Elif Shafak: It Is Hard to Be an Armenian in Turkey

What little opposition exists is fragmented, scattered, and demoralised. Since the Gezi Park riots three years ago, people have been increasingly and systematically intimidated. On average, every four days someone is being sued in Turkey for insulting Erdogan — almost 2,000 people since he became president. Among them are artists, journalists, cartoonists, academics, even students for Facebook comments. Over the years, as Turkey’s media has been curbed, social media has become more politicised. Now that too is heavily monitored. Turkey tops the countries demanding content removal from Twitter.

Everything is shifting in Turkey — and very fast. We Turks live with a feeling of “what now?,” knowing that every day something new happens. As the country slides backwards, what we have in our hands is not a democracy but a crude form of majoritarianism. The central components of democracy — such as separation of powers, rule of law, freedom of speech — are all but broken.

Murat Belge, a well-known academic and columnist, was put on trial for insulting the president. Academics who signed a peace petition criticising the government’s actions in southeast Anatolia have been slated in pro-government media. Some have lost their jobs. Four were imprisoned. The infamous article 301, which claims to protect “Turkishness” even though nobody knows what exactly that means, has re-emerged.

There are three major dangers: an absolutist monopoly of power; the total collapse of the Turkish-Kurdish peace process; and the loss of secularism. Recently the parliamentary speaker, Ismail Kahraman, came up with a horrifying proposition: “Secularism shouldn’t take place in the new constitution.” Secularism was the one principle that separated Turkey from other parts of the Middle East. It made the country relatively more liberal, more open, more diverse. And the recent talk by some AKP members about developing a religious constitution is alarming — particularly for women, who need to uphold secularism more loudly and wholeheartedly than men because they have more to lose in an Islamic fundamentalist regime. Befittingly, Bayan Yani, a humour magazine produced by an all-female staff, and whose title means “the seat next to a woman on public transportation,” drew a cartoon of a Turkish Marianne leading the people with the caption: “Long live secularism!”

Hikmet Çetinkaya and Ceyda Karan, two veteran journalists from the daily Cumhuriyet — one of the last remaining alternative voices in the media — have been sentenced to two years in prison for reprinting Charlie Hebdo cartoons. During their trial Islamist slogans were chanted in the courtroom. The sentence profoundly shocked Turkey’s democrats. Today, in Reporters Without Borders’ world press freedom index, Turkey ranks 151st of 180 countries.

In the past we had a solid tradition of black humour. Politics was always rough, but it was OK for the people to laugh at politicians. Not any more. Recent research shows that only half of Turkey’s people think it OK to criticise the government publicly. When Angela Merkel allows German comedians to be sued by Erdogan, it is a clear message to Turkey’s democrats: “You are all alone.”