On 29 March, hundreds of thousands gathered at Istanbul\u2019s Maltepe beach area \u2013 some even say it was 2.2 million. Waving flags and chanting slogans, the protestors demanded the release of Ekrem \u0130mamo\u011flu, the mayor of Istanbul who had been detained the week before. On 23 March, \u0130mamo\u011flu and 47 others were arrested on corruption charges; that same day, the People\u2019s Republican Party (CHP) announced \u0130mamo\u011flu as its candidate for Turkey\u2019s 2028 presidential elections, after holding a symbolic ballot.<\/p>\n
On the day of the rally I was writing in my studio, four kilometres away. The sound of the crowd floated through the air, rising and falling in waves; the songs, chants and slogans seemed to be coming from many directions. Even after closing the window, I could hear the tenor of the speeches: the angry, joyful, despairing voices of \u0130mamo\u011flu\u2019s wife, of his mother, and of \u00d6zg\u00fcr \u00d6zel, the CHP leader. The rally felt like a natural phenomenon, a snowstorm or a tornado that surrounded my reality in Istanbul.<\/p>\n
I gave up trying to write and turned on the TV.<\/p>\n
A cookery show. A program about the approaching Eid al-Fitr<\/em>. Footage from the devastating earthquake in Myanmar. The weather. A Coca-Cola commercial. Sports commentary about that night\u2019s match. A documentary on global warming. The producers of Turkey\u2019s leading news channels were obviously the only ones in the country who hadn\u2019t heard about the \u0130mamo\u011flu rally.<\/p>\n Image: Atomotantik \/ Source: Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n For the rest of the day, and in the papers the next morning, Turkey\u2019s government-controlled media avoided any mention of the demonstration. The media silence seemed unsustainable. But it was sustained and \u2013 as I write these lines \u2013 still is.<\/p>\n No wonder that Turkish culture is becoming increasingly Soviet in outlook. The gap between what you see on the street and what you get in the media is widening all the time. When I spend time in Istanbul, the city where I was born 44 years ago, I often feel compelled to distrust my eyes, ears and heart. Because what I see, hear, and think has become too dangerous to acknowledge.<\/p>\n At times like this, I have a dark urge to ask the system to control my mind. What exactly am I supposed to say and think? It seems the government requires from its citizens a composite of despair, apathy and numbness. But that\u2019s a difficult feeling to manage on one\u2019s own.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n I ended up watching the speeches on the YouTube channel of S\u00f6zc\u00fc<\/a>, an opposition TV station. (The next week the government announced it would shut down S\u00f6zc\u00fc because of its wall-to-wall coverage of the protests.) And then something unexpected happened.<\/p>\n It was at 2.53 p.m. when \u00d6zel \u2013 an uncharismatic but highly effective party leader \u2013 asked the crowd whether they knew which TV channels were showing the rally and which were not.<\/p>\n One of the ones not showing it was NTV, once a darling of progressives that had run programming in the mould of MSNBC, its US sister channel until 2014. If NTV hadn\u2019t reported on the rally by the top of the hour, he would issue a boycott, \u00d6zel warned.<\/p>\n I tried to imagine the scenes in the newsroom. Editors and producers pondering whether to go live. Whether to cover the rally negatively, perhaps as an illegal gathering. Or to simply ignore it. There was a brief will they or won\u2019t they<\/em> moment. Minutes passed. Not surprisingly, the channel chose to ignore the rally entirely.<\/p>\n As the media boycott reality, people are boycotting the media. \u00d6zel reeled off a list of further newspapers and TV channels that supporters of the CHP would boycott. He would remove the boycott once the media changed their mind and started covering events.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n In autocracies, individuals are forced to lead two different, interweaving lives. In private, they talk and act in one way; in public, they speak and behave in another. The rift is soon normalized. To the eye of the silenced citizen, it appears to be the foundation of public life. The rift\u2019s widening signals an authoritarianism on the rise.<\/p>\n When I covered<\/a> the Gezi Park protests in 2013, I noticed how the crux of what activists were articulating was a refusal of this separation between the public and the private. The millions who flocked to that small park in Istanbul were objecting to life in the closet of normativity, at a moment when Turkey\u2019s hybridity seemed to be blossoming.<\/p>\n At the time I was struggling with a new novel. Increasingly, I had found myself unable to write in what I considered the \u2018artificial\u2019 mode of fiction. The reality surrounding me was much more interesting. Making up plots, characters, patterns and conflicts, as one would for, say, a historical novel, seemed unbearably suffocating, even a betrayal of the act of writing.