We owe an apology to Kerem Kınık and his daughter

One of the reflexes of societies in the face of great disasters is mutual aid. Another is to construct the story of that disaster. In that story there is always a hero and always a culprit. Because complex realities tire the mind; people prefer to explain great disasters through a few names.

In the February 6 earthquakes, Türkiye faced one of the greatest disasters in its history. Two major earthquakes within the same day, destruction spread over thousands of square kilometers, collapsed transport infrastructure, winter conditions, closed roads... In the face of such a disaster, it was not possible to explain the delays in the first hours by state capacity alone. Indeed, President Erdoğan himself openly stated that the desired response had not been possible in the first two days and asked citizens to forgive him.

But even in those days the state was not the only one in the field. There were hundreds of thousands of volunteers who had set out from every corner of Türkiye. There were hundreds of civil society organizations. There were IHH, the Beşir Association, the Diyanet Foundation. A tremendous network of humanitarian solidarity formed by foundations, communities, orders, municipalities, professional organizations and a number of volunteer structures too numerous to name emerged as a manifestation of Türkiye's humanitarian aid and solidarity capacity and of its real heroism.

But none of this fit the story that certain circles wanted to write. Because what they needed was not a civil society working together with the state, but a "savior" who would replace the state. In fact, to some extent, it was a matter of wishing that the state (that is, Erdoğan) would remain under the rubble, and there was an expectation of a savior in its place. Ahbap was created precisely as a manifestation of this psychological need. Let Marx explain this one too. Even the left-socialist circles, long accustomed to explaining religion as man creating his own god, created their own saviors in exactly the way they described.

The interesting side of the matter was that even Haluk Levent himself had repeatedly rejected this. "How can you compare us with AFAD? We have thirty employees, AFAD has hundreds of thousands of personnel. When I went to the field, the ministers were there too," he had once said.

That was the truth of the matter, but Ahbap was only one of hundreds of civil society organizations. It actually became the work of those who are now racing to sell him out with "How he fooled us all." The fraudster and the greedy attract each other like magnets, after all. The cause of Ahbap and Haluk Levent was nothing but the greed of getting rid of Erdoğan by a cheap route.

To create a hero, a villain was also needed. An absolute culprit. The usual culprit in the story was Kızılay, which directly represented the state, that is, Erdoğan. That is why, in the same event, the perception created about Kızılay and the perception created about Ahbap were like each other's reflection in a mirror.

The name of Kızılay President Kerem Kınık became the focus of great public reaction after the February 6 earthquakes with the controversy over the sale of tents to the Ahbap Association. In those days, the sale of tents to Ahbap through a Kızılay affiliate suddenly came onto the agenda as an event more shocking than the earthquake itself.

Yet in the transaction there was neither corruption, nor irregularity, nor any disruption of a service that was supposed to reach the earthquake survivors. When the news was reported under the headline "Kızılay sells tents while citizens await tents during the earthquake," it sounded very grave, but of course the matter was not so simple. Even so, given the likelihood that the news would be reflected in this way, it could do no good for Kerem Kınık to say before the Grand National Assembly Research Commission that the sale in question had not been made with his direct knowledge. Nor could his saying "Had I been asked, we would not have made this sale; we would have delivered the tents ourselves with our own logistical means." Yet the tents that were sold ultimately reached the earthquake survivors' use anyway. That was the operating logic of the company Kızılay had established for precisely such work, and it produced maximum public benefit in the end. These explanations, which could not entirely remove the perceptions that had stuck like mud, were at least enough to show that the event was not as simple as it was presented to the public.

The crucial point of this whole business is that the role of the symbolic villain and guilty scapegoat, required by the figure of Ahbap and Haluk Levent, produced to answer some people's psychological need for a savior-hero, was ruthlessly loaded onto Kerem Kınık.

Kızılay was made the symbolic culprit of the whole disaster. Ahbap, on the other hand, became the symbolic owner of the whole success. The extraordinary achievements shown by the same Kızılay or the state to which it belongs during the earthquake, and the speed and capacity, unparalleled anywhere in the world, shown afterwards in healing the wounds of the earthquake survivors, were not even seen by some. Building and delivering 455 thousand homes to earthquake survivors within 2 years is something no state in the world could accomplish today. What kind of devastation would you expect this to cause in the dreams of the circles that created a savior-hero out of Haluk Levent as a psychological need? Even if miracles were to rain from the sky, still...

In fact, Kerem Kınık's guilt was as realistic as Haluk Levent's saviorhood corresponded to reality, and unfortunately they made not only him but his daughter, who was caught up in an accident by sheer chance, pay the penalty for this guilt ruthlessly.

Of course traffic accidents are painful. Every incident in which a person loses his or her life saddens us all. Understanding and sharing the pain of the relatives of those who die in such events is a requirement of humanity. But law speaks not in the language of pain but in the language of evidence. The duty of courts is not to satisfy the social conscience but to establish justice.

The camera footage and technical analyses reflected to the public clearly showed that Fatıma Zehra Kınık stopped on arriving at the intersection, checked the traffic and moved off behind the vehicle that had given her way. The same analyses reveal that the motorcycle came out fast from behind a minibus that blocked the view, and that after becoming visible there was only about 1.5 seconds until the collision. Considering the perception-reaction times accepted in the traffic safety literature, there are serious technical assessments that this time may not have been enough for a reasonable driver to notice the danger and brake.

Of course these assessments do not take the place of a final legal verdict. But they at least show this: the incident is not as clear and indisputable as it was presented on social media at first. It has technical and legal dimensions that must be seriously considered. (All details about the incident, camera footage from different angles and technical analyses are on the site https://kazaanaliz.com/fzkd.html).

Despite this, from the very first days of the investigation we witnessed on social media that it was not the defendant but the surname that was being tried.

Under normal conditions, in a significant portion of similar traffic accidents, especially where there is no suspicion of flight, the evidence has been collected and the parties have shown a will to settle, trial without detention is the rule. The court is expected to evaluate in detail all the technical dimensions of the incident while determining the degree of fault. Yet in this case so-called public pressure, from the very first day, took precedence over the legal debate. It ceased to be a traffic accident file; it became a continuation of social anger directed at Kerem Kınık.

But what is striking here is not only the cruelty of social media. What is truly striking is the strong conviction that has formed about the extent to which the judiciary may have been affected by this pressure. Because when law begins to be used to satisfy popular anger, it no longer produces justice. It produces the participation of law in the lynching. Unfortunately, in the decision handed down at the end of the process for Kerem Kınık's daughter, this social perception and anger, whose way of working is by now all too well known, rather than judicial factors, was decisive, and Zehra was sentenced to prison. She is now being quietly punished.

Perhaps today it is possible to make up neither for the injustice that Kerem Kınık nor that his daughter Fatıma Zehra suffered. But at least it is possible for people of conscience in this country to see that what was done to them may have been a verdict given in the name of anger, not in the name of law. Justice sometimes begins after court rulings; when people dare to think about the truth anew.