Dissident Spotlight: Ayşe Nur Zarakolu
Ayşe Zarakolu wrote was arrested over 30 times for writing about subjects Türkiye's government found taboo.
Ayşe Zarakolu was a political writer and author in Türkiye. Some of the topics Zarakolu wrote about included corruption in the government and the history of the Armenian genocide.
The Armenian genocide began under the Ottoman Empire but was continued by Turkish nationals until 1923, after the Turkish War of Independence, which made Türkiye an independent country. The Armenian genocide also made Türkiye an ethnically homogeneous country, with thousands of years of Armenian history destroyed.
Türkiye remains reluctant to acknowledge its role in the Armenian genocide, imprisoning writers for analyzing the genocide’s place in Türkiye’s founding.
While many writers are arrested while they’re alive, Zarakolu had new charges brought against her after she died. She died in January 2002, and two weeks later, she received a summons to appear in court. Zarakolu published The Song of Liberty by an exiled Kurdish author. The government also took issue with The Culture of Pontas, which explores the influence of ancient Greeks on the area.
Both cases were eventually dropped, but it shows how threatening ideas are to Türkiye’s leaders.
Dictators Only Allow One Founding Myth
Countries have complicated, bloodthirsty histories. Healthy views of those histories can acknowledge the darkest periods of a country’s founding while celebrating the progress that country’s civil society has made possible. The United States struggles with its heritage of racial discrimination, but Ibram X. Kendi isn’t hunted by the government on terrorism or separatism charges.
In contrast, Türkiye’s leaders are unable to grapple with its past the way its greatest writers and citizens routinely do. It’s not in the authoritarian’s interest to allow deviant histories. It undermines the idea of the state he has sold to legitimize his rule.
For Türkiye, admitting fault in the Armenian genocide would also undermine Turkish nationalists, who have dominated Turkish politics since the country’s founding. A century of denial has entrenched that view, making it even more difficult for a nationalist politician to do the difficult work of reconciling the country with its early crimes.
Despite their best efforts, Türkiye’s leaders can’t stop its citizens from doing the hard work that its leaders have refused to do generation after generation.