<\/p>\n Developments in Turkey were a wake-up call, a reminder of cold realities of the country. They also gave us a chance to explore and understand ourselves, our passions and red lines. For years, the media had gone along with a narrative fabricated by the government. Then, suddenly, young people challenged it with their own realities. This was what I wanted to do in my writing, too. All I could rely was on my own experience and observations. Since Occupy Gezi Park, I began to write autofictions.<\/p>\n The protests, which continued for 18 days, dismantled the myth of the \u2018New Turkey\u2019, just one of many externally imposed fictions. Nobody with eyes and ears could still believe that the country was undergoing a process of democratization. At the beginning, liberals had considered support for the government from the most deprived sectors of society as a mark of its democratic credentials; but now that support was in freefall. The Gezi protesters showed how selfishness, profit and disregard for the suffering of others had come to define Turkey\u2019s regime.<\/p>\n The intervening years have brought a relentless assault on queer communities and other marginalized groups, as the government has sought to consolidate normativity. Ecocidal acts carved out space for airports and other construction projects. And then there is the sneering cynicism towards anyone interested in leading an ethical life.<\/p>\n During the latest protests, I have been reminded of a remark by Franz Kafka: \u2018A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.\u2019 For many of us, Gezi was that axe, which fell on what Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky called \u2018manufactured consent\u2019. No wonder that Turkey\u2019s government-controlled media is refusing to let that axe fall again.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n \u0130mamo\u011flu\u2019s arrest prompted a series of op-eds in the international press. Was Turkey still \u2018competitive authoritarian\u2019, or had it sunk further down the democracy scale?<\/p>\n While the conflict is clearly between the forces of democracy and autocracy, it isn\u2019t immediately clear that an electoral victory for the democrats would pacify the country. That, I think, requires a more comprehensive reckoning with the cultural texture that has emerged in the past two-and-a-half decades. Nobody should underestimate how \u2018New Turkey\u2019 propaganda has shaped minds and behaviour. Unlearning selfishness and apathy takes time.<\/p>\n Alongside the symbolic primary election organized by the CHP, which 15 million people voted in, the party launched a petition for \u0130mamo\u011flu\u2019s release. \u2018I am one of the tens of millions of patriots whose hearts beat for the Republic, democracy and justice,\u2019 it reads. \u2018I am signing this to see my candidate next to me and the ballot box in front of me.\u2019<\/p>\n The petition is the latest attempt to crush a culture of concealment and silence. As a method of dissent, it has swiftly dispersed among networks whose members feel similarly about the mayor\u2019s arrest. But the government has a more diverse selection of tools and tactics in its arsenal.<\/p>\n Soon after the CHP launched Boykotyap.com<\/a>, listing the brands it was boycotting, the government shut the website down. The CHP changed the URL to Boykotyap.net<\/a>. When the government blocked that a few days later, the CHP launched Boykotyap.org<\/a>. But that can disappear too, if and when the government decides.<\/p>\n On 1 April the public prosecutor\u2019s office in Istanbul opened investigations into the boycotters on the grounds of incitement to \u2018hatred, discrimination and hostility\u2019, with the interior minister describing the calls for boycotts as a \u2018coup attempt\u2019. The following morning, the police detained 16 suspects, including the actor Cem Yigit Uzumoglu, who played Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror in the Netflix series \u2018Rise of Empires: Ottoman\u2019. Scores of actors and scriptwriters had their contracts with the national public broadcaster TRT revoked after voicing support for \u0130mamo\u011flu. Their films and TV shows were also excised from TRT\u2019s digital library.<\/p>\n The game of whack-a-mole can continue as long as both sides want and is sure to test their patience. In material terms, the government has the upper hand: the next elections are in three years, and it says there is enough money in the state coffers to avert a financial meltdown. In the week after \u0130mamo\u011flu\u2019s arrest, the Turkish Central Bank spent almost $12 billion<\/a> in foreign reserves to prop up the lira after it hit a record low of more than 40 to the dollar. There is still an estimated $150 billion that the government can use in case of more socio-economic turbulence. Despite grumblings from the US State Department and the European Council, the western response to the arrest has had the strength of chamomile tea.