Locked Up by Erdogan
Osman Kavala, the son of a well-to-do Turkish businessman from a family of tobacco traders, was born in 1957. He attended the highly selective Robert College in Istanbul—a secular, coeducational high school founded in 1863, with classes in both English and Turkish—and then Manchester University in England before entering a graduate program in economics and political science at the New School in New York City. In 1982, when his father died, Kavala left graduate school. He returned to Istanbul to take over the family business.Kavala helped establish several publishing companies in Turkey, including Ana Publishing, which issued a Turkish version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He also became a founder and funder of several civil society organizations, including Anadolu Kültür, which fosters artistic and cultural exchange (Kavala has chaired the group), and an independent think tank called the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation, which promotes democratization, accountability, and good governance. His focus has been on establishing cultural centers in underdeveloped parts of Turkey as well as organizations that protect minority rights.In 2002 Anadolu Kültür founded the Diyarbakir Arts Center. Diyarbakir, a city of more than one million in southeastern Turkey, is essentially the capital of Turkey’s Kurdish region. The center promotes cultural dialogue and artistic expression in a part of the country that has been submerged in ethnic conflict and where the Kurdish population is severely victimized. When I visited not long after the Diyarbakir Arts Center opened, I saw Kurdish and Turkish teenagers to whom the group had given inexpensive cameras with which to document their lives. The program was clearly very popular among the participants. Their photos were exhibited on the center’s walls.Though Diyarbakir itself then seemed peaceful, armed combat in the region had begun about two decades prior, when the Kurdish Workers’ Party, or PKK, launched a war to establish an independent Kurdish state in 1984. The PKK’s goals shifted in the early 1990s toward securing enhanced political and cultural rights for Turkey’s Kurds. The United States, the European Union, and Turkey have designated the PKK as a terrorist organization, but to me it seems more appropriate to call it an insurgency on behalf of a harshly repressed minority.When the insurgency started, the existence of the Kurds as a distinct minority was simply not recognized. Kurds were known as “mountain Turks.” Their language, music, and other cultural expressions were either severely restricted or outright banned. An estimated 40,000 were killed in that insurgency, which lasted more than four decades, most of them Kurdish noncombatants.Turkish security forces impeded access to conflict areas by journalists and human rights investigators. Even so, periodic reports published by Human Rights Watch and other groups indicated that the Turkish military and police forcibly displaced hundreds of thousands of noncombatants in towns with large Kurdish populations and often attacked the homes of unarmed civilians, injuring and killing many.For decades Turkey has repressed Kurdish political movements, often citing the PKK as justification. Many members of political organizations like the Peoples’ Democratic Party have been imprisoned on charges of supporting terrorism. In recent years the Turkish government has implemented some reforms—for instance, permitting certain broadcasts and university programs in the Kurdish language—but the crackdown has continued. Against this backdrop, the willingness of Kavala, an ethnic Turkish businessman, to establish a multiethnic cultural center in a predominantly Kurdish city at the epicenter of the conflict speaks to his character. He stood ready to use his resources to promote the advancement of a persecuted minority.In October 2017 Kavala was returning to Istanbul from Gaziantep, a city near the border with Syria. He had visited Gaziantep to investigate how he might support the Syrian refugees in the area. As he arrived at the airport in Istanbul, he was arrested for his alleged involvement in protests that had taken place more than four years earlier. He has been imprisoned for over seven and a half years.The episode that led to Kavala’s incarceration began as an environmental protest over Istanbul’s Gezi Park, which abuts the city’s main square. It is one of the few green spaces in the center of the city. In September 2011 the Turkish government announced that the park would be replaced by a new development: a shopping center housed inside a reconstruction of Ottoman-era barracks that had once stood at the site. On May 27, 2013, the day construction was set to begin, a group of about fifty environmentalists and neighborhood residents peacefully occupied the park to prevent its demolition. Crews were able to dig up only a few trees and a walkway before the activists interfered. A small group kept watch that night.The following morning police unsuccessfully attempted to clear the park of protesters. By the evening many had pitched tents, and they refused to leave. As news of the sit-in and reprisals spread on social media, the number of occupiers grew. On May 31 the crowd of demonstrators had swelled to the tens of thousands, spilling into the surrounding streets and the main square. That day the police intervened again, attacking the demonstrators with tear gas, pepper spray, and water cannons to remove them from the area. Though Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, then prime minister, swore the government would not abandon its plan for the mall, work