TABLE
OF CONTENTS
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Escaping Near Imprisonment in
Turkey
By
Ryan Harper
I
would have never guessed that a chance encounter with two Kurdish men
in Istanbul would have kept me from having to visit the Turkish prison
later that very same evening. My visit with the two nineteen year old
men began with my inquiry regarding the timing of the next metro that
was to be coming along and from there we introduced ourselves.
Considering the fact that we were all approximately the same ages the
conversation started to revolve around the comparison of our somewhat
similar interests.
My travel companion and I asked if they were still
in school, to which they said no, and we continued by expressing our
common love for the sport of futbol (or American soccer). It turned out
that they were actually just wasting time before they had a match to go
play in a little while. They also mentioned that they were awaiting
enrollment in the Turkish military service, which was no more than ten
days away. We found this to be a very interesting topic because
mandatory enrollment is something that is very foreign to us back in
the United States. They had mentioned that the service was different
for them because actually engaging in combat is a doubtful scenario and
mostly it is something that they enjoy doing because it gives them an
excuse to leave their hometown.
Knowing the little that I did about the internal
conflict between the Kurdish and Turkish ethnic people within Turkey, I
asked what their experience has been and they replied that most
important was their desire to speak their own language. They said that
it was a tragedy to be forced to speak Turkish and that because the
Kurds are such a minority within the state they often experience slight
oppression or discrimination. This was the type of common conflict
present in Turkey that I had read about in an article by Yael
Navaro-Yasin entitled "The Historical Construction of Local Culture".
The article presents two differently dressed Muslim women arguing about
who has the right to proclaim Turkish heritage and the author states,
"disagreement about the content of 'Turkishness' is extremely
commonplace in the public culture of contemporary Turkey."
It became time to catch the metro as I had let it
pass many times since my prior inquiry and I was now nearly late to
meet some friends out at the popular bar district of Istanbul called
Taksim Square. Later that evening I met some friends out in the street
and they quickly told me that a cop had been following them because
they did not have their passports on them and was insisting on taking
them to jail. Thinking there must be some confusion I met the officer
as he quickly approached and told him our situation and that we were
instructed that we did not need to carry our passports on us when in
the city Istanbul.
He continued to be adamant about taking us all to
jail, because I as well did not have my passport with me, and the
debate continued for an exhausting hour and a half or more. Just when I
doubted our ability to talk our way out of the situation, I spotted my
Kurdish friends walking no more than ten yards beside us, having just
finished their futbol match. I yelled out to them to help us and they
came over to talk with the officer on our behalf.
To make a long story short, we ended up bribing the
ethnically Turkish officer, after which we all went out to celebrate
and discuss the event further. The Kurdish man was not surprised at the
Turkish officer and said that only because they were about to
participate in military service did they even have the right to discuss
the matter with the officer in the first place. He expressed his
distaste for Turkish people repeatedly and I soon realized how common
is such ethnic conflict in the struggle over the content of
"Turkishness" in contemporary Turkey.
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