<\/p>\n The government knows it has extensive room for manoeuvre. Shortly after \u0130mamo\u011flu\u2019s arrest, it announced that Eid al-Fitr<\/em>, the holiday marking the end of Ramadan, would last nine days, one of the longest in recent history. This was calculated to be a sedative: closing schools, businesses and public offices would limit the effect of sociability and discourage public displays of dissent.<\/p>\n In response, activists have been flexing their muscles on social media, naming and shaming businesses whose leaders have insulted \u0130mamo\u011flu and his family. Among those targeted was a public events producer, prompting the South African comedian Trevor Noah, the Norwegian singer-songwriter Ane Brun, and the British rock band Muse to cancel their Istanbul dates.<\/p>\n To avoid the impression of weakness, the government needs to stay on the offensive. Censorship is its go-to solution. During Eid al-Fitr<\/em>, pro-government lawyers petitioned courts to shut down \u0130mamo\u011flu\u2019s social media. The mayor\u2019s allies have been using his X account, which has 9.7 million followers, to disseminate calls for rallies. If this fails, the government can throttle entire platforms, as it did after the earthquakes in 2023<\/a>. Ankara used this tactic again after \u0130mamo\u011flu\u2019s detention, when for three days YouTube, WhatsApp, and Instagram experienced slowdowns to the point of inaccessibility.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n Istanbulites have displayed their trust in the mayor by voting for him three times in five years. With electoral margins like this, no wonder \u0130mamo\u011flu unsettles officials in Ankara. He reminds them of the government\u2019s diminishing popularity. The CHP won 35 out of 81 municipalities in the local elections just a year ago, including mayoral victories in Turkey\u2019s five largest cities: Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Bursa and Antalya.<\/p>\n But with no elections scheduled until 2028, polls matter less than naked force. Besides, percentages and statistics cannot describe what has been happening in Istanbul and other urban centres over the past weeks. Walking through the Maltepe beach event area the other day, I felt aware of its immensity. I was so small compared to the space\u2019s peninsula-like dimensions. It was like being in the desert, where nobody can hear you except those nearby.<\/p>\n That my voice could carry for kilometres from here was an exciting possibility, one denied to so many in the country. In breaking the silence that has become engrained in Turkish culture, the people who came here last week to shout for freedom have done a great service to our country.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.eurozine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/2025_Sarachane_Protest_02-scaled-e1744021121953-1024x1013.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
![Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\nFor the rest of the day, and in the papers the next morning, Turkey\u2019s government-controlled media avoided any mention of the demonstration. The media silence seemed unsustainable. But it was sustained and \u2013 as I write these lines \u2013 still is.<\/p>\nNo wonder that Turkish culture is becoming increasingly Soviet in outlook. The gap between what you see on the street and what you get in the media is widening all the time. When I spend time in Istanbul, the city where I was born 44 years ago, I often feel compelled to distrust my eyes, ears and heart. Because what I see, hear, and think has become too dangerous to acknowledge.<\/p>\nAt times like this, I have a dark urge to ask the system to control my mind. What exactly am I supposed to say and think? It seems the government requires from its citizens a composite of despair, apathy and numbness. But that\u2019s a difficult feeling to manage on one\u2019s own.<\/p>\n*<\/p>\nI ended up watching the speeches on the YouTube channel of S\u00f6zc\u00fc<\/a>, an opposition TV station. (The next week the government announced it would shut down S\u00f6zc\u00fc because of its wall-to-wall coverage of the protests.) And then something unexpected happened.<\/p>\nIt was at 2.53 p.m. when \u00d6zel \u2013 an uncharismatic but highly effective party leader \u2013 asked the crowd whether they knew which TV channels were showing the rally and which were not.<\/p>\nOne of the ones not showing it was NTV, once a darling of progressives that had run programming in the mould of MSNBC, its US sister channel until 2014. If NTV hadn\u2019t reported on the rally by the top of the hour, he would issue a boycott, \u00d6zel warned.<\/p>\nI tried to imagine the scenes in the newsroom. Editors and producers pondering whether to go live. Whether to cover the rally negatively, perhaps as an illegal gathering. Or to simply ignore it. There was a brief will they or won\u2019t they<\/em> moment. Minutes passed. Not surprisingly, the channel chose to ignore the rally entirely.