on the project was suspended on June 14.The Gezi Park protests spread to other parts of the country. Activists in nongovernmental organizations that did not ordinarily focus on environmental issues took up the mantle. Members of labor unions, women’s groups, human rights organizations—they all seemed to use the controversy over Gezi Park as a means of expressing their general dissatisfaction with the corruption and authoritarianism of the Erdoğan regime. According to a government report, between the start of the protests in late May 2013 and their informal end that September, some 3,600,000 people took part in more than five thousand protests, resulting in 5,513 arrests. Reportedly, 4,329 people were wounded, and five were killed (though other sources estimate as many as eight thousand were wounded and eleven killed).The original protesters achieved their main goal: Gezi Park was not demolished, and the shopping center intended for the site was not built. After the national demonstrations subsided, in part because of the violent police response, a number of people were prosecuted for supposedly organizing them. A number of prosecutions for these protests resulted in acquittals in 2015. The diversity of the participants and the fact that they belonged to many groups not known to have previously participated in protests indicated that the demonstrations were not preplanned but spontaneous.Three years later Erdoğan faced a far more serious challenge. In July 2016, by which point he had become president and gained enhanced powers in the constitution, a faction of the Turkish military attempted to overthrow him and his Justice and Development Party, or AKP. (In the last few decades of the twentieth century there were several military coups in Turkey.) Participants in the attempted coup attacked and killed scores of police who were among the government’s defenders, as well as a good number of civilians. They also damaged and destroyed government structures and used fighter jets to bomb the parliament building.Government forces loyal to Erdoğan put down the coup with some difficulty. Thousands of soldiers and teachers, along with some 2,200 judges and prosecutors, were swept up in the mass arrests that followed. More than 100,000 public officials were dismissed or suspended, including about 28,000 teachers.The government attributed the organization of the attempted coup—perhaps accurately, perhaps not—to Fethullah Gülen, a Muslim cleric with a large following. (By that time Gülen, who had formerly been aligned with Erdoğan, was living in Pennsylvania. Successive US presidential administrations declined to extradite him to stand trial in Turkey. He died last October.)Though the coup had no discernible connection to the Gezi Park demonstrations three years earlier, the Erdoğan government claimed that the protests had been a forerunner to the attempt to overthrow the regime. In this way it justified the harsh treatment of those it subsequently accused of planning the protests.When Kavala was arrested a year later and questioned by police for his supposed organization of the Gezi Park protests, he submitted a statement in which he said: I did not take part in any international meeting about the Gezi Park events prior to their occurrence…. I merely added my voice to the demands that Gezi Park remain a public park and I supported the activities to that end. I am convinced that parks are essential sites in urban life. In addition, my office and the building where I was born are located on the Elmadağ district, near the park; as a result, I regularly use this park on my daily travels. It is for this reason that I took part in peaceful activities to defend the environment…. I do not have any links to the organisations in question…. The allegation that I provided financial support to the campaign is incorrect. My only contribution was to supply young trees. On November 1, 2017, an Istanbul magistrate ordered that Kavala be placed in pretrial detention but did not bring any formal charges against him. On November 21, 2018, while Kavala was still being held in detention without charges, Erdoğan said during a meeting with local elected officials: Someone financed terrorists in the context of the Gezi events. This man is now behind bars. And who is behind him? The famous Hungarian Jew George Soros. This is a man who encourages people to divide and to shatter nations…. His representative in Turkey is the man of whom I am speaking, who inherited wealth from his father and who then used his financial resources to destroy this country. It is this man who provides all manner of support for these acts of terror. About two weeks later Erdoğan made a similar speech, this time citing the supposed Soros “representative”—Kavala—by name.On February 19, 2019, Kavala was formally indicted for attempting to overthrow the Turkish government by organizing and financing the Gezi Park protests. Fifteen other civil society figures were indicted alongside him. They included a prominent Turkish journalist, Can Dündar, who had been the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Cumhuriyet, and two people who had served in succession as the executive director of the Open Society Foundation in Turkey, of which Kavala had been a board member.The 657-page indictment is impossible to summarize, but it includes allegations that the defendants were responsible for various misdeeds committed by participants in the Gezi Park protests. It also suggests that the protests were modeled after large-scale movements that had unseated strongmen elsewhere, like the uprisings of the Arab Spring and the color revolutions in the former Soviet Union.In the indictment Kavala is linked to the Gezi Park protests as their supposed financier. He is repeatedly described as “Turkey’s Soros,” giving the impression that Soros was the government’s intended target and that Kavala was being prosecuted as a proxy. The indictment states that the Open Society Foundations provided funding for Kavala’s cultural projects, but there is no evidence that Kavala or the OSF funded protests on the ground. There is information to indicate that conversations took place within the OSF about potentially funding a retrospective video on the Gezi Park events.