Monday, October 16, 2017

After a Turkish Prison

After a Turkish Prison, the Potent Symbol of a Lingering Kiss

The Saturday Profile
 

By CARLOTTA GALL 





 
Kadri Gursel with his wife after being released from prison. Their kiss has become a symbol of freedom in Turkey. Yasin Akgul/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

ISTANBUL — When he was released from prison after midnight late last month, Kadri Gursel walked straight to his wife, Nazire, and embraced her. Their lingering kiss in front of the prison, and a soldier’s shy glancing away, was caught on camera by a Turkish photographer and sent round the world.
The kiss came to stand for freedom in more ways than one in today’s Turkey. Tens of thousands of people have been arrested or purged from their jobs under a state of emergency declared after a failed coup attempt last year, but that is not the only source of tension. There is also the government’s deepening religious conservatism, which is changing the face of the republic.
For Mr. Gursel the kiss was spontaneous, but it symbolizes much of who he is. A senior columnist for Cumhuriyet, Turkey’s leading opposition newspaper, and board member of the International Press Institute, which works for press freedom, he is one of the most prominent political prisoners to be swept up in the government crackdown.
“We behaved not politically but naturally,” he said of the kiss. But he recognizes that it signifies more to many people. “This has been interpreted as a disobedience to the political culture, the invasion of the public sphere and the imposing of religious conservatism,” he said. “I think we did well. This was needed.”

In one of his first interviews after 11 months in prison, Mr. Gursel, 56, a lean, soft-spoken intellectual, told of his anger at what he called the baseless charges against him and his colleagues, and described the chronicle of persecution that has steadily closed down news outlets in Turkey and shut down independent voices under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.


Accused of aiding a terrorist organization in a group indictment with 18 others, he still faces serious charges. Most of the accused are from Cumhuriyet, including reporters, executives, a cartoonist and an accountant. Detained 11 months ago, only three of the group remain in jail: a reporter, Ahmet Sik; the editor in chief, Murat Sabuncu; and the paper’s chief executive, Akin Atalay.
“I control my anger. I am not a captive of my anger,” he said, speaking in English and pausing to choose his words. “But someone who stayed 11 months in prison, should be angry. I am very angry.”
As with tens of thousands of other Turkish citizens, they were rounded up in countrywide purges, many of them accused, like Mr. Gursel, of having links to Fethullah Gulen, the United States-based cleric who is blamed by Turkey for directing the failed coup.
More than a hundred news media outlets have been closed and more than 120 journalists detained — more than in any other country in the world, human rights organizations say.
Mr. Erdogan has denied jailing masses of journalists, saying that only two of those arrested are journalists. The rest he described as terrorists.
The Cumhuriyet group was charged with pursuing an editorial line that favored Mr. Gulen’s movement, as well as the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., and a third far-left group. The Turkish government treats all three groups as terrorist organizations.
Mr. Gursel was specifically charged with communicating with Gulen supporters through the Bylock encrypted messaging app. He vehemently rejected the accusations in lengthy testimony in the opening phases of his trial in July last year, and now says that he should never have been detained or charged in the first place.

He pointed out that he never had the app installed on his phone, and although he received scores of messages a couple of years ago from Gulenists in a campaign to win his sympathy, he did not respond to any of them.





 
Mr. Gursel and his wife, Nazire. He still faces serious charges, which he denies, of aiding a terrorist organization. Ozan Kose/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

His persistence, what he calls his “boring defense,” as well as international pressure paid off with his release from prison, though he still faces a potential 15-year prison sentence if he is ultimately found guilty when his trial resumes at the end of the month.
Sitting in his sunlit apartment overlooking the Bosporus, he said he would not complain about conditions in the Silivri prison, where he was held along with hundreds of other political prisoners — district governors, police chiefs, wealthy businessmen, militants of the far-left, Kurdish members of Parliament and, lately, human rights defenders.
People would call out his name when he was led along the corridor, banging on windows of their cells. “They were trying to speak to me but the windows were very thick,” he said. “They were saying hello.”
He called it a “nasty, ugly joke” that he was locked up with hundreds of followers of Mr. Gulen, Islamists whom he had criticized strongly in the past. He refers to them generally as the members of cemaat, a fellowship of Islamists, and he is not a fan, joining other critics in accusing them of using underhanded tactics in past years to infiltrate the government and expand their power base.
“Cemaat people have done everything to undermine democracy, by faking evidence in trials, to liquidating people in the army, judiciary and civil society,” he said. “I don’t feel any solidarity with these people regarding what they have done.
“But I admit I support their right to a fair trial,” he added. “This is what I need and what they need. For anyone in Turkey, they have an indisputable right to a fair trial.”
He says he spent most of his time in prison with two other colleagues in a set of rooms with a kitchen and bathroom: “You cannot call it a cell, they were rooms.” But communication with the outside was limited, and access to a lawyer restricted and without privacy.
Born and brought up in Istanbul, where his father was a businessman, Mr. Gursel found left-wing politics early in life, and the government found him. At age 18 he was imprisoned for nearly four years for belonging to an illegal organization and for crimes against the state.

“Trouble came after me in this country,” he said. “I did not seek it, it followed me. I insisted to be myself and go after my choices.”
While the conviction did not dim his determination to fight for what he believed in, it did have one long-term impact: Because of it, he could not go to college.
His most recent incarceration came at the height of a distinguished career in journalism that he began by publishing a newsletter at primary school. He worked as a reporter with Agence France-Presse in the 1990s — at one point being held captive for three weeks by the P.K.K. — and served as foreign news editor and senior columnist for 19 years at a prominent daily, Milliyet.
For the past decade, his columns and regular television appearances have been a thorn in the side of the president, the governing Justice and Development Party and his own newspaper bosses. As presidential elections approached in 2015, he was fired from Milliyet — for a tweet criticizing Mr. Erdogan’s Syria policy — and dropped from mainstream television.
He joined Cumhuriyet, one of Turkey’s oldest newspapers, but within just a few months, as Mr. Erdogan was seeking greater powers in a referendum, that paper, too, came under siege.
“I was jailed when there was no instrument left to silence me,” Mr. Gursel concluded. “They wanted to silence the newspaper and punish it for its disturbing articles, and they wanted to settle accounts with me.”


Correction: October 13, 2017 
  An earlier version of this article misstated the name of an organization that defends press freedom. It is the International Press Institute, not the Independent Press Institute.

Correction: October 15, 2017
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article also misstated the Turkish president’s description of those jailed. He said that only two of the arrested were journalists, not that “all but two” of them were.


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