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Tag: Osman Kavala

  • Osman Kavala and the Life of the Mind

    Osman Kavala and the Life of the Mind

    Thomas de Waal on sending Osman Kavala books to read in Silivri Prison.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    Since he was arrested in October 2017, the life of Osman Kavala, Turkey’s most prominent political prisoner, has been reduced to a few basic elements. He lives in a small cell, adjoining a tiny outside courtyard where he can take exercise and see a rectangle of sky. He is allowed occasional visits from his wife and his lawyer.

    The Turkish authorities have subjected Kavala to cruel and arbitrary imprisonment. For a long time, no charges were brought against him. Then he was acquitted of one set of charges but immediately arrested, on the same day, on even more grotesque charges of allegedly participating in the 2016 coup d’état.

    Incarceration has stopped Kavala from pursuing the vast range of activities in support of democracy and dialogue with Turkey’s neighbours that made him so prominent and beloved across the world. But his intellectual life is undimmed. Kavala is not allowed a computer, so he writes letters and notes in longhand, giving interviews and commentaries on cultural and political topics.

    For much of the day, he reads. He and his wife Ayşe Buğra, who recently retired as a social sciences professor at Boğaziçi University, find a little solace from the agonising uncertainty by reading books in parallel and sharing impressions when they meet. Initially, he made use of the prison library and reread Marcel Proust. Then he started to receive deliveries of books.

    ‘Every week he reads the books pages of Cumhuriyet newspaper,’ Buğra told me recently in Istanbul. ‘He is more informed than I am about new publications!’ Currently, they are reading the novels of Olga Tokarczuk

    Books are a way to keep in touch with a wider circle of friends, colleagues, and writers abroad, such as Elif Shafak. Julian Barnes’s 2016 novel The Noise of Time, about the dilemmas faced by Dmitri Shostakovich and his struggles with the Soviet establishment, made a deep impression. ‘It’s so relevant to present times,’ said Buğra. Through Shostakovich, Barnes was also describing the tribulations of contemporary Turkish artists facing the impossible choices of whether to leave the country, and if and how to speak up against injustice. The novel again strikes a chord in 2022, as Russian artists face  similar choices. 

    Thanks to English PEN, Barnes wrote a letter to Kavala, thanking him for his warm words about The Noise of Time and sending a ‘metaphorical handshake’. The gesture was deeply appreciated.

    I – and not only I, it seems – had hit on book deliveries as a way of keeping in touch with our friend Osman. The Turkish prison bureaucracy does what it can to make the process difficult, not just by restricting the number of books sent, but also by frequently rejecting books sent from abroad that do not have Turkish tax-stamps demonstrating that they were bought in Turkey. This means one must buy the books in Turkey, or online via an Istanbul bookshop.

    Having overcome these hurdles, I sent Osman a few books ordered via Pandora bookshop in Istanbul. I tried to choose titles that were stimulating but not too depressing. So I sent him Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, hoping that a story of free spirits battling state bureaucracy would be inspiring. He told me he enjoyed the subversive character of Professor Woland, the Mephistophelean spirit who brings havoc to Stalinist Moscow, and who ‘enables us to see how things are’. Later, in a more frivolous mode, I sent him Eva Ibbotson’s Magic Flutes, anticipating – correctly, I am glad to say – that a patron of the arts would enjoy her description of the improvised staging of a Mozart opera in a decrepit Austrian castle. Osman responded that he enjoyed the intellectual and musical romp.

    He also greatly enjoyed Letters to Camondo written by my brother Edmund de Waal, the story of an artistic entrepreneur who grew up on the shores of the Bosphorus and tried, and failed, to have the French state return the loyalty he showed them. More parallels there for Osman Kavala, the son of a wealthy family who became a major patron of the arts in Turkey.

    Lately, the flow of books to Osman has hit a bit of a traffic jam. I recently visited the headquarters of his cultural foundation, Anadolu Kultur, in central Istanbul. Inside, Kavala’s office lies empty, missing its tenant. His wide desk is piled high with books – I counted about 40 of them – waiting to be brought to Silivri Prison, 90km outside Istanbul, by his lawyer. More arrive all the time. Kavala’s secretary photocopies the front and back covers and includes them in the next package of letters and court documents, so he can choose books to read next.

    Kavala reads between two and five books a week, fewer when he is working on his trial documents. And he is only allowed a maximum of ten books in his cell. (What danger, I wonder, does possessing 11 books in your cell, and not 10, pose to the state? Only an authoritarian regime can answer these questions.)

    In the pile of unsent volumes on his desk I saw titles by Thomas Mann, Seamus Heaney, Kazuo Ishiguro, and a couple of books that I had sent him and were not yet delivered. Let us hope that he never has the time to read all these books – not in his prison cell, at least. The case against Kavala is so absurd, and the international calls for his freedom are so strong, that one day he will be released. Sooner, we hope, and not later.

    Osman Kavala’s desk.

    Tom de Waal is a senior fellow with Carnegie Europe, specializing in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus region.

