Berkin Elvan - just as hundreds of thousands turned up to bury Hrant Dink - there are far more questions than answers. This, unfortunately, is the Turkish way. Though nationalism killed Hrant Dink and the three missionaries, the state’s role in that nationalism remains opaque. Was it an active participant in the crimes? Or through its enactment of Turkification, and its enforcement of Article 301, was it merely an accessory, a passive factor in two horrible crimes committed against men who existed outside the Turkish mainstream?
And what role will that state play now that Berkin Elvan is dead? How will Berkin’s status as an outsider impact the state’s desire to find, and bring to justice, those behind his death?
In a country accustomed to conspiracies and violent deaths, Berkin’s death has captivated the country because it seems the perfect intersection of everything Erdogan’s Turkey stands for - the corruption and capitalism, the violence and nationalism, the confusion and social stratification. A fourteen year old boy shot while buying bread serves as the perfect symbol of how dehumanizing the Turkish state’s relentless assault on the other has been - and how those others have been further disenfranchised by the rampant development Erdogan has overseen.
Yet there’s one more reason Berkin’s death has gotten so much attention, and that’s the very simple humanity of it. The photos from the last two days are astonishing for how raw they are. Berkin’s mother, her face red with tears, wails with unabashed grief. His family members hold one another desperately. Strangers and friends crowd the streets, blindly reaching out to the casket - it’s far too small - hands raised together in mourning.
Here was a boy - by all accounts a kind boy and a good student - running an errand for his mother. He could have been anyone’s son - a Turk or a Christian’s, an Alevi or an Armenian’s, a Kurd or a Sunni’s. For all we don’t know, this we do: nothing will bring back Hrant Dink. Nothing will bring back Necati Aydın, Uğur Yüksel, and Tilmann Geske. Nothing will bring back Berkin Elvan. They are simply gone.
In many ways, Ergenekon is the perfect case for Erdogan’s Turkey. Depending on one’s perspective, it was a nefarious, devious plot from deep within the bowels of the Turkish state to supersede the democratic will of the people - to preserve one of Ataturk’s six founding principles (laicism) at all costs; or it was a trumped up carnival, a disastrous prosecution full of forged evidence and specious claims, created to consolidate AKP’s hold on power.
Unfortunately, one’s perspective in Turkey is liable to frequent manipulation and recalibration. The media is bought and paid for by special interests, but what those interests want can change on a dime. One day, a paper is pro-Erdogan, and the next it is virulently anti-Erdogan. The country is full of rumors and conspiracy theories, and many of those rumors are passed off as legitimate news by some sources. Many of the military officers that the government worked diligently to put behind bars for threatening to undermine the state are now being released by that very same government, and being hailed as victims of a vast conspiracy. The zigzags and contradictions within Turkish politics are enough to render even the most astute observer speechless.
While many of the suspects in the Ergenekon case were being set free last week, so, too, were the suspects in the Zirve massacre. While their case languished amidst the judicial uncertainty and upheaval of the last few months, AKP passed a new bill, setting free anyone who had been detained for five years without a final verdict having been decided on their case (the previous statute had been ten years). This bill - along with multiple other bills the party has passed in the wake of the December 17th corruption charges leveled against it - degrades the rule of law in Turkey, chiseling away at the judiciary’s independence. Above all, it means that the five men behind the murder of three Christians were set free.
~
Today, on the day when tens of thousands turned up to bury Berkin Elvan - just as hundreds of thousands turned up to bury Hrant Dink - there are far more questions than answers. This, unfortunately, is the Turkish way. Though nationalism killed Hrant Dink and the three missionaries, the state’s role in that nationalism remains opaque. Was it an active participant in the crimes? Or through its enactment of Turkification, and its enforcement of Article 301, was it merely an accessory, a passive factor in two horrible crimes committed against men who existed outside the Turkish mainstream?
And what role will that state play now that Berkin Elvan is dead? How will Berkin’s status as an outsider impact the state’s desire to find, and bring to justice, those behind his death?
In a country accustomed to conspiracies and violent deaths, Berkin’s death has captivated the country because it seems the perfect intersection of everything Erdogan’s Turkey stands for - the corruption and capitalism, the violence and nationalism, the confusion and social stratification. A fourteen year old boy shot while buying bread serves as the perfect symbol of how dehumanizing the Turkish state’s relentless assault on the other has been - and how those others have been further disenfranchised by the rampant development Erdogan has overseen.
Yet there’s one more reason Berkin’s death has gotten so much attention, and that’s the very simple humanity of it. The photos from the last two days are astonishing for how raw they are. Berkin’s mother, her face red with tears, wails with unabashed grief. His family members hold one another desperately. Strangers and friends crowd the streets, blindly reaching out to the casket - it’s far too small - hands raised together in mourning.
