Mavi Boncuk |
Süleyman Demirel obituary
Dominant figure in Turkey’s politics and seven times its PM
Wed 17 Jun 2015
Süleyman Demirel in Helsinki, Finland, in 1975. Photograph: AFP
In 1983, three years after a coup, Süleyman Demirel, previously five times Turkish prime minister, was still being held prisoner in a military camp. Distressed at the glowing publicity the country’s military junta was receiving in the west, Demirel and his fellow prisoners sent a secret emissary to Britain, hoping to contact the Conservative government, drawing attention to the dark side of military rule and accusing western politicians of “clapping until their hands were red”.
Despite Demirel’s eminence, no notice was taken of the letter by the Conservatives, who simply redirected its bearer to Edward Mortimer, at the time a foreign policy commentator on the Times. This was the one time during Demirel’s 35-year political career that he made a direct appeal to western liberals and politicians. But, detecting no charisma in Demirel, they paid him little attention, despite his obvious survival skills.
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Yet between 1965 and the close of the century, Demirel, who has died aged 90, waged a largely successful battle for democratic politics and rapid economic development in Turkey amid incessant turbulence. Though at times he made serious mistakes, he not only made comebacks after two military coups but also lived to see Turkey become a prosperous middle-income industrial country, though under an Islamist government that more or less obliterated the former tradition of centre-right politics. Born into a family of peasant farmers in Islamköy, a village in Isparta province in south-western Turkey, Demirel graduated as an engineer from Istanbul Technical University. While there he was a classmate of Necmettin Erbakan, the future leader of Turkey’s Islamist revival and attended his prayer meetings. Demirel’s technical ability attracted the attention of the prime minister, Adnan Menderes, and at the age of 31 he became director general of the state hydraulic works agency, after a period studying in the US on a scholarship from the Eisenhower foundation. Turkey’s network of hydropower projects in the south-east was his brainchild. After the military coup in 1960 that deposed Menderes’s government, Demirel emerged as winner in the contest to lead Turkey’s centre right, first becoming prime minister after the 1965 general election. Though he and his Justice party seemed to have a natural majority in the country, Demirel was hard pressed, even with his considerable skills, to stay on top of a stormy situation. Leftists plotted with the military to set up a government along the lines of the Ba’athist administrations of Arab countries to the south, while his own followers were riven by feuds, and annual population growth of 3% produced urban chaos and protests at the nation’s economic backwardness.
Demirel was forced to devalue the lira. In June 1970 there were massive protests in Istanbul and martial law was introduced. Inflation began to rise into double and sometimes triple digits and was used to finance major economic and infrastructural projects. This mixture of pressures set the prevailing pattern in Turkish life until the end of the century.
In March 1971 the military unexpectedly ordered Demirel and his government to resign but did not shut parliament down. The withdrawal of the military from politics coincided with the rise of Bülent Ecevit on the centre left. Demirel allied with the Islamists and nationalist right fringes – thus inadvertently gıvıng them a permanent place in national politics – and became prime minister again in 1975 at the head of an anti-left “nationalist front” government. The polarisation that he fostered led to political paralysis, culminating in the military coup of 12 September 1980 with Kenan Evren at its head. In detention, Demirel was held with his left-of-centre rivals, with whom he found himself on surprisingly good personal terms. When civilian politics returned, Turkish centre left and centre right for the first time found it easy to co-operate.
After 1981 Turkey moved away from protectionist economic policies to a market economy and renewed growth, as Demirel’s rival Turgut Özalpursued bolder policies than his. Demirel was banned from politics by the military until a referendum in 1987 reinstated him. By 1991 he was prime minister again, though now at the head of a coalition, and in 1993 he was elected president, retiring after seven years. His most controversial act as head of state came in 1997, when he evicted Erbakan, by this time the Islamist prime minister, from power by leading him to expect he would still be part of a new coalition if he resigned, but then appointing a rival. This blocked the Islamist movement from power in Turkey until its comeback in 2002. Though the Turkish military are frequently blamed for this, the decision seems to have been Demirel’s own.
Widely read, he could talk easily both to farmers and visiting foreign professors. He was an ebullient but also in some ways a personally shy man. The Islamist course of Turkish politics after 2002 disappointed him and he made few public statements in the final years of his life. He is likely to be remembered as an arch-compromiser who steered Turkey through critical decades.
In 1948 he married Nazmiye Demirel, a cousin. She died in 2013.
• Sami Süleyman Gündoğdu Demirel, politician, born 1 November 1924; died 17 June 2015
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Kenan Evren obituary
Leader of Turkey’s military coup of 1980 and president of the country for seven years
Kenan Evren in his presidential office in 1982. Last year he was given a life sentence for crimes against the state and stripped of his ranks, honours and medals. Photograph: Depo Photos/EPA
In June last year, a Turkish court in Ankara wrote a final humiliating postscript to the career of the former president Kenan Evren, who has died aged 97. Evren, permanently hospitalised after the removal of his large intestine five years earlier, received a life sentence for crimes against the state, along with the sole surviving member of the junta he had once headed.
