A document that marks 2021!
Doğan Özgüden, Artı Gerçek, January 2, 2002
I write this article at the twilight of the morning, when, like all metropolises of the world, the European capital, Brussels, is in deep sleep after the New Year’s Eve celebration.
There is no New Year’s Eve celebration that has left a mark on my memory from the first decade of my life, when I turn almost 86… However, although Turkey did not actually participate, in the anxious environment of World War II, especially in the impoverished villages of the Anatolian steppe, where I attended primary school as the son of a railway worker, no one had the luxury of celebrating New Year’s Eve.
The first New Year’s Eve I can remember was exactly 75 years ago… After finishing primary school in the summer of 1946, I was able to meet my railway worker family who were assigned to Ankara from an intermediate station in Anatolia, I was a first-year student of the middle school at Ataturk High School…
On July 21, 1946, after years of one-party dictatorship, multiparty general elections were held for the first time, and the newly formed left-wing parties and trade unions were immediately closed by martial law, so as the only opposition party, the Democratic Party entered parliament with 64 parliamentary seats despite many irregularities in the vote and pressure on the electorate.
Both in the neighborhood where we live and in our school, all the interviews focused on the post-election debates. At our house too until the midnight radio broadcast announcing the winning numbers in the national lottery, the first New Year’s Eve celebration on December 31, 1946 was marked by party controversy, even reaching hurtful levels at times.
These annual domestic New Year’s Eve celebrations have been a thing of the past for me since I started journalism in 1952… In the newspapers I worked in, I volunteered to print the January 1 issue on the last night of the year to allow my married colleagues to celebrate the New Year with their families. And when the midnight hit 12:00, we’d celebrate the New Year with a glass of wine with my crew and friends who work in the printing press.
After joining the Turkish Workers’ Party, which started organizing in 1962, new year’s eve celebrations would become more of an event for me and my friends to share our determination to fight by singing revolutionary anthems and reading poems.
With one exception, New Year’s Eve connecting 1964 to 1965… It was the days when I was trying to turn the Aksam newspaper into the daily newspaper of the leftwing. Inci, who worked as a reporter in the Ankara office of the newspaper, also came to Istanbul during the New Year holiday. That night, when we decided to unite our lives and carry out our fight together for life, I gave Inci Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata performed by “Red Violin” David Oistrakh as a gift, and she gave me Bach’s “Toccata and Fugues” performed by Albert Schweitzer…
In the following years, while we were managing Aksam, then Ant, together, we continued to spend New Year’s Eves singing revolutionary anthems and reading poems with our comrades until we were exiled from Turkey by the March 12 coup.
Our New Year’s Eves in exile have been painful for most of the time… I told that story in detail two years ago in my article titled “The Sad New Years of Exile…” published at Arti Gercek.
We had our first hopeful New Year’s Eve in exile 35 years ago, the night that connected 1987 to 1988. The main reason was that in the year that closed, as political exiles, we achieved an important union, regardless of opinion and organizational differences.
After the September 12 coup[1], 13,788 people were stripped of their Turkish citizenship, mainly those who showed resistence abroad. During the visit of Turgut Özal, who signed under all these denaturalization decisions as deputy prime minister and then prime minister, during his visit to Berlin, we held a joint press conference in the Berlin Senate on September 23, 1987, and explained to the world what needs to be done to truly democratize Turkey. TIP [2] chairperson Behice Boran, TSIP[3] chairperson Ahmet Kaçmaz, TÖS[4] leader Gultekin Gazioglu and DISK[5]‘s exiled leaders either personally participated in our statement or signed our statement.
Some of the exiled friends, who cared about Ozal’s repeated promises of “democratization” just to gain the support of European countries, had begun to return to Turkey, despite the continued repression, arrest and torture. The secretary general of the TKP and TIP also returned to the country together on 16 November 1987, but were immediately arrested.
In 1986, we were aware that we would not be able to return to the country any time soon, as we published a voluminous black book called “Black Book on the militaristic democracy in Turkey.”
Prime Minister Turgut Özal, who came to Belgium on March 4, 1988, to open the door to the European Union with the eye-rolling of “democratization”, proved that a return to Turkey would not be possible for us for a long time.
Turgut Özal, who was angered when we asked him questions about the continued human rights violations in Turkey at a press conference at the International Journalists Center in Brussels, instructed the Turkish Republic Consulate General in Brussels as soon as he returned to Turkey and delivered for the second time on May 26, 1988, exactly five years after our denaturalization, that we had been stripped of our Turkish citizenship.
In Turkey, arrests, convictions, tortures and military operations against the Kurdish nation were going on.
In this environment, the International Court against the Regime of September 12 was established in Cologne, Germany on 10-11 December 1988… The jury of internationally renowned lawyers, scientists, human rights defenders, politicians and trade unionists condemned the September 12 regime after listening for two days to witnesses who had been victimized in various forms.