<\/p>\nAs the media boycott reality, people are boycotting the media. \u00d6zel reeled off a list of further newspapers and TV channels that supporters of the CHP would boycott. He would remove the boycott once the media changed their mind and started covering events.<\/p>\n*<\/p>\nIn autocracies, individuals are forced to lead two different, interweaving lives. In private, they talk and act in one way; in public, they speak and behave in another. The rift is soon normalized. To the eye of the silenced citizen, it appears to be the foundation of public life. The rift\u2019s widening signals an authoritarianism on the rise.<\/p>\nWhen I covered<\/a> the Gezi Park protests in 2013, I noticed how the crux of what activists were articulating was a refusal of this separation between the public and the private. The millions who flocked to that small park in Istanbul were objecting to life in the closet of normativity, at a moment when Turkey\u2019s hybridity seemed to be blossoming.<\/p>\nAt the time I was struggling with a new novel. Increasingly, I had found myself unable to write in what I considered the \u2018artificial\u2019 mode of fiction. The reality surrounding me was much more interesting. Making up plots, characters, patterns and conflicts, as one would for, say, a historical novel, seemed unbearably suffocating, even a betrayal of the act of writing.<\/p>\nDevelopments in Turkey were a wake-up call, a reminder of cold realities of the country. They also gave us a chance to explore and understand ourselves, our passions and red lines. For years, the media had gone along with a narrative fabricated by the government. Then, suddenly, young people challenged it with their own realities. This was what I wanted to do in my writing, too. All I could rely was on my own experience and observations. Since Occupy Gezi Park, I began to write autofictions.<\/p>\nThe protests, which continued for 18 days, dismantled the myth of the \u2018New Turkey\u2019, just one of many externally imposed fictions. Nobody with eyes and ears could still believe that the country was undergoing a process of democratization. At the beginning, liberals had considered support for the government from the most deprived sectors of society as a mark of its democratic credentials; but now that support was in freefall. The Gezi protesters showed how selfishness, profit and disregard for the suffering of others had come to define Turkey\u2019s regime.<\/p>\nThe intervening years have brought a relentless assault on queer communities and other marginalized groups, as the government has sought to consolidate normativity. Ecocidal acts carved out space for airports and other construction projects. And then there is the sneering cynicism towards anyone interested in leading an ethical life.<\/p>\nDuring the latest protests, I have been reminded of a remark by Franz Kafka: \u2018A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.\u2019 For many of us, Gezi was that axe, which fell on what Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky called \u2018manufactured consent\u2019. No wonder that Turkey\u2019s government-controlled media is refusing to let that axe fall again.<\/p>\n*<\/p>\n\u0130mamo\u011flu\u2019s arrest prompted a series of op-eds in the international press. Was Turkey still \u2018competitive authoritarian\u2019, or had it sunk further down the democracy scale?<\/p>\nWhile the conflict is clearly between the forces of democracy and autocracy, it isn\u2019t immediately clear that an electoral victory for the democrats would pacify the country. That, I think, requires a more comprehensive reckoning with the cultural texture that has emerged in the past two-and-a-half decades. Nobody should underestimate how \u2018New Turkey\u2019 propaganda has shaped minds and behaviour. Unlearning selfishness and apathy takes time.<\/p>\nAlongside the symbolic primary election organized by the CHP, which 15 million people voted in, the party launched a petition for \u0130mamo\u011flu\u2019s release. \u2018I am one of the tens of millions of patriots whose hearts beat for the Republic, democracy and justice,\u2019 it reads. \u2018I am signing this to see my candidate next to me and the ballot box in front of me.\u2019<\/p>\nThe petition is the latest attempt to crush a culture of concealment and silence. As a method of dissent, it has swiftly dispersed among networks whose members feel similarly about the mayor\u2019s arrest. But the government has a more diverse selection of tools and tactics in its arsenal.<\/p>\nSoon after the CHP launched Boykotyap.com<\/a>, listing the brands it was boycotting, the government shut the website down. The CHP changed the URL to Boykotyap.net<\/a>. When the government blocked that a few days later, the CHP launched Boykotyap.org<\/a>. But that can disappear too, if and when the government decides.