Theater of the absurd in Turkey's
courts By Caleb Lauer
ISTANBUL - The Istanbul Palace of Justice
is sleek, huge (nine floors high), and built on the
round. The new courthouse - said to be Europe's
biggest - sits on that continent's side of the city.
Inside the
courthouse, past the airport-like security -
jackets and belts off, shoes stay on - one stands
in a soaring atrium filled with light falling from
the glazed ceiling nine storeys overhead; floors
of courtrooms rise on either side.
The
foreign visitor can expect every courtesy and
every assistance. But the loft and elegance of the
place seem to bring into even starker relief the
impression that a number of people on
trial here face dysfunction
and absurdity.
On December 13, 2012, a
pregnant woman in the gallery of one courtroom
stood on tip-toe, waved, and leaned back to show
her belly to some of the accused. She pivoted and
swayed to find a sightline. Fourteen gendarmes -
mostly young conscripts doing their military
service - stood shoulder to shoulder along the
bar, backs to the gallery, cutting communication
between it and their prisoners, though the two
groups were just an arm's length apart.
"Five weeks to go," the woman mouthed,
patting her belly. Smiling, she flashed an open
hand through a sightline.
In the gallery -
three short pew benches split by an aisle - four
dozen people sat squished together. They craned
their necks and ducked their heads. Through the
shifting gaps between the shoulders and elbows of
the gendarmes they waved, pantomimed, and blew
kisses. One baby-faced gendarme was turned
outwards, keeping watch. But a young woman had
captured most of his sheepish attention; whenever
she chanced to glance at him, he quickly dropped
his gaze.
Both the gendarme and the young
woman looked about 20 years old. This trial began
before they started high school. If the pregnant
woman had given birth when the accused were first
arrested, that child today would be in the middle
of first grade.
One of the accused was
journalist Fusun Erdogan, detained - but not yet
convicted - since September 2006. Like her two
dozen co-defendants, Erdogan is accused of
belonging to the illegal Marxist-Leninist
Communist Party, known by its Turkish initials as
the MLKP. She faces life imprisonment. The charge
is not complex, nor is the evidence exceedingly
voluminous - the main exhibit is a document
prosecutors say is a MLKP roster; defense lawyers
say it's fake.
Erdogan is being persecuted
for her journalism, she says, a claim supported by
the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists
(CPJ) and the France-based Reporters Without
Borders (RSF).
The Journalists' Union of
Turkey says more than 70 journalists are currently
detained without conviction; many have been in
jail for more than a thousand days. After more
than 2,300 days and 17 hearings, Fusun Erdogan's
(and her co-defendants') detention continues.
"There is concern that arrests and long
pre-trial detentions without conviction are used
as a form of intimidation," the Organization for
Security and Co-operation in Europe wrote about
Turkey in April 2012. The CPJ identified Turkey as
the 2012 world-beater in jailing journalists.
The packed gallery paid little attention
to the proceedings. They had come to visit. People
waited out in the main corridor behind a
turnstile. One by one they were let through as
others left and seats became free. But rather than
rotating out to free-up more seats, many in the
gallery squeezed empty spaces from the pews by
cramming closer.
A woman asked what
language I was writing in; it was not an intrusion
as my notebook was practically on her lap. "Get
out!" a new arrival hissed to the gallery - family
members were waiting, she implored - "Get out!"
The bailiff eventually intervened.
Please,
he said quietly as the proceedings continued
behind him, stop squishing together, leave during
recess and give others a chance, it's the only
way. A pew that had been full with five people now
held nine; everyone pretended - for the bailiff's
sake - to be comfortable.
Then the
gendarmes changed shifts and the wall of green
fatigues disassembled, and before the replacements
reassembled, for what must have been too brief a
moment, the courtroom was like the arrivals hall
at a silent airport.
During a recess,
hundreds of people milled about the main corridor
or leaned against the railing overlooking the
atrium. The crowd was full of well-known
activists; Lesbian, gay and bisexual, Kurdish,
Armenian, socialist, and other struggles were all
represented.
One man with a long white
beard paced and clutched to his chest Hasan
Cemal's latest book 1915: The Armenian
Genocide. (Cemal, a columnist, promotes
awareness of the Armenian Genocide though he is
the grandson of Cemal Pasha, a member of the
Ottoman triumvirate allegedly responsible for the
genocide. Oddly enough, the other two, Enver Pasha
and Talat Pasha, are buried just outside the
courthouse.)
Bedri Adanir, a Kurdish
journalist who had been in the gallery, was buoyed
by the crowded support for Erdogan. Adanir had
himself just left jail. Convicted of belonging to
the illegal Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which
he denies, he served three years of a six-year
sentence. Like Erdogan, Adanir was targeted for
his journalism, the CPJ and RSF say. While in
prison Adanir and Erdogan wrote letters to each
other. They have not yet properly met, but that
day, for the first time, they were able to
exchange waves.