In the hearings where Server Tanilli, Şerafettin Kaya, Gültekin Gazioglu, Nihat Behram, Omer Polat, Tarife Okkaya, Turgan Arinır, Yucel Top and Arife Kaynar and I were testifiying, the stories of our dear friend Enver Karagöz, who was detained while teaching in Artvin and tortured with boiling water poured down his throat, shocked the jurors and those who watched the trial.
After the court issued its conviction, it also appealed to international institutions:
– The policies, justice and law of September 12, which have collapsed on the people with all their weight, should be annulled.
– A general amnesty should be declared, all political prisoners should be released immediately, the death penalty should be abolished, torture, ill-treatment and inhumane living conditions in prisons should end.
– In Turkey, the rights of the peoples to determine their own destiny should be recognized and the practice of exile should definitely end. Government and government officials, police and military members responsible for torture and massacres should be tried and punished by the forces behind them.
– The right to free political and union organization and activity should be carried out practically.
– Turkey’s entry into the European Community should be postponed until human rights in Turkey are guaranteed in a proven manner.
– Military aid to Turkey and support to the regime should be stopped.
Detailed Information on the establishment of the International Court Against the September 12 Regime, the jurors, the witnesses he listened to and his decision is published in the journal Özgürlük Dünyası[6].
The decision of this international court pleased and gave us hope, like all exiles, so we celebrated New Year’s Eve from 1988 to 1989 with great enthusiasm with our friends in Brussels.
But 33 years later, the darkness of September 12 fascism now persists as the darkness of Islamist fascism, and new year’s eves in exile, as in our country, cannot still be celebrated with happiness and hope.
In this darkness, just as the 2021 date was getting closer, a document that reached me in the mail became one of the best Christmas gifts I have received in recent years.
The 64-page document contains the “Motivated Opinion”[7] of the Turkey Tribunal[8], which met in Geneva in September, condemning the Ankara regime.
In addition to this important document, Prof. Em. Dr. Johan Vande Lanotte, a former Belgian minister and head of the Flemish Socialist Party, who started the Turkey Tribunal initiative, said in a special message that the hearings, in which many witnesses are heard, are watched daily by about 70,000 people from 85 countries on YouTube, and stresses that the Tribunal will address them as human rights violations continue in Turkey.
I am delighted with this message from Johan Vande Lanotte, but it also took me back 22 years.
In 2000, a book titled “The Insight of PKK Terrorism: Here They Are! “ was distributed to Turkish mosques, associations and grocery stores by the Turkish Religious Foundation[9] in Belgium, of which the Turkish ambassador is the honorary president.
A table in the book, written with a forged signature by one of Hurriyet’s correspondents in Brussels, shows that, along with all Kurdish associations in Belgium, the Kurdish Institute of Brussels, the Info-Turk, the Assyrian Cultural Association of The Assyrians and the Belgian Association of Democratic Armenians were also directly affiliated with the PKK Regional Secretariat.
In the section dedicated to Info-Turk, it was claimed that Doğan Özgüden participated in all anti-Turkish activities in Belgium, and after the 1994 Saint-Josse Events, he made clear his relationship with the PKK by publishing a joint statement with the Kurdish, Armenian and Assyrian associations.
It was also given in the book as proof of my relationship with the PKK as Abdullah Ocalan, who participated by phone in a television program that included me on Kurdish television Med TV, when it was just starting broadcasting in Brussels, greeted me personally, recalling my struggles in pre-1971 Turkey.
The most ludicrous aspect of the book was the claim that all 22 Belgian political people of different political stripes served the PKK.
Prominent lawyer Georges-Henri Beauthier, president of the Belgian Human Rights Association, was also accused of supporting terrorists in Turkey for following the case of The Evrensel Newspaper reporter Goktepe’s murder along with many European observers.
Johan Vande Lanotte was Deputy Prime Minister and Budget Minister in the Belgian Federal Government in 2000, when he was the target of this attack.
Yes, it’s been 21 years…
Johan Vande Lanotte is one of the leaders of the international efforts of the fight against human rights violations in Turkey today, as he was then.
The Motivated Concluding Opinion of the Turkey Tribunal Vande Lanotte has sent me is on my desk as one of the most valuable memories of our struggle in exile…
In Turkey, the opposition of the masses to the Tayyip dictatorship is getting stronger by the day…
If opposition parties manage to unite on a democratic platform and do it this year or in 2023, which falls on the 100th anniversary of the Turkish Republic, if they can tear up this darkness and defeat the Islamist fascist dictatorship, if they can lay the first foundations of the democratic republic, it will be the greatest gift not only for us exiles, but also for Johan Vande Lanottes who support our struggle internationally…
