Who will pay for the price of 375 days?
The release of the quartet Nedim Şener, Ahmet Şık, Sait Çakır and Coşkun Musluk almost turned into the celebrations of the conquest of Istanbul. Only fireworks were missing.
All of us were extremely happy and joyous. The “specially-authorized courts” that were dragged through the mud until yesterday are now carried high on shoulders.
As a matter of fact, the verdict that the judges reached is precisely what “normal” should be, and we are all applauding a verdict that should have been made much earlier.
Can you imagine? They were kept in jail for exactly 375 days and now they are released with: “Sorry, you should not have been jailed.” All of those who have experienced long detention periods should go to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and demand compensation. They should make the Turkish state pay for this incident of theft. If they sue in Turkish courts, they would not be able to receive proper compensation, because the world of the judges is limited to a few thousand Turkish Liras. However the ECHR can hurt the state. Because the ECHR understands much better what it means to take away so many years from a person’s life.
I want to see this development as a step forward. It should be the other detainees’ turn after this.
Detention periods are such a major injustice in the eyes of the public and seen as such a big punishment as those who are actually guilty and those who are not intermingle.
One last word to the government:
Couldn’t they have done this arrangement before? Couldn’t a step have been taken during all this time, before so much loss of prestige occurred?
[HH] Sivas case is a disgrace for all of us
The expected finally happened. The case of the disaster that cost 37 lives in Sivas, most of them burnt alive, was dropped on grounds of the statute of limitations.
Put yourself in the place of the families whose beloved ones were burnt to death.
I wonder if you had the opportunity to watch the February 28 documentary. When the Sivas incidents were on the screen, gooseflesh was all over me. The crucial aspect of the whole incident is that the state was just a spectator, starting from the beginning of the incidents and lasting till the end.
There are many other incidents similar to that. Each opportunity when the state could have easily intervened and dispersed the crowd and sent the delirious back was missed, one by one.
When you read deeper into the newspapers of those days and go into detail then you involuntarily feel that the hand of the deep state was involved in this. There is no concrete evidence. But, there is no other example either in which a murder that was committed so blatantly has being circumvented with: “I did not see; I did not hear.”
I take one more step. I believe the Sivas incidents lie behind the reason why the deputy prime minister at the time, Erdal İnönü, left politics. After speaking with Aziz Nesin and promising him, “Don’t worry, we are responding immediately,” İnönü must have concluded, “I have no business here,” and must have decided to quit after seeing the resistance inside the state.
A last word to the judiciary:
Esteemed prosecutor and judges,
The responsibility that this incident ended without a result is also on your shoulders. For all those years you could not overcome the state mechanism that resisted by not finding the murderers. If you had wanted to, you could have overcome it. You either did not want it or they made you not want it. But the result is self explanatory.
In fact, there should not be statutes of limitations for murders and terror incidents. The Justice Ministry can make a move on this and lift the rule of statutes of limitations and have the Sivas massacre investigation continue.
Is that very difficult?