*On February 18, 2020, a year after the indictment and nearly seven years after the protests themselves, nine of the defendants, including Kavala, were acquitted. The remaining seven, including Gökçe Tüylüoğlu, then the director of the Open Society Foundation in Turkey, had been out of the country when the indictments were issued. Although they were tried in absentia, they were not included in the court’s judgment.Erdoğan is, of course, not alone among authoritarian leaders in fixating on George Soros. Both Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Vladimir Putin in Russia have demonized Soros. As the Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev wrote in a book about Soros edited by Peter Osnos, he represents everything that [they] sought to extirpate: internationalism (globalism), minority rights, autonomous civil society, and the power of nonstate actors…. In Eastern Europe the “war on Soros” has become a rallying cry meant to persuade Eastern European societies that any form of internationalism is antithetical to national cultural traditions…. At a moment when conspiracy theories have replaced ideologies as the instigator of political identity, Soros-related conspiracy writing has become the book club of the far right. A day after the court announced its decision, Erdoğan denounced the acquittals at a parliamentary meeting. Once again he attacked Soros: “There are those types like Soros stirring up trouble behind the scenes to make some countries rise up. And, you know, its Turkey branch was behind bars. They attempted to acquit him with a maneuver yesterday.”The Council of Judges and Prosecutors, the Turkish judiciary’s supervisory body, responded by launching a disciplinary probe against the three judges who issued the verdict. The Istanbul public prosecutor then appealed the group’s acquittal, and the appellate court ruled that Kavala and the other defendants could be retried on additional charges. During these proceedings, and despite his acquittal, Kavala’s imprisonment continued.The retrial led to a decision on April 25, 2022. Kavala was found guilty of attempting to overthrow the government. He was sentenced to aggravated life imprisonment, meaning that he could never be released on parole. The court sentenced seven other defendants to eighteen years in prison for aiding and abetting him. For the defendants who did not return to the country to face trial, charges remain open.By this time the proceedings had aroused widespread condemnation. The International Commission of Jurists and the International Bar Association both denounced the disciplinary action against the judges who had acquitted Kavala and the others. Both groups had sent observers to monitor the proceedings.Meanwhile Kavala and his Turkish counsel appealed to the European Court of Human Rights. Turkey, as a member of the Council of Europe, is a party to the European Convention on Human Rights and has agreed to be bound by that court’s decisions. On March 10, 2020, in a decision reaffirmed on July 11, 2022, by the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights, the court had ordered Kavala released. The decision, referring to Erdoğan’s speeches in 2018 denouncing Kavala and claiming that he was acting for Soros, said: The Court cannot overlook the fact that when these two speeches were given, the applicant [Kavala], who had been held in pre-trial detention for more than a year, had still not been officially charged by the prosecutor’s office. The imprisonment of Kavala, it said, therefore affected not merely the applicant alone, or human-rights defenders and NGO activists, but the very essence of democracy as a means of organising society, in which individual freedom may only be limited in the general interest. That is, the imprisonment of Kavala was a means of suppressing dissent in Turkey.Although Kavala was acquitted of the charges on which he was originally indicted, although his release was ordered by a court that Turkey has agreed to obey, and although embassies of ten countries (Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and the United States) have sought his freedom, he remains in prison.And still his contributions to cultural expression continue to be recognized. On May 6 Germany’s Goethe-Institut announced that he had been awarded the 2025 Goethe Medal, which will be presented at a ceremony in Weimar on August 28, Goethe’s birthday. In 2023 the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly awarded Kavala the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize.Erdoğan is now seventy-one years old. He has ruled Turkey for the last twenty-two years, first as prime minister and then, after the constitutional changes he promoted, as president. He has reached his term limits, so if elections take place in 2028, following the electoral schedule, he will not be eligible to run. But he could prolong his reign. Erdoğan could amend the constitution again, or call elections at an earlier date (for which he would need parliamentary support) and claim in this way that he has not exhausted his term limits. Like