Freedom or else
TURKEY KEITH KYLE
Keith Kyle has recently visited Turkey on behalf of Amnesty.
Sadi Alkilig was a minor Turkish civil ser- vant in his late fifties, in charge of the stores of the Health Department in Istanbul, married with a family of five. In the autumn of 1962 Cumhuriyet (The Republic), a leading Istanbul daily owned by the wealthy Nadi family, ran, as it had done for several years past, an essay competition on a topic of public interest. This time the set theme was 'Turkey's Way to Salvation: Liberalism or Socialism?'
The best hundred essays were chosen for pub- lication, running sixty to forty in favour of socialism. Of the sixty successful Socialist en- tries, one had been written by Sadi Alkilic and submitted, because he was a civil servant, in the name of his wife Hikmet. Solely on account of this article, Sadi Alkilic is now in jail, con- demned in 1965 to serve six years and two months, to be followed by two years of exile to any area of the country named by the govern- ment (a severe hardship for an Istanbul man forced to live in a remote Asian village), plus permanent loss of civil rights, which in addi- tion to depriving him of the vote means that he can never be employed as a civil servant again.
Alkilic had no political record. The essay which brought on this complete disaster is a naive, derivative exercise in utopian socialism. Its tone can be gauged from a short extract: 'Socialism will be established by means of law and of governmental force against the greedy exploiters. Yes, by force. As the majority consists of poor people the application of socialism by force of law will prove to be in conformity with democratic principles.
'Under a socialist government Turkish people will be more friendly and quiet. Theft, bribery, brigandage will disappear of them- selves.'
Alkilic was accordingly arrested and charged under Section 142 of the Penal Code. This pro- vides extremely stiff penalties for the crime of seeking to 'establish the domination of one par- ticular social class over other social classes' or to 'overthrow the social and economic order.' He was acquitted, and on appeal by the public prosecutor was acquitted again. But this par- ticular prosecutor, who remains today abso- lutely convinced that Alkilig's article is Communist propaganda of the most dangerous kind, eventually secured an appeal to a still higher court, which found Alkilic guilty. The harsh penalties inflicted were the minimum prescribed under the code for such offences when actual publication is involved.
As Turkish authorities are quick to point out, right-wing (i.e., pro-Islamic state) as well as left-wing propaganda falls under this ban. But it has to be borne in mind that the whole notion of democracy in Turkey has about it the air of paradox.
From the days of Kemal Atatiirk onwards modernism and liberal democracy have been imposed on the country against the will of the majority. Istanbul itself is a great European city governed as a dependency of rural Asia. The majority of the Turkish people are still Anatolian peasants, dominated by their Muslim teachers who regard Istanbul as a sink of cos- mopolitanism, infidelity and Communism.
Atatiirk himself believed in free discussion as part and parcel of the 'Western civilisation' that he wanted for Turkey, provided it was conducted in the permitted area between the extremes of advocating Communism and ad- vocating the Islamic state. But he made the penalties for going over the ill-defined (and therefore readily adjustable) edges very severe.
The basic dilemma of post-Kemalist Turkey is how to preserve secular democracy by thwarting the will of the majority. On no account must politicians be allowed to promise or still less to deliver to the peasant voters what they really want. The late Adnan Menderes slid further and further into this heresy during his decade in the premiership until, having started on a final persecution of the official opposition, the old party of Kemal Atatiirk, he was deposed by the army and, having been tried on capital charges under the ordinary penal code, was condemned and executed. But the exposure of his personal as well as his political misdeeds in no way disenchanted the peasantry, who, when they were given the chance in 1965 to demon- strate their true feelings, returned to power Suleyman Demirel's Justice party, which could be called the reincarnation of Menderes's Democrats—were it not still a criminal offence, punishable by five years in prison, to do so.
Demirel, being a great deal more sensible than Menderes, is strongly disinclined to lose his head for the sake of the anti-democratic views of his voters. On most subjects his party is heavily deterred from any disposition to yield to its electorate by the 1961 constitution.
This safeguards even more than the usual freedoms, but there are significant qualifica- tions. Freedom to form political parties without prior permission is guaranteed (article 56). But any political party that as much as hints at the subordination of social, political, legal or eco- nomic policies to religious rules must be banned permanently by the constitutional court (article 19). There is full freedom of speech and the press (articles 20-22). But no political propa- ganda is permitted which may cause damage to the forest, nor may anyone convicted of such an offence benefit from any amnesty (article 131). Asian Turkey suffers from erosion, the peasants yearn for the right to strip the forests, therefore politicians must on no account be allowed to promise it to them. Under the law of measures, which is exempt from chal- lenge on constitutional grounds (provisional article 4), it is a criminal offence to attack democracy indirectly by praising Menderes. It is also a very serious offence, explicitly ex- empted from all constitutional safeguards, to wear a fez or call anyone pasha or effendi (article 153).
In this climate the exercise of free expression in Turkey is a gamble, spiced by the danger of high penalties for the losers, in which some of the intellectuals and the newspapers indulge quite lustily. Most controversial writers of the right or the left are under some sort of warning harassment from the public prosecu- tors most of the time. It is a little like England at the time of Queen Anne. But of all the writers running such risk only one has been made to pay the full penalty: the insignificant amateur Sadi
Rightly or wrongly, Atattirk embraced 'West- ern civilisation' passionately as the salvation of Turkey. 'We're not going to pay any attention to what this one or that one says,' he once declared, 'we're going to be civilised and proud of it.' In which case there are standards. And however understanding one may be of Turkey's special history, one must state that the con- tinued imprisonment of Sadi Alkilic and the section of the penal code under which his sentence was possible are incompatible with such standards.
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