Two years ago tonight

It was a day that looked as if it would start peacefully and end peacefully. You know how summer days drag out and we had handed over the paper to the team with nighttime responsibility before night had even fallen and knocked off following a somewhat rushed hand-over.

At a friend’s home, two aged bachelors for the summer had prepared themselves a salad and the pleasures of a summer night had begun to the accompaniment of two varieties of cheese and a well-cooled white wine, and we had even each taken a sip of wine when the damned mobile phone chirped:

-Mate, there are odd comings and goings on the Bosphorus bridge. Soldiers have closed the bridge in one direction. The other direction is open.

Had there been no mention of “soldiers” I would not have budged. “Soldiers” were mentioned and I budged. I threw myself into the first taxi and made my way to Cumhuriyet. On the way, with the taxi’s radio rambling on about some indiscernible breaking news incapable of explaining what it was, the mobile phone chirped again.

-Mate, jets have assumed low-level flight in Ankara. Even windowpanes are trembling to the verge of breaking. There are also helicopters flying near parliament.

What was I to say? If you are a journalist who has been through three coups, you do not ask, “What is happening, why and how?”

But the taxi’s inquisitive driver asked.

-What’s going on, mate?

-A coup’s going on. A coup.

***

There then began an extremely tiring, extremely tense and interminable night in professional terms. We held a meeting of very brief duration with the paper’s editorial team to the accompaniment of the sonic booming of jets echoing into the phone of the colleagues who were conveying the news from the Ankara office. We came up with the main headline of the Cumhuriyet that would appear the next morning:

“Democracy is the solution.”

With the booming of jets having reached Istanbul, too, the soldiers on the bridge having sprayed at civilians with their guns, the number of fatalities having reached frightening proportions and the announcements of the coupists who deemed themselves worthy of the name “Peace at Home Council” having begun to be read on the Radio and Television Corporation screens, too, that is, when it appeared that the coup had also attained success, that headline underwent absolutely no change.

Subsequently, while the First Army Commander’s statement rejecting the coup appeared on the screens and then while listening to Tayyip Erdoğan’s statement screened by CNN Türk calling on the people to resist the coup, too, we never thought of changing that headline. With dawn approaching and the time to print having come, we did not change that headline, giving absolutely no thought to the result of the coup attempt:

“Democracy is the solution.”

***

This was a democracy exam that Cumhuriyet took in the most tumultuous hours of the coup attempt without in the least relinquishing to the timidity of asking, “What if the coupists have won or will do so?” In the immediate aftermath of the quelling of the coup attempt, Cumhuriyet never refrained and never stepped back from arguing most forcefully that the coupists be punished and on the harshest scale, but, once the intention and resolve had made itself manifest to treat the coup attempt as a “gift from God” and purge political opponents and opposition supporters who had had no knowledge of the coup, had not the least involvement in it and in no way supported it, nor did it from defending a democracy that said, “No to the witch-hunt.”

It became apparent that the insistent and persistent defence of the law, the supremacy of the law and the rule of law, i.e. “democracy” to put it at its bluntest, with a decisiveness equal to that with which the coup had been opposed would be deemed a crime. It was not many months, just a few, before a dawn raid was staged on the homes of Cumhuriyet managers and columnists and they were all placed in police custody. The Silivri dungeon days of twelve of our colleagues, ten months at the shortest and nineteen months at the longest, then began. This, in short, is the tale of Cumhuriyet on the second anniversary of the 15 July coup attempt. This is an honourable tale that we will tell with our breasts puffed up to our children and grandchildren when they ask, “What did you do that night and afterwards, dad/grandad.”

http://www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/koseyazisi/1026942/iki_yil_once_bu_gece.html