Here was a boy - by all accounts a kind boy and a good student - running an errand for his mother. He could have been anyone’s son - a Turk or a Christian’s, an Alevi or an Armenian’s, a Kurd or a Sunni’s. For all we don’t know, this we do: nothing will bring back Hrant Dink. Nothing will bring back Necati Aydın, Uğur Yüksel, and Tilmann Geske. Nothing will bring back Berkin Elvan. They are simply gone.
~
The question, ultimately, will be what does Berkin’s death mean? When tragedies happen – especially to someone so young – our basic instinct is to ask, first, why? And then we ask, how do we make it matter? When Dink died, hundreds of thousands attended his funeral. Chants of, “We are all Hrant Dink, we are all Armenians,” echoed through the streets. Though there have been plenty of tributes paid to Dink in the academic and journalistic communities, perhaps the biggest change his death ushered in was a revision of the Turkish penal code’s article 301, having to do with the denigration of Turkishness. It is now – at least in theory – harder to be brought in front of a court in Turkey for speaking one’s mind. Because of Dink’s death, it is harder to find one’s self on a nationalist watch list, deemed an enemy of the state. But, there’s still a long ways to go before true journalistic freedom exists – Turkey leads the world in jailed journalists, after all. Still, there’s no doubt that Dink’s murder changed the system in a small, but real, way.
When Berkin Elvan stepped out his door 270 days ago, neither he or anyone close to him could’ve foreseen what was about to happen – that it would be the last time he would ever hug his mother. But they also couldn’t have predicted that, moved by his death, tens, perhaps even hundreds, of thousands of his countrymen – Sunnis and Alevis, Christians and Kurds – would take to the streets demanding justice – if not for Berkin, than for those still living. Berkin has mobilized a country that has been roiled for decades by ethnic strife. He has given voice to a generous, humble populace who have been oppressed and silenced by an unending succession of authoritarian governments, the secularists no different from the Islamists. Using the myth of Turkish identity, the state, under different stewardship, has sought to control power by turning its own citizens against one another.
That’s of little comfort to his family today. They have lost their son, and with him, they have lost all the promise he represented – the possibility of a meaningful career, perhaps as a doctor or in the civil service; they’ve lost possible grandkids and nephews; a vital chain in the family, and cultural, narrative has been broken.
As people in Turkey know more acutely than most, death is everywhere. It’s lurking in the new mosques that dot Istanbul’s skyline, the bridges that cross its famous waters. It’s in the very ink of the country’s founding narrative, and persists to this day in the ink of its newspapers and religious texts. To die, especially in Turkey, is not remarkable; it is simply human. But to die meaningfully? That’s rare indeed.
Unfortunately, as I write this, more sad news comes in: two more young men died in the protests tonight. The killing, like the State, simply goes on.
The question, ultimately, will be what does Berkin’s death mean? When tragedies happen – especially to someone so young – our basic instinct is to ask, first, why? And then we ask, how do we make it matter? When Dink died, hundreds of thousands attended his funeral. Chants of, “We are all Hrant Dink, we are all Armenians,” echoed through the streets. Though there have been plenty of tributes paid to Dink in the academic and journalistic communities, perhaps the biggest change his death ushered in was a revision of the Turkish penal code’s article 301, having to do with the denigration of Turkishness. It is now – at least in theory – harder to be brought in front of a court in Turkey for speaking one’s mind. Because of Dink’s death, it is harder to find one’s self on a nationalist watch list, deemed an enemy of the state. But, there’s still a long ways to go before true journalistic freedom exists – Turkey leads the world in jailed journalists, after all. Still, there’s no doubt that Dink’s murder changed the system in a small, but real, way.
When Berkin Elvan stepped out his door 270 days ago, neither he or anyone close to him could’ve foreseen what was about to happen – that it would be the last time he would ever hug his mother. But they also couldn’t have predicted that, moved by his death, tens, perhaps even hundreds, of thousands of his countrymen – Sunnis and Alevis, Christians and Kurds – would take to the streets demanding justice – if not for Berkin, than for those still living. Berkin has mobilized a country that has been roiled for decades by ethnic strife. He has given voice to a generous, humble populace who have been oppressed and silenced by an unending succession of authoritarian governments, the secularists no different from the Islamists. Using the myth of Turkish identity, the state, under different stewardship, has sought to control power by turning its own citizens against one another.
That’s of little comfort to his family today. They have lost their son, and with him, they have lost all the promise he represented – the possibility of a meaningful career, perhaps as a doctor or in the civil service; they’ve lost possible grandkids and nephews; a vital chain in the family, and cultural, narrative has been broken.
As people in Turkey know more acutely than most, death is everywhere. It’s lurking in the new mosques that dot Istanbul’s skyline, the bridges that cross its famous waters. It’s in the very ink of the country’s founding narrative, and persists to this day in the ink of its newspapers and religious texts. To die, especially in Turkey, is not remarkable; it is simply human. But to die meaningfully? That’s rare indeed.
Unfortunately, as I write this, more sad news comes in: two more young men died in the protests tonight. The killing, like the State, simply goes on.
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