Unable to attend court in person, the former general received news of the judgment via closed-circuit television. He was stripped of all his ranks, medals, and honours. It is not clear how much impact these rulings had. According to his relatives, Evren was no longer able to understand the proceedings.
For many Turks, particularly on the left, the condemnation of Evren in a now mainly Islamist Turkey helped bring closure to painful wounds suffered in 1980 at the hands of military coup-makers, who threw out an elected but feeble civilian government and ruled the country directly for more than two years. However, the judgment ignored the fact that during its short period in power, Evren’s regime had restored law and order to a country where at the time of the coup about two dozen people a day were being killed in political clashes. It also set the stricken and paralysed Turkish economy of 1980 on the road not just back to stability, but also to a vastly more prosperous era, the largely inadvertent outcome of Evren’s style of government.
He was born in the western Anatolian town of Alaşehir. His father was an imam, but Evren was educated in military schools as an army officer and grew up as a secularist. His family background gave him a less unfriendly view of the religious establishment than most Kemalist bureaucrats. His early career, which included a spell in Korea in the second half of the 1950s, was successful but not notable until August 1977 when the then prime minister, Süleyman Demirel, promoted him to be chief of general staff over the head of a more liberal general. It was a fateful decision. Three years later Evren would lead a military coup which deposed Demirel and sent him, along with senior ministers and opposition colleagues, into detention.
Evren was more the figurehead than the architect of the coup. Bluff, cheerful, and surprisingly considerate of others, he lacked intellectual forcefulness at a time when Turkey’s future hung in the balance and the military were expected to decide the outcome. Bitter polarisation between right and leftwing parliamentarians had spilled over into street violence between revolutionary Marxists and ultra-nationalist “Grey Wolves”. The daily death toll grew steadily and even the imposition of martial law in Turkey’s major cities failed to restore order.
The military dragged their feet in backing the civilian government, allowed the situation to ripen to ensure support for a coup and put out feelers to the US and Britain about their intentions. In the summer of 1980, parliament was unable to agree on the election of the head of state, impeached the foreign minister and left a minority government in office which was powerless.
On 12 September, Evren and his colleagues moved and declared him head of state with a junta of top generals exercising legislative power. Order was restored within a few weeks. The price was high – and became more severe in the second year of the junta as its composition changed. The generals hanged 35 militants (one of them a boy of 17) and placed many thousands of others, particularly journalists and academics, on trial in martial-law courts. Torture was ubiquitous. A long-standing personal foe of the Grey Wolf leader, Alparslan Türkeş, Evren jailed ultra-nationalists as well as leftists.
Two years of redesigning Turkey’s institutions followed, intended to reshape the country’s political system along semi-authoritarian but outwardly democratic lines. The new system was intended to proscribe all political activity outside the narrow limits the generals regarded as permissible. Evren also revived Islamic religious education in schools, believing it would curb the growth of the left, and made it compulsory.
He and his colleagues intended that a pro-army conservative party should run the country. A dubious referendum in June 1982 endorsed a new constitution, followed 17 months later by a general election in which only three approved parties competed. Evren had formally become president in the June 1982 referendum and watched helplessly as Turgut Özal, whom he disliked, won the general election in November 1983 and set Turkey on the path to greater political and economic freedom.
Evren himself served out a seven-year term as a figurehead president without fuss before retiring to a life of painting by the seaside at Bodrum, making only very occasional (and usually poorly judged) public remarks.
Evren’s wife, Sekine, died in 1982. He is survived by three daughters.
• Kenan Evren, military officer and statesman, born 17 July 1917; died 9 May 2015\
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Yasar Kemal obituary
Turkish writer best known for his novel Memed, My Hawk
Sun 1 Mar 2015 13.22
Yasar Kemal at his home in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2008. Photograph: Yoray Liberman
The Turkish writer Yaşar Kemal, who has died aged 91, found fame after the publication of his first novel, Ince Memed (1955), translated into English as Memed, My Hawk (1961). It became known around the world in other translations, the first Turkish novel to make a big impact internationally. Kemal was then working as a journalist in Istanbul, but the story dealt with the harsh life of farmers and ordinary people in the Çukurova plain and Taurus mountains around Adana in southern Turkey. Memed, My Hawk is a sort of Robin Hood tale, rich in autobiographical elements. Its hero, Memed, grows up in a village cut off from the rest of the world and owned by an oppressive landowner, Abdi Agha, who viciously exploits the farmers and their families. A feud springs up between Memed and Abdi: Memed, accompanied by the young woman he loves, Hatche, is driven into the mountains as a bandit and eventually kills Abdi, though only after Hatche has been killed and he himself betrayed.