    He is the author of numerous publications about the region. The second edition of his book The Caucasus: An Introduction (Oxford University Press) was published in 2018. He is also the author of Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide (Oxford University Press, 2015) and of the authoritative book on the Nagorny Karabakh conflict, Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War (NYU Press, second edition 2013).

    From 2010 to 2015, de Waal worked for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC. Before that he worked extensively as a journalist in both print and for BBC radio. From 1993 to 1997, he worked in Moscow for the Moscow Times, the Times of London, and the Economist, specializing in Russian politics and the situation in Chechnya. He co-authored (with Carlotta Gall) the book Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus (NYU Press, 1997), for which the authors were awarded the James Cameron Prize for Distinguished Reporting.

    Photo credit (r): Kerem Uzel.

  • This Is Not an Arthur Koestler Novel – This Is Turkey

    This Is Not an Arthur Koestler Novel – This Is Turkey

    Can Bahadır Yüce writes on Turkey’s response to coronavirus, and calls for the release of at-risk political prisoners

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    While COVID-19 is indiscriminate, its impact has not been equal. The poor suffer more than the rich; the threat to the old is graver than to the young; urban communities are more vulnerable than their rural counterparts. There is one particular group, above all, who are most defenceless: the incarcerated. Prisons are coronavirus hotspots. Across the world, millions closed in them are in imminent danger. Faced with calls from human rights organisations to free sick and vulnerable inmates, countries have responded in starkly different ways. There are those, like the United States, that have largely ignored these warnings. There are those, like the Philippines, that have released prisoners en masse. And then there’s the curious case of Turkey.

    In recent weeks, the Turkish government has freed more than 45,000 prisoners – almost a sixth of the  incarcerated population. Political prisoners, however – journalists, intellectuals, lawyers, teachers jailed on terrorism charges – have been exempt. In the terms of the bill passed last month, violent criminals may be released, while political prisoners remain locked-up. If you are a convicted murderer, you can be freed; if you are a journalist who has criticised President Erdoğan on social media, you cannot.

    COVID-19 cases in prisons are increasing. In Silivri Prison, the notorious penitentiary that hosts hundreds of journalists and political prisoners, the spread grows day-by-day. As of May 12, more than 191 cases were reported, with eight inmates in intensive care. There are also concerns of underreporting: no reliable information comes from the authorities, prison visits are cancelled, and the state-controlled media look the other way.  Silivri Prison is notoriously beset by poor conditions, where more than 40 people are packed into some seven-people cells – prime territory for a pandemic.

    Living in that territory, today, is Osman Kavala, the 62-year-old philanthropist and civil rights defender who will approaches 1000 days in jail. Then there is the writer and journalist Ahmet Altan, who is 70 and at-risk, serving a ten-and-a-half year sentence. During this pandemic, it is hard not to think about his prison memoir, I Will Never See the World Again, and quite how urgent its message feels. There is Hidayet Karaca, former head of a national TV station, who has been in jail for over five years and is in danger due to deteriorating health. And there is the visual journalist Fevzi Yazıcı, who remains in solitary confinement. A few weeks ago, Yazıcı sent a drawing from his jail cell to the world. The drawing, titled ‘Injustice’, reminded me of Picasso’s Guernica. It is reported that a German officer who saw Guernica asked Picasso, ‘Did you do that?’ to which the artist replied, ‘No, sir, you are the one who did it’. Yazıcı’s drawing, a product of a flawed justice system, says: The Turkish authorities did this.

    The threat of COVID-19 looms large in Turkey’s other prisons, too.  Selahattin Demirtaş, the prominent political prisoner and the former co-chair of the People’s Democratic Party, remains in Edirne Prison, and is considered high risk due to his health problems. Nedim Türfent of Dicle News Agency has completed his fourth year in Van Prison this week. This is not an Arthur Koestler novel – this is Turkey in 2020.

    Turkey’s government is using the pandemic for political vengeance. This is the cruellest of totalitarian methods. Turkey has been on an authoritarian track for some time. While the Erdoğan regime has been labelled as fascist, perhaps the word has been overused. Authoritarianism is often conflated with fascism. But how else can one describe leaving vulnerable people – whose only crime is political opposition – to suffer and die in prison? Now, we cannot deny that authoritarian tendencies have turned into fascism.

    Coronavirus has been a strange experience for all of us. For some, it is about work or education; for many, it is mostly about the economy. But for imprisoned people, it is a matter of life and death. People have compared lockdown to being caged. But we are free; we can protect ourselves. If we are lucky, we can even work from home, and avoid physical contact. How can inmates protect themselves in 40-people wards? I hope this ubiquitous experience of isolation makes us more empathetic to imprisoned people; that is one good that may emerge from our current moment.

    The law that was passed by the Turkish parliament is flawed and unjust. In Edmund Burke’s words, bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny. But the situation can still be resolved, and lives can still be saved. The government must free vulnerable political prisoners now. Their survival may rest solely on a a single decision by the Turkish government. We must call, now, for this decision. We must speak up for the defenceless. The danger is immediate and real. The clock-hands are moving. And there is a lethal difference between late and too late. 

    Can Bahadır Yüce is a poet and academic. He teaches history at the University of Tennessee.