Abstract
The arrest of a university student for attending a funeral has unsettled Turkey. As the trial continues,
The Turkish state is wary of funeral processions, particularly crowded and politically significant ones. In those ceremonies, the bringing of the casket to the grave can revitalise a century-long animosity between the Turkish state and its longtime opponents: Kurdish nationalists, Marxists and fundamentalists from different Islamic sects. Since plain clothes policemen often patrol the funerals of major political figures, attendees can sometimes find themselves in peril.
In the 1980s, the government and media started to call fallen Turkish soldiers “martyrs” and consider them sacred. The use of “martyred” is now close to mandatory for journalists reporting on the deaths of these soldiers. Militant groups among Marxists and Kurdish nationalists also consider their deceased militants as “martyrs”.
As politicised events, funeral processions have come to signify a larger Turkish obsession with death. According to legend, the reflection of the crescent moon and a star in a pool of blood during wartime inspired the design of the Turkish flag; the Turkish national anthem is woven with images of death. These associations help to turn funeral processions into political gatherings.
Although Turkish politicians, from the nationalist Devlet Bahçeli to the Islamist Recep Tayyip Erdogan, occasionally criminalise burial ceremonies, they may also sometimes use them for political propaganda. For those in power, a speech delivered alongside the coffin of a fallen soldier is an effective political tool which they take advantage of. Because funerals serve as spaces for political expression, they become subjected to censorship and even suppression.
Ustabaş was arrested on the birthday of Berkin Elvan, a 15-year-old Turkish boy who died in March 2014, after being hit in the head by a gas canister during anti-government protests. Since his attendance at Elvan’s funeral got him into trouble, Ustabaş assumed his arrest on Elvan’s birthday was intentional.
The funeral of Elvan, a secondary-school student, was attended by several thousand mourners who chanted anti-government slogans. In response, Turkish police used water cannons and tear gas to disperse the crowd. During the ceremony, a police camera filmed Ustabaş walking alongside protesters carrying a placard that read: “Elvan’s funeral will be avenged.”
Ustabaş’s arrest is part of a series of controversies involving political funerals. Ragip Zara-kolu, a leading publisher and dissident, lost his wife and co-publisher Ayşe Nur Zarakolu in 2002. At her funeral, the couple’s son Deniz Zarakolu, a university student like Ustabaş, delivered a speech about his commitment to his parents’ progressive struggle. Soon afterwards, a prosecutor charged him with inciting hatred. In 2011, both Ragip and Deniz Zarakolu were arrested, alongside approximately 4,000 accused members of the Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK), an illegal organisation demanding Kurdish independence.
Among the most chilling recent political funeral processions was that of Hatun Tuğluk, who died in September 2017. She was the mother of Aysel Tuğluk, a parliamentarian from the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). Aysel, who is serving a 10-year sentence for terrorism offences, was brought to her mother’s funeral on a special permit. But her arrival angered nationalists who claimed that “terrorists” and “martyrs” couldn’t be buried in the same cemetery.
Around a dozen protesters initially came to the burial. Using social media, they soon attracted dozens of like-minded anti-Kurdish nationalists. Those who wanted to halt the burial ceremony approached the site driving tractors, vans and cars, and chanting the slogan “this is not an Armenian graveyard” in unison. Nationalist Turks often use the term “Armenian” to denigrate all those deemed to belong to subversive groups.
Tuğluk’s relatives were forced to dig up the coffin. Eventually, they brought it to another graveyard and reburied it. When Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu received the news, he rushed to the first burial site, his ministry stated, to make sure “it was safe”. In June 2018, Soylu was involved in another row about political funerals when he banned anyone from the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1919, from the funerals of fallen Turkish soldiers. The government has accused the CHP of supporting Kurdish militants.
Gündüz Vassaf, a Turkish psychologist and the author of Prisoners of Ourselves: Totalitarianism in Everyday Life, considers such events as symptomatic of Turkey’s political culture over the last half-century.
“In the 1970s, as a member of a university teachers’ union, I attended so many political funerals,” Vassaf remembered. “Once I was in the front row of a procession, when a military commander ordered soldiers patrolling the funeral to ‘march’ toward us. Fearing violence, I caught the eyes of soldiers and ordered back: ‘Stop marching!’ The soldiers followed both orders in succession, and we were able to lay the coffin to rest.”
Vassaf headed Amnesty International’s first Turkish branch in Istanbul in the 1970s. He remembers the difficulty of even visiting the graves of Deniz Gezmiş, Yusuf Aslan and Hüseyin İnan, leading members of the illegal People’s Liberation Army of Turkey (THKO) who were executed in 1972. The same applied to visiting the graves of right-wing politicians, including Adnan Menderes, Turkey’s first democratically elected prime minister, who was executed in 1961 by a military junta. Vassaf says that “people were afraid of being tagged”.
Ustabaş, the arrested student, apparently didn’t share that fear. “The martyrs of the revolution are immortal,” he is accused of shouting during Elvan’s funeral. The prosecutor considered this a call for vengeance. After the funeral procession, an illegal left-wing group attacked a police station; in March 2015, two members of the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C) took a prosecutor hostage and fatally shot him to “avenge Elvan’s death”.
Vassaf says that the animosity between the state and its critics continues beyond funeral ceremonies. Aziz Nesin, the great Turkish contrarian and humorist, died in 1995, leaving a will that expressed his wish to be buried in the garden of an educational organisation he founded. But Turkish law forbids burials in private properties; Turkish MPs had to debate the issue in the parliament, and eventually granted Nesin the right to a private burial. But this, they said, was an exception.
Mourners attend the funeral of a Turkish soldier in a terrorist attack, in Izmir, Turkey, 2018.
CREDIT: Mahmut Serdar Alakus/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
“When a Turkish citizen dies, the family is obliged to hand the identity card of the deceased to the state,” Vassaf said. When his own mother died some years ago, Vassaf refused to hand back her identity card, as the law required. “I told the authorities that it was lost.” Vassaf feels this gesture is symbolically important.
But for those who have years to live ahead of them, like Ustabaş, this is not an option. On the third hearing of his case in September 2018, Ustabaş was not allowed into the courtroom and instead gave testimony via video conference. When he began talking about Elvin, the boy whose funeral got him into trouble, the judge muted Ustabaş’s voice. Ustabaş remains in prison.