<\/p>\nOn 1 April the public prosecutor\u2019s office in Istanbul opened investigations into the boycotters on the grounds of incitement to \u2018hatred, discrimination and hostility\u2019, with the interior minister describing the calls for boycotts as a \u2018coup attempt\u2019. The following morning, the police detained 16 suspects, including the actor Cem Yigit Uzumoglu, who played Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror in the Netflix series \u2018Rise of Empires: Ottoman\u2019. Scores of actors and scriptwriters had their contracts with the national public broadcaster TRT revoked after voicing support for \u0130mamo\u011flu. Their films and TV shows were also excised from TRT\u2019s digital library.<\/p>\nThe game of whack-a-mole can continue as long as both sides want and is sure to test their patience. In material terms, the government has the upper hand: the next elections are in three years, and it says there is enough money in the state coffers to avert a financial meltdown. In the week after \u0130mamo\u011flu\u2019s arrest, the Turkish Central Bank spent almost $12 billion<\/a> in foreign reserves to prop up the lira after it hit a record low of more than 40 to the dollar. There is still an estimated $150 billion that the government can use in case of more socio-economic turbulence. Despite grumblings from the US State Department and the European Council, the western response to the arrest has had the strength of chamomile tea.<\/p>\nThe government knows it has extensive room for manoeuvre. Shortly after \u0130mamo\u011flu\u2019s arrest, it announced that Eid al-Fitr<\/em>, the holiday marking the end of Ramadan, would last nine days, one of the longest in recent history. This was calculated to be a sedative: closing schools, businesses and public offices would limit the effect of sociability and discourage public displays of dissent.<\/p>\nIn response, activists have been flexing their muscles on social media, naming and shaming businesses whose leaders have insulted \u0130mamo\u011flu and his family. Among those targeted was a public events producer, prompting the South African comedian Trevor Noah, the Norwegian singer-songwriter Ane Brun, and the British rock band Muse to cancel their Istanbul dates.<\/p>\nTo avoid the impression of weakness, the government needs to stay on the offensive. Censorship is its go-to solution. During Eid al-Fitr<\/em>, pro-government lawyers petitioned courts to shut down \u0130mamo\u011flu\u2019s social media. The mayor\u2019s allies have been using his X account, which has 9.7 million followers, to disseminate calls for rallies. If this fails, the government can throttle entire platforms, as it did after the earthquakes in 2023<\/a>. Ankara used this tactic again after \u0130mamo\u011flu\u2019s detention, when for three days YouTube, WhatsApp, and Instagram experienced slowdowns to the point of inaccessibility.<\/p>\n*<\/p>\nIstanbulites have displayed their trust in the mayor by voting for him three times in five years. With electoral margins like this, no wonder \u0130mamo\u011flu unsettles officials in Ankara. He reminds them of the government\u2019s diminishing popularity. The CHP won 35 out of 81 municipalities in the local elections just a year ago, including mayoral victories in Turkey\u2019s five largest cities: Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Bursa and Antalya.<\/p>\nBut with no elections scheduled until 2028, polls matter less than naked force. Besides, percentages and statistics cannot describe what has been happening in Istanbul and other urban centres over the past weeks. Walking through the Maltepe beach event area the other day, I felt aware of its immensity. I was so small compared to the space\u2019s peninsula-like dimensions. It was like being in the desert, where nobody can hear you except those nearby.<\/p>\nThat my voice could carry for kilometres from here was an exciting possibility, one denied to so many in the country. In breaking the silence that has become engrained in Turkish culture, the people who came here last week to shout for freedom have done a great service to our country.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n[ad_2]\nSource link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[ad_1] On 29 March, hundreds of thousands gathered at Istanbul\u2019s Maltepe beach area \u2013 some even say it was 2.2 million. Waving flags and chanting<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":278510,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[154],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278509"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=278509"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278509\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/278510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=278509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=278509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=278509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}](\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:2025_Sara%C3%A7hane_Protest_02.jpg\"){kind=link}