“Perhaps you feel you know enough about Turkey from its human-rights record and democratic backsliding?” writes the Turkish academic. “But if you assume that is the whole story, then I fear you miss out on a complex and contradictory reality”
an 18-year sentence and writing this column by hand from a maximum security prison. I am one of seven people recently imprisoned for allegedly organising anti-government protests in 2013 that started after plans to demolish Istanbul’s Gezi Park emerged. Regular readers ofare probably familiar with accounts of deteriorating democratic standards in Turkey. My co-defendants include an architect, a city planner, several academics and civil-society personalities, a film producer and a lawyer.
The Bosphorus offers an apt analogy: a narrow but busy seaway with 90-degree turns that captains have to navigate between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. The visible top current flows from north to south, but there is also a lower current with heavier, saltier Mediterranean water flowing from south to north. Unless the captains are aware of both, the Bosphorus cannot be successfully navigated. The same goes for relations between Europe and Turkey.
I will admit that the recent past has not been encouraging. On July 15th 2016, Turks watched our own aircraft bomb the country’s parliament, while Turkish tanks crushed people in cars. Commanders were taken hostage by their own aides de camp. For any society, this would have been a source of profound insecurity, where they would have appreciated their friends to be by their side. Sadly, that did not happen for Turks.
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