It is an extraordinarily violent story, told with great vividness and simplicity in language that not only brings the luckless villagers to life but also evokes very strongly the sounds, smells, and colours of Turkey’s Taurus region. The message is clear – the oppressed need to stand up firmly against oppression and fight injustice rather than endure it uncomplainingly. The novel became a classic, even though some Turkish readers do not think it is necessarily Kemal’s best.
Not everyone approved. When a leading Hollywood producer contemplated a film version, he was warned that the Turkish authorities considered Kemal to be a communist and he backed off. It was not until 1984 that Peter Ustinov directed and starred (as Abdi) in a film version of Memed My Hawk. Even then Ustinov was denied permission to film in Turkey. Kemal was born in the village of Hemite (now renamed Gökçedam) a couple of weeks before the demise of the Ottoman Empire and the declaration of the Republic of Turkey. He was named Kemal Sadık, after his father, and in 1934 the family took the surname of Gökçeli. His parents, Sadık and Nigâr, were Kurdish peasant farmers who had escaped from the first world war by trekking a few years earlier from their home on the shores of Lake Van to live in what is now Turkey’s Osmaniye province, near the north-east corner of the Mediterranean. The only Kurdish family in the village, they spoke Kurdish at home and Turkish with their neighbours.
A childhood knife accident left Kemal blind in one eye, and when he was five years old his father was murdered before his eyes by his stepbrother. His interest in literature began with folksongs. Unable to play the saz – the Turkish long-necked lute – well, he became interested in the world of ballads, and their stories of bandits and protests. Working part-time as a casual labourer in the cotton fields around Adana, he put himself through some secondary schooling but was forced to leave in his mid-teens.
In 1943, he published a book of folk ballads locally, and while doing his military service in Ankara a year later his first short story. For the next few years he combined working as a labourer with offering his services as a public letter writer, moving gradually into journalism and in 1950 served a short spell in prison for alleged communist activities.
A year later, on the advice of several of Turkey’s leading leftist writers, he went to Istanbul and was given a job as a reporter on Cumhuriyet newspaper. It was at this point that he adopted the pen name of Yaşar Kemal.
From then onwards his life was a story of high-profile success: three travel books based on his work as a reporter, and more than 20 novels between 1955 and 2013, continuing to deal with the people of the southern Turkish countryside whom he had known in his earlier life and their sufferings and feuds. He won a stream of Turkish and international awards, though he seems to have been more appreciated outside the English-speaking countries. He was particularly liked in France, becoming in 2011 a grand officier of the Légion d’Honneur. But though nominated for the Nobel prize in 1973, he never won it. Kemal’s lifelong passion for social justice led him to join the newly legalised Workers’ Party of Turkey in 1962. He also always publicly affirmed his Kurdish identity even when tensions between Ankara and the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers’ party, were at their height.
In the late 1970s he moved temporarily to Sweden at a time when there was a spate of political assassinations in Turkey. In 1996 he was sentenced to 20 months for an article he wrote for Index on Censorship, but although he asked the court not to suspend it, he did not actually go to jail.
Kemal married his first wife, Thilda Serrero, in 1952, and they had a son, Rasit. Thilda died in 2001, and the following year he married Ayşe Semiha Baban. She and Rasit survive him.
• Yaşar Kemal (Kemal Gökçeli), writer, born 6 October 1923; died 28 February 2015
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Mehmet Aksoy obituary
Rahila Gupta is a writer and journalist. Her last book, Enslaved: The New British Slavery explores the role of immigration controls in enslaving people with no formal status here
Mehmet Aksoy was the programme director of the annual London Kurdish film festival
My friend Mehmet Aksoy, who has died aged 32, was a film-maker, journalist and prominent figure in the Kurdish community in the UK. He was killed in an Isis ambush while documenting the fight between Kurdish forces and Isis in Raqqa in northern Syria. I met Mehmet in 2015 after he had given a rousing speech about an unbelievable place in northern Syria called Rojava (now known as the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria), where a self-governing, Kurdish-led democracy based on the principles of gender, race and class equality had been set up in 2012 with a special focus on women’s liberation. Such were Mehmet’s persuasive powers that I travelled to Rojava to have a look for myself. Everything he had said was true. Over the next two years I was also to discover his vast range of achievements in such a short life. Mehmet was born in Istanbul, Turkey, the oldest child of Zeynep (nee Konca) and Kalender Aksoy. When he was four his family moved to London, where his parents now run an off-licence. Educated at Leyton college and then Barnet college, he started going to the Kurdish Community Centre in central London as a teenager and there became increasingly aware of the Kurdish freedom struggle. Important milestones in his political development were the writings of the Black Panther activist George Jackson and ideas on democratic federalism put forward by Abdullah Öcalan, the Kurdish leader now imprisoned in Turkey. After gaining a first class degree in film studies from Queen Mary University of London in 2007, Mehmet worked as editor of the Kurdish.com website, but was also founding editor of an internet-based news portal called The Region and of the website Kurdishquestion.com, the place for information, news and analysis on all things Kurdish. In tandem with his journalistic efforts he maintained his interest in film and in 2014 completed an MA in film-making at Goldsmiths, University of London: his 2014 film, Panfilo, an apocalyptic fairytale about three generations of men coming to terms with loss and death in rural Italy, won prizes at the Italian Short Film festival and the UK Student Film Awards. He was also the programme director of the annual London Kurdish film festival, and at other times could be seen wielding a megaphone or a placard in support of Kurdish self-government. In his search for answers to the Kurdish question, he tragically paid with his life.
