This is just the start

By Ali Sirmen

Yayınlanma: 28.06.2017 - 17:47
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I caught up at Bakaca locality in Düzce’s Kaynaşlı sub-province with the procession on the thirteenth day of the Justice March under Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu’s leadership that set out from Bolu Mountain. While walking alongside Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu in the procession of around five thousand marching purely under the banner of ‘justice’ and with the slogan ‘We want justice,’ I remembered Zonguldak a quarter of a century ago on 4 January 1991. There was a commotion in Zonguldak on that day and banners and slogans were in abundance. Just like the 2017 Justice March, the great miners’ march under the leadership of trade union leader Şemsi Denizer had been decided on at the last moment, preparations had been completed as best they could and the rest, in the hope things would fall into place, were completed on the road. The aim of the miners’ march was to shake up Turkey and give a jolt to Özal in his position as Turkish Employers’ Association of Metal Industries Chair. The miners aimed to dish out some punishment and to make their voice heard in Ankara.
 
Concerns over provocations
 
Kılıçdaroğlu’s justice march, while on the one hand aiming to rip off the shroud of hopelessness by crying out that there will be no passive acceptance of injustice, is going to great lengths not to let the affair be sidetracked and to prevent provocations that will further inflame Turkey’s political atmosphere and take everything beyond the brink. On the thirteenth day of the march, great weight is being attached to concerns over preventing provocations as is readily apparent from the announcements that are made. Our colleague İklim Öngel, who has been following the march from the outset, states that vigilance has intensified and precautions have increased as they approach Düzce. Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, having come out onto the street as a last resort in the quest for justice, is exercising the greatest possible vigilance against all kinds of incitement. When I ask him in the course of the march why they did not come out onto the street over the irregularities in the referendum he replied that the atmosphere at that time did not lend itself to the conducting of such action in a healthy way. As the long Ankara-Istanbul march draws closer to Istanbul, a 25-person committee of MPs has been formed to coordinate the increasing precautions in the face of concerns over provocations. Precautions will reach the highest level in Istanbul where participation is expected to exceed one hundred thousand, and according to some will reach a million.
 
If they ask, he’s one of us
 
Having joined the march as a citizen who like everyone yearns for justice, a member of a the professional branch that will be the first to pay the price for oppression and the lack of justice, a journalist who in the past has paid the price for injustice by being deprived of his liberty and a member of Cumhuriyet newspaper, which is kept under constant intimidation, is the target of attacks and whose employees and managers suffer injustice, I was also there to represent the Cumhuriyet people in Silivri: Akın Atalay, Murat Sabuncu, Kadri Gürsel, Güray Öz, Hakan Kara, Turhan Günay, Musa Kart, Önder Çelik, Bülent Utku, M. Kemal Güngör, Ahmet Şık and Y . Emre İper. To stress this, I was wearing the T-shirt made by Kadri Gürsel’s classmates from Galatasaray, the graduates of the 114th term, for Kadri bearing his picture and the inscription, ‘If they ask, he’s one of us.’ For a while, it was as though Kadri was walking alongside Kılıçdaroğlu in the front row of the Justice March. Many citizens, from seven to seventy, male and female, heartily agree with the desire for justice expressed by Kılıçdaroğlu. You grasp this from the reaction of people in the street.
 
Is this action the last?
 
They are also joined by lawyers, the indispensable component of the judiciary whose basic concern is the seeking of justice. For a time, I am consumed by the thought as to the astonishment I would elicit from the female lawyer marching at my side in her robes were I to pose the most idiotic question of my life by asking her why she is marching. If lawyers are not on that march, who will be? Who knows, from among those judges whose consciences are not yet stunted and long to sleep easily, how many of them would like to be alongside those lawyers just now? When I ask Kılıçdaroğlu, ‘Will there be other actions after this walk or will this action be the last?’ he replies, ‘This is just the start.’ In an environment in which parliament has been rendered ineffective and the independence of the judiciary has been eliminated, the main leader of the opposition is seeking justice on the street in the country of Diogenes, who wandered around with a lantern in the daytime looking for people. This is his right, and more than a right, is his duty. Given that remedies are inexhaustible in democracies, let us see what democratic methods we become acquainted with as oppression and tyranny increase.


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