many other authoritarian leaders, including Putin and Xi Jinping—and of course Donald Trump has alluded to a third term—he seems intent on ruling for life.On March 1, in a development that could assist Erdoğan in extending his rule, the PKK announced a cease-fire with the Turkish government, vowing to resume combat only if attacked. The PKK was responding to a call from Abdullah Öcalan—its founder and leader, who has been imprisoned in Turkey for the past twenty-six years—for the group to “lay down their arms.” The PKK followed up with a declaration on May 12 that it was disbanding and disarming. Henceforth, it said, the Kurdish struggle will take place through the political process. If the PKK obtained any concessions from the Erdoğan government, these were not disclosed. It is certainly the case that enhanced support from Kurdish voters could help Erdoğan’s effort to amend the constitution.Another factor that may have influenced the Kurds in the peace agreement is the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, which has enabled Kurdish forces in that country to take part in efforts to form a new governing structure in lieu of pursuing independence. And for Erdoğan, Turkey is in a moment of severe financial difficulty. Its foreign currency reserves are depleted, and an international bailout may be needed. A reconciliation with the Kurds enhances Turkey’s international standing and may help the country secure a loan.A few days after the cease-fire signaled a possible end to the war, the Erdoğan government took another step that seemed like preparation for a reelection campaign. On March 19 officials arrested Ekrem İmamoğlu, the mayor of Istanbul, and, by this writing, more than a hundred of his supporters, on charges of corruption and terrorism. İmamoğlu’s Republican People’s Party, or CHP, was about to designate him as its candidate for president, an unhappy scenario for Erdoğan, as CHP candidates routed their AKP opponents in nationwide local elections in 2024, and İmamoğlu has repeatedly defeated AKP candidates in Istanbul.Many Turks have tired of Erdoğan, who once seemed to be a reformer but has become more corrupt, more extreme, and more rigidly Islamist the longer he has remained in power. The CHP was founded by Turkey’s national hero, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. İmamoğlu has followed in Atatürk’s footsteps in his commitment to secular government.A day before İmamoğlu’s arrest, his diploma from Istanbul University, which he had received thirty-one years earlier, was abruptly revoked—a sign of coordinated political planning, since the Turkish constitution requires that presidential candidates hold university degrees. The government banned demonstrations over the arrest, but many thousands of Turks nevertheless took to the streets of Istanbul, Izmir, Ankara, and smaller cities across the country to express their outrage. The police used tear gas, pepper spray, and water cannons against the protesters, but the demonstrations continued. About two thousand people were arrested. Days after İmamoğlu was detained by police, nearly 15 million people—including 13 million nonparty members—voted for him to become the CHP’s presidential candidate in the 2028 elections.On March 29 hundreds of thousands or more—organizers claimed 2.2 million—took part in demonstrations in Istanbul. The Erdoğan government restricted access to social media, and there, too, expressions of dissent resulted in many arrests. But protests have continued, including boycotts of businesses and products connected to prominent supporters of Erdoğan.The simultaneity of İmamoğlu’s arrest and the peace process with the PKK suggests that Erdoğan may have been planning to call early elections to circumvent term limits. But the scale of the resulting protests may persuade him to devise an alternate means of perpetuating his rule.Whether Erdoğan succeeds in his effort matters far beyond Turkey’s borders. Turkey is a large country with powerful armed forces, and its geographic position is of immense strategic significance. It is a member of NATO, and it has a larger military than any member country other than the United States. The country sits astride the waterways that connect the Black Sea ports of Russia and Ukraine to the rest of the world. It has the largest refugee population on earth; Europe would be overwhelmed if many of the 3.1 million people sheltering in Turkey were to continue westward. (Concern about the possibility that Turkey might unleash a flow of refugees made some leaders of the European Union exercise notable restraint when commenting on İmamoğlu’s arrest.) The Turkish diaspora has a significant presence in several European countries, including Germany and Sweden. Turkey is also a powerful force in the Middle East, including Syria, and in Central Asia, where some groups speak Turkic languages.The results of local elections in 2024 make it clear that a large part of the Turkish population—most likely the majority—wishes to end authoritarian rule and to be governed by public officials who respect civil rights and the rule of law. If the country is able to move significantly in that direction, it will greatly strengthen democratic forces that have been losing ground internationally for more than two decades.İmamoğlu’s detention and the continued persecution of those who exercise their freedom of expression—best exemplified by Kavala’s life imprisonment—demonstrate that it will be extremely difficult to hold a free and fair election in Turkey. The protests against İmamoğlu’s arrest show that many Turks have not given up on overcoming authoritarian rule. It is unclear whether they can succeed.