Repression of Turkish intellectuals elicits global response
Nobel laureates, intelligentsia and celebrities around the world unite against the arbitrary detention of Turkish authors.
Prolonging religious holidays to make them long vacations has been an established practice in Turkey.
Religious holidays were seen as opportunities to heal social wounds and settle disputes. But nowadays that practice appears to further deepen existing political and ideological fissures while enabling millions of Turks to hit the roads for short holidays.
At dawn on Sept. 10, the apartments of two Turkish opinion leaders and public intellectuals were raided by police in Istanbul. They have been under detention since the first hours of the nine-day-long Eid al-Adha holidays. Nobody has heard from them. Their lawyers could not find the prosecutor who signed their detention warrants because he was on vacation, and they were not allowed to see their clients.
The detainees are not only neighbors in the same condominium, they are also brothers. The elder brother, Ahmet Altan, 66, is a best-selling novelist, a veteran journalist and the former editor-in-chief of Taraf, the controversial daily that rocked Turkey with sensational news stories on the alleged coup preparations of the military against the Justice and Development Part government during the first decade of the 2000s. The younger brother, Mehmet Altan, 63, is a professor of economics but is better known as a columnist who pioneered the trend called “Second Republicans” demanding the termination of the “First Republic” founded by Kemal Ataturk, whose guardian was the military.