However, the crowd had
not, in fact, come for Erdogan's trial but for
Pinar Selek's, happening the same day in another
courtroom off the same corridor. One might
understand if Adanir was slightly dismayed. After
all, Erdogan and her co-defendants have been in
prison without conviction for more than six years,
more or less forgotten by the public, while Pinar
Selek, whose local and international supporters
crowd courthouse halls and issue multilingual
press releases, is being tried in absentia, and
lately enduring it in some comfort, exiled at the
University of Strasbourg in France where she is
completing a doctorate.
However, Adanir is
the first to say that begrudging Selek would be
unconscionable.
On July 9, 1998, an
explosion at the Spice Bazaar in central Istanbul
killed seven people and injured more than 100. Two
days later, Pinar Selek was arrested on charges
unrelated to the explosion - she was accused, like
Adanir would be a decade later, of being a PKK
member. While in custody, she was tortured by
strappado (hands tied behind the back and the body
suspended in the air by a rope attached to the
wrists) and electricity.
A few weeks after
Selek had been taken into custody, a man was
arrested and confessed that he and Selek had
planted the Spice Bazaar bomb.
However,
state and academic experts had concluded,
independently, that the Spice Bazaar explosion was
most likely a tragic accident - it seemed a tank
of cooking fuel had blown-up, not a bomb. The man
who had confessed told the court he had been
tortured into the false statement and had never
known Pinar Selek. Selek was released in December
2000 pending trial; in 2006 she was acquitted.
But the prosecutor appealed and the
acquittal was overturned. In 2009, the lower court
acquitted Selek again. In 2010, the appeals court
ordered a retrial. The lower court refused and
confirmed Selek's acquittal. But then in November
2012, the lower court accepted the demand and
proceeded with a retrial.
In other words,
prosecutors insisted, over and over, that Pinar
Selek was guilty of a crime that court experts
doubt happened and for which she was repeatedly
acquitted. Further, the basis of her presumed
guilt is a confession the court found false,
extracted by torture from a man who never knew the
accused, and who was himself acquitted.
No
one can explain why this is happening. One
supporter who was outside the courtroom, Oner
Ceylan, believes Pinar Selek is being persecuted
for her work in the 1990s. Ceylan mentioned
Selek's research on Ulker Street in Istanbul where
many transgender women lived but were forced out.
Selek was also researching the Kurdish
insurgency in the 1990s when she was arrested,
Ceylan said. She had opened an art workshop for
street children, and she had written about sex
workers. Most commentators say Selek's research
and writing on marginal groups, especially Kurds,
in the 1990s had made her a target.
But
nobody has a good explanation why, for almost 15
years, the state has persisted in what seems an
illogical prosecution.
"I can't find any
legal or lawful reason why a conviction of Pinar
Selek is desired so insistently," Akin Atalay, one
of Selek's lawyers, wrote in an email. "By bending
the rules of logic, reasoning, and law - most of
the time clearly violating them - and by covering
up facts, it is clear this desire to convict comes
from a place beyond law and justice. But whether
the reason is political, social, or personal is
impossible to know."
Pinar Selek's trial
continued on January 24, 2013. That day, in the
hall overlooking the atrium, lawyers told
supporters it was "99%" certain the court was
about to sentence Pinar Selek to life
imprisonment.
The late afternoon crowd
waited for the decision, chatting in Turkish,
French, German, and English. The courtroom was
larger than where Erdogan was tried, but with the
same wood-paneling decor. Three judges sat on the
bench. Behind them a stylized image of Mustafa
Kemal Ataturk, founder of modern Turkey, hung on
the wall with his words emblazoned: "Justice is
the Basis of Property". The prosecutor sat
elevated in his own box to the judges' right. In
the well, the clerk worked behind two computer
screens. Forty lawyers for the accused sat past
the bar.
A judge read the majority
decision in a faint, high-pitched voice. Reporters
scribbled then turned for the doors the moment
they heard Pinar Selek's life sentence and arrest
order; they headed downstairs, across the now
darkened atrium, to the square outside where
cameras were lit and running and where supporters,
who had skipped the verdict delivery, now prepared
their protest. A gay pride flag flew; Kurdish
ululations rose over the crowd. They shouted
slogans in Turkish, French, and English. "We
cannot explain this decision in legal terms," said
lawyer Ceren Akkaya. "But it was clear after the
last hearing that this would be the decision."
The decision was two to one; the president
of the court - the only judge to have been on the
case from the beginning - wrote a dissenting
opinion citing the lack of evidence.
Pinar
Selek's lawyers have begun the appeal process. The
Supreme Court of Appeals will hear the appeal and
if that court confirms the conviction the decision
will be final. "We see this as most likely,"
Atalay said.
In the end, Erdogan, Selek
and their co-defendants will have recourse to the
European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). On the same
day that Pinar Selek was sentenced, Dean
Spielmann, president of the ECHR, delivered the
court's annual report, which shows that 65% of all
judgements against Turkey in 2012 involved a
violation of the right to a fair trial. Both the
ratio and the real number (80) are the highest of
any country.
Erdogan's trial continues
March 12, 2013.
Caleb Lauer is a
Canadian freelance journalist living in Istanbul
and covering Turkey since 2006.
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