Mehmet is survived by his parents, his sister, Gonca, and his brother, Ali.
John Freely obituary
Brooklyn-born historian of science and passionate traveller whose 1973 book, Strolling Through Istanbul, became a classic
Mon 5 Jun 2017
In 1960 a chance encounter with a former teacher at Robert College, Istanbul, persuaded John Freely to move his young family to Turkey, where he took up a post teaching theoretical physics at the college
In books such as Before Galileo (2012), Light from the East (2010) and Aladdin’s Lamp (2009), John Freely, a historian of science and inveterate traveller, who has died aged 90, showed how much modern science and indeed modern thought in the west owes to ideas forged in the eastern past. His non-scientific works, including The Grand Turk (2009), Storm on Horseback (2008) and Jem Sultan (2004), range widely throughout Turkish history. Istanbul, at the crossroads between east and west, was the locus of his life and his work; and John’s travel book Strolling Through Istanbul (1973, with Hilary Sumner-Boyd), has established itself as a classic. As a guide to the city, John was peerless; it is doubtful whether any westerner in the late 20th century had a better understanding of it than he. What makes Strolling Through Istanbul so unusual is its combination of erudition and first-hand observation. The New YorkTimes described it as reading like a novel. Of the Topkapi Saray (palace), for instance, he wrote: “In all the Saray there could have been no more agreeable place for the Sultan to enjoy his keyif than from his balcony, cooled by the gentle breezes from the Bosphorus, watching the lights twinkling like captive constellations on the hills of his beautiful city.” John was a born storyteller, and his encyclopedic knowledge of history and culture enabled him to treat Istanbul in an informed but very personal way; the book is shot through with anecdotes as well as facts. This applied to all his travel books, which included volumes on Athens, Venice and the islands in teh Aegean known as the Cyclades. He was an indefatigable walker – nothing escaped his eye when he was touring a place, and he was able to situate the things he saw in a human as well as a historical context. He was also highly irreverent.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, John was the son of Peg (nee Murphy) and John Freely. His mother took him for two periods to live in her native Dingle, in County Kerry, Ireland, while his father, whose jobs included trolley conductor, gardener and gravedigger, tried to find steady work in Brooklyn. By the time he was six, John had crossed the Atlantic four times, thus setting the pattern for his restless life.
After being expelled from high school in Brooklyn, for neglecting all studies except the humanities that interested him, he enlisted in the US navy just in time to have adventures on the Burma Road and in China before the second world war ended. The GI Bill enabled him to study physics at Iona College and New York University, and from there he went on to carry out thermonuclear research at the Forrestal Research Center, Princeton University.
In 1947 John had married Dolores Stanley (affectionately nicknamed “Toots”); in 1960 a chance encounter with a former teacher at Robert College, Istanbul, persuaded them to move with their young children to Turkey, where John took up a post teaching theoretical physics at the college. Over the course of the following 50 years, and inspired by the example of the Ottoman traveller and historian Evliya Çelebi, he became steeped in the history and cultures of the eastern Mediterranean. The young family took extensive trips in college vacations; the inspiration was often Homer and the Odyssey, and by the end of his travelling days John had easily outdistanced his mythical precursor. John’s life in Istanbul in the 1960s was both scholarly and hedonistic, the expatriate crowd he hung out with being noted for hard drinking and party-going, and for inebriated midnight swims in the Bosphorus. John’s elder daughter, the novelist and translator Maureen Freely, dramatised this in her novels The Life of the Party (1984) and Sailing Through Byzantium (2013). Alcohol later became a grave problem, however, and John eventually quit drinking altogether.
At Robert College, which has since become Bosphorus University, John devised a course in the history of science that over the years attracted countless devoted students. Recently the institution named one of its principal halls after him.
Dolores died in 2015. John is survived by his daughters, Maureen and Eileen, and son, Brendan.
• John Freely, writer, born 26 June 1926; died 20 April 2017
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Smyrna Stitch 
