![]() ![]() Istanbul, City of the Fearless by Christopher Houston, published in March by the University of California Press, breathes life into these figures. Ordinary Turks, including millions of activists, are at best background silhouettes. But it, too, is marked by a willed forgetfulness: just forty of his study’s 320 pages consider the implications of September 12th within Turkey, and those render the coup entirely from the viewpoints of warring generals and politicians. A flurry of similar anecdotes, captured from corridors of power, color Birand’s book, which laments the collapse of Turkey’s parliamentary democracy. While enjoying Fiddler on the Roof at the Kennedy Center, President Carter received a call from Edmund Muskie, stepped outside his box seat, thanked his secretary of state for the update on Turkey and tiptoed back inside. “No one wished to discuss it, even once the danger of arrest had receded,” writes the anthropologist Jenny White, who calls the reaction “mass amnesia.” The journalist Mehmet Ali Birand’s book 12 Eylül Saat: 04:00 remains the finest study of the coup, revealing, among other things, Jimmy Carter’s reaction to the takeover. In most cases, Turks dealt with the coup by willfully forgetting it. In Turkey, the coronavirus poses a double threat: along with the risk of contagion, there is also the danger that, in trying to control the epidemic, the country will fall victim to its own past.įor all the ways that the 1980 coup and ensuing martial law shaped an entire generation of Turks, the absence of research into personal recollections of that time is striking. No wonder that, for a certain generation of Turks, the COVID-19 lockdowns can be seen as a screen for the country’s authoritarian politics. At the end of The Plague, Albert Camus writes: “The plague bacillus never dies or vanishes entirely … it can remain dormant for dozens of years in furniture or clothing … it waits patiently in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, handkerchiefs and old papers.” Like Camus’s plague, the trauma of the political curfews remains with us. ![]() They are rooted in the repressive powers of their own state mindsets formed during the 1980 curfew continue to menace the nation forty years on. The fears of Istanbulites are different-deeper, and in some respects darker. These memories of heroism and collective hardship, of defending the national good against ruthless invaders, offer some relief from the atmosphere of panic and fear that has spread with the contagion. In London, it’s been first- or secondhand memories of air raids or backyard bunkers dug during the Blitz in Paris, recollections of Resistance fighters hiding out in basements as Hitler’s Wehrmacht goose-stepped down the Champs-Élysées. During those five years, the junta blacklisted 1,683,000 citizens, arrested 650,000, tried 230,000 in courts, denied passports to 388,000, forced 30,000 to flee abroad, revoked the citizenship of 14,000, killed 171 under torture and executed fifty by hanging.Īs COVID-19 has spread pitilessly across the globe, national traumas have resurfaced. When the curfew was lifted two days later, the military declared martial law that didn’t end in Istanbul until 1985. Relying on informants, they’d collect activists like packages.” They could enter homes without warrants and take anything, or anyone they wanted. “If you ventured out, soldiers would lay you on the pavement. “Those who say they didn’t panic are lying,” he told me recently, “because that night traumatized us all.” Kara’s front door was just ten meters from his flower shop, but after hearing the news he feared stepping outside, so he spent the next 48 hours locked down at home. to quickly ensure safety of life and property.” Twenty-five years old at the time, Kara ran a flower shop in Istanbul and was preparing for bed when the radio began playing military marches. on September 12, 1980, the Turkish General Kenan Evren announced, “A curfew will come into force from 5 a.m. ![]() Nearly forty years earlier, just after 4 a.m. Two hours before the curfew was lifted at midnight on April 12th, the interior minister announced his resignation, admitting that it was a mistake to have hastily called a curfew that startled the nation.įor Hasan Kara, the curfew declaration and ensuing panic were reminders of Turkey’s last successful military coup. City officials estimated that the ensuing chaos in the streets would cause a spike in COVID-19 infections. Fistfights broke out in bakeries customers quarreled in department stores. Crowds of people scrambled for groceries, showing little regard for social distancing. In Istanbul, the country’s biggest city, the announcement was met with panic. It would be imposed in 31 provinces with the aim of curtailing the spread of COVID-19. ISTANBUL, TURKEY- Shortly before ten o’clock on April 10th, Turkey’s interior minister announced a two-day lockdown that would come into force at midnight. ![]()
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