Nuray Mert and "membership in a terrorist organization"

Ever since I heard last week that a case had been filed against Nuray Mert on the charge of "membership in a terrorist organization," the last 40 years we have lived through in Turkey keep passing before me like a long film reel I have watched over and over. What is happening to us? Where are we headed? I sent the news to many friends and asked the same question: what is happening to us? Most of our old mutual friends heard the news from me. They too are bewildered.

Many things can be said about Nuray Mert; after all, she is someone with very sharp ideas and stances that will disturb many people. But perhaps the only thing that cannot be attributed to her, cannot be pinned on her, and would not even stick to her is "membership in a terrorist organization," or even "membership in any organization." Because she has a personality independent enough in thought, and oppositional at its core, that she cannot be a member of any organization. As far as I know, in every setting she has joined she has never held back from saying what she sees, by her own lights, as wrong, and perhaps for that very reason she holds a stance that could never find a place inside any structure or organization.

"Always being in opposition" is perhaps the first description you would hear if you asked her for a phrase that would define the style of politics in her life and express herself. Indeed, she has also published a book under this title. Personally, it is of course not a style of politics I have ever shared. In one debate, to those who expect Islamism, too, to be always in opposition, I tried to remind them, with the whole of its theoretical foundation, that the Prophet, as the reference of Islamism, never set remaining in opposition as an ideal; on the contrary, there was the Medina experience as much as the Mecca experience. Anyway, this is my own personal view, of course, but no one has to share it, least of all Nuray Mert. My reason for mentioning this difference is not to criticize her on this point or to prove myself right, but to explain how irrational it is to attribute membership in an organization to her.

My acquaintance with Nuray Mert goes back to the early nineties. From the moment I first met her, we had, of course with our differences, a friendship that proceeded through very strong and productive dialogues. During the February 28 process she joined the editorial board of the journal Tezkire, which we were publishing in Ankara with a group of friends, and made very fine contributions, signing very strong articles. In 2003, within the scope of the Eastern Conference, in order to take a stand on behalf of Turkish intellectuals against the US occupation of Iraq, we set out with a busload of intellectuals to Syria, which had been mentioned as the second target.

Both until that time and from then until 2007, we approached many issues through which the country and the world were passing, together with many intellectuals, discussing them, at times agreeing and at times diverging, but never accusing one another of anything. I can say that the ground on which intellectuals of very different ideas and temperaments could debate one another and explain themselves to each other in person was, in the end, our greatest loss at the close of the processes we later lived through. When exactly and why did it disappear? Perhaps it was a rupture that had been progressing slowly beforehand, but I think the real great rupture came with Gezi. We are of course not in a position to determine its causes and those responsible, and pass judgment on them, in one stroke here.

In 2007, as Nuray Mert herself recounts in her latest book, we ended up in rather opposed positions because of her stance in the presidential election. Without ever dropping the manners of debate, I criticized this stance of hers. On many issues that came afterward we thought very differently, but I never thought that she was calculating in what she wrote or in the attitudes she adopted, or insincere, someone who did not believe what she said. On the contrary, I have always kept one ear open to hearing from her even ideas that I found not worth considering when I heard them from others. Even when I did not like them at all. I also read her latest book (Batı İslâm'ı Çok Sevmişti - Batı'nın İslâm Siyasetleri ve İslâmcılık [The West Loved Islam Very Much - The West's Policies on Islam and Islamism], İletişim Yayınları, 2022), had many objections, and kept saying I would evaluate it any day now, but never found the chance. Anyway, that is not the subject.

Frankly, we cannot ignore the climate that has led Nuray Mert today to "bid farewell" to writing and speaking on political subjects. Of course it is not possible to say that this climate was created by those in power alone. Indeed, although Nuray Mert today objects to the expression, she is practically "expelled from nine villages." Actually I have always held a separate respect for her, thinking that she is not bothered by this situation. A person who persistently pursues her own truths, risking and paying the price of exclusion, commands respect whatever happens. Where has one ever seen a person who insists on her own truths being accepted by everyone?

Mert has drawn considerable wrath: from the newspaper Cumhuriyet because of her views criticizing Kemalism; from leftist circles because her stance in the Referendum was interpreted as "not enough, but yes"; earlier, from the "power circles" of the time, secularist-Kemalist, because she had defended the headscarf; and, I think, again on the Kurdish question, from the circles of the "organization" of which she is accused of being a "member." The circles of power are one of these nine villages from which she was, so to speak, expelled.

True, today there is no single center, no single power that prevents us from speaking, applies pressure on us, and incites lynching fury. Every group has a world of its own making, and in each world the authority, pressure, excommunication and exclusion mechanisms of a separate power operate. But undoubtedly, none of the other villages or centers of power is perhaps in a position to wield the "judicial" force of power against the others, and precisely this creates a serious moral situation that otherwise compels everyone with a conscience.

In the "Resolution Process" that began 11 years ago, that is, in 2013, Mert, like many journalists, held talks with PKK members and shared them with the public. In the atmosphere that formed in that period, the definition and nature of the crime were reshaped according to that atmosphere, and Mert, trusting the atmosphere of that process taking shape in Turkey, acted a bit more boldly in this environment, in a sense standing out in putting her hand under the stone. Indeed, an investigation opened on this very ground also ended in an acquittal ruling noting that it was "within the scope of the Peace process." Despite this, today, because of this event, she will be tried at the High Criminal Court on the accusation of "membership in a terrorist organization."

I know that treating this as part of the government's effort to silence its opponents makes the diagnosis of a more complicated problem of ours even harder. If you ask how I know, in 22 years of government we now know more or less how the judiciary works, from Ergenekon to Balyoz, and from there to the FETÖ cases and later other cases: Turkey has a serious problem of judicial mindset.

Of course, this is a problem that has taken shape and diversified in a complex relationship with the government and politics in general. A judiciary that appears to bow to the government while turning around and, by a fait accompli, determining both the government and politics is a typical problem. It is also a problem that cannot be reduced to the relationship with the government. The judiciary is always a power that creates and operates its own ideology, autonomous power and behavior.

Dismissing as detail and belittling the small victims caught in between while focusing on the larger target, a carelessness, a heedlessness that begins by seeing it as normal for the green to burn along with the dry, is justice's greatest killer. Unfortunately, the notion that just struggles legitimize burning the green along with the dry opens the way, in all these cases, for those more royalist than the king, for those trying to build their own power through the judiciary, and leaves us facing grave judicial murders that are impossible to make up for.

Justice is not the name of burning the green along with the dry; it is the name of a hair-splitting sensitivity that works, despite everything, to separate the dry from the green.