Tragedy in Turkey

Where to begin when we look at Turkey? Here is a part of the world with so much cul­ture and his­tory in its favour but in the last cou­ple of years it has be­come some­where you would not choose to live and you would even have to think twice about vis­it­ing.

The biggest sin­gle rea­son for this is the coun­try’s Pres­i­dent Recep Tayyip Er­do­gan, who has made an ob­vi­ous grab at tak­ing greater con­sti­tu­tional pow­ers after a ref­er­en­dum on greatly ex­tend­ing pres­i­den­tial au­thor­ity was nar­rowly passed. Un­sur­pris­ingly, the op­po­si­tion No cam­paign dis­puted at least one third of the votes as being legally valid.

Er­do­gan’s clear in­tent is to move Turkey away from its sec­u­lar, non-re­li­gious pol­icy to­wards a much stronger and stricter Is­lamic state with him firmly in con­trol. He has re­cently or­dered that the teach­ing of evo­lu­tion in schools should stop and that the death penalty should be rein­tro­duced, through an­other ref­er­en­dum if nec­es­sary.

Aside from these back­ward ide­o­log­i­cal steps, his regime has taken to using a sup­posed coup last year as fair grounds for stran­gling basic free­doms. Thou­sands of or­di­nary peo­ple (in­clud­ing writ­ers) have been im­pris­oned and tor­tured with­out good rea­son. Turkey now jails more jour­nal­ists than any other na­tion – a third of the world­wide total – largely on the flimsy pre­tence of them being ter­ror­ists. Dur­ing the sum­mer, two local Turk­ish lead­ers from the re­spected human rights or­gan­i­sa­tion, Amnesty In­ter­na­tional, were also locked up.

I find all this so sad for po­lit­i­cal rea­sons but also for more per­sonal ones. My fam­ily and I spent a week based in the cap­i­tal Is­tan­bul a cou­ple of sum­mers ago and were en­chanted by it. As well, I once taught at an Is­lamic sec­ondary school in Aus­tralia and have very fond mem­o­ries of my Turk­ish-Aus­tralian for­mer col­leagues and stu­dents there. They were the warmest of peo­ple and I still have Turk­ish friends now, who are some of the most gen­er­ous and lovely in­di­vid­u­als you could ever wish to meet and spend time with.