"A Century of Silence"

"Demirbaş had the opposite reaction: inspired by Socrates, he became a teacher of philosophy. Between 1983 and 1991, the Kurdish language was illegal, but he and his wife named their daughter Berfin, the Kurdish name for a pale-colored flower—a decision that instantly triggered prosecution. The legal battle went to Turkey’s Supreme Court, and by the time Demirbaş won, his daughter was a year old. As a teacher, he confronted the bureaucracy of Turkification with similarly mild gestures, each time eliciting a severe legal reaction. The government moved Demirbaş from school to school. In 2001, he was posted to Sivas, a deeply conservative city, where he wrote a press release stating that all people in Turkey had a right to education in their native languages. He was fired. Destitute, he returned to Diyarbakir, and was elected to lead a teachers’ union. From there, he entered politics, and in 2004 he became mayor of Diyarbakir’s old city.

At the time he lost his teaching job, he had been charged in as many as a hundred cases. Some of them, owing to changes in the law, were dropped; many others were added, and now he does not know how many there are. His lawyer told him that if he lost every case his combined prison term would be four hundred and eighty-three years. It seemed strange that Demirbaş could not keep track of his legal affairs, but as he spoke about his cases, I began to understand his confusion. Shortly after he was elected, a twelve-year-old Kurdish boy was fatally shot while police were gunning down his father, in front of their house; Demirbaş erected a sculpture to mark the tragedy, with thirteen holes carved into it, representing the boy’s gunshot wounds. He was prosecuted: misuse of municipal office and resources. (Three years.) The case went to the Supreme Court, which remanded it to a terrorism court, which threw it out—though now, on appeal, it has made its way back to the Supreme Court. In 2006, at a conference in Vienna, he presented a paper, “Municipal Services and Local Governments in Light of Multilingualism.” This time, the charge against him was “propagandizing for a terrorist organization.” (Five years.) When he issued a multilingual tourist brochure, in Turkish, Kurdish, Armenian, and Assyrian, he was charged. He was charged for speaking Kurdish while officiating at a wedding.

In 2007, the government forced Demirbaş out of office, and so he phoned a friend who owned a house near the municipal headquarters and set himself up there as shadow mayor. Journalists, dignitaries, and assemblymen still sought his advice, as did his constituents, who came by the hundreds, with offerings of tea and sugar. Members of his former staff raised funds to cover a small budget and volunteered during off hours. Demirbaş’s teen-age children took jobs to support the family. In this way, he continued his term. And the state continued finding new ways to charge him."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/05/century-silence