Intellectual detained at airport

Here is what I know about Osman Kavala, the businessman who was detained on Oct. 19 by the police at the airport.

I first heard his name during the time of the Sept. 12, 1980 Turkish coup.

He was a young businessman and financier of the Yeni Gündem newspaper that was putting up a democratic struggle against the military rule in Turkey.

In his initial years and the years when the negotiations on full membership with the European Union had started, Kavala had supported President Erdoğan.

He was one of the first Turkish intellectuals who had noticed the FETÖ (Fethullahist Terror Organization) conspiracies and had adopted an attitude against them.

When the doctor Türkan Saylan, the chairwoman of a civic group sponsoring the education of poor girls in Turkey, had passed away, he went all the way from her funeral ceremony to the cemetery accompanied by his wife Prof. Ayşe Buğra.

He is the son-in-law of the noted Turkish author, Tağrık Buğra.

He supported Turkish economist Dani Rodrik and his wife Pınar Doğan in bringing the Balyoz conspiracy out in the open.

He organized a meeting in those days that brought together liberals with Dani Rodrik, who perceived all the cases that involved Balyoz as a “weakening of military tutelage,” in order to listen to the mistakes in this case.

But his former friends who were liberals rejected joining this meeting.

He is the partner of İletişim Yayınları, which has published brilliant books by the author Orhan Pamuk and many other Turkish intellectuals.

Dear prosecutor and police officer, as you can see, the person you had arrested in a hurry off the airplane, the one you had treated in a way that you would not have even treated a sexual harasser from the religious ENSAR Foundation, has a quiet intellectual record behind him.

Punishments gathered in a flash for television channels

The Turkish Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK) did not even wait for the prosecutor to look at the case file and ask for television presenter İsmail Küçükkaya’s statement. They met in a flash and made the decision to give FOX TV a record-breaking punishment.

They said the television channel had made fake news by saying the spouse of one of the ministers had the mobile phone messaging app ByLock—used by FETÖ members to communicate with each other—installed on her mobile phone.

“News stories cannot be broadcasted without investigation and without verifying their validity,” they said.

Now, as a citizen do I not have the right to ask this question?

Four years have passed since that big and historical lie concerning the “ruthless attack” in Kabataş during the Gezi protests.

Until today, what kind of punishment have you given to those television channels that broadcasted that lie for days, spreading grudges and hate among individuals in the society?

What kind of hasty punishment have you given those channels that dramatized lies about Turkish Commander Ali Tatar’s family and that carried them on their screens non-stop?

You should know that this haste has incredibly offended our eyes and has therefore made us question this whether we want to or not.
Have you, yourself made this decision or has it come from a higher authority?

Discharging a party leader

Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu has said, “We can also discharge an opposition party leader if he is involved in corruption.”
This statement really scared me.

What would President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan have felt if he had heard someone say such a thing if he had been discharged from his position while he was the Istanbul mayor?

Or, what about what the mayor of İzmir, Aziz Kocaoğlu, would have felt, whose assistants had been arrested for alleged links to the FETÖ conspiracy and who will be tried along with them?

Will the AKP minister who had 30 percent of the votes in İzmir discharge the mayor, who has been chosen with 50 percent of votes, on allegations of corruption?

We had thought it was the people who were supposed to serve the punishment for mistakes by voting in elections.