Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Son et lumière et fury

Turkey is a country of contrasts.  An advocate of public free speech, one can be prosecuted for ‘insulting Turkishness’ if one calls the historically proven fact of the massacre of 1.5m-2m Armenians 100 years ago  ‘genocide’.  A member of NATO and seemingly close to the West, it has been steadily eroding its attitude to democracy and human rights.  It practises freedom of the press but locks up more journalists than Russia.
Comparing with Russia is apposite, if only as a yardstick as how a democracy can revert to authoritarianism.  Leviathan, by Andrey Zvyagintsev, received 35% of its funding from the Russian Ministry of Culture, yet was an unflinching, if oblique, critique of the forces that govern Russia today. The Russian Ministry of Culture subsequently altered its rules on funding yet it still got made in a reactionary climate.  Bakur (North), the first ever documentary set in the camps of the Turkish-outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), was set to open the Istanbul International Film Festival before being pulled only hours before the screening.  Organisers received a letter from the Turkish Ministry of Culture claiming the film did not have the required registration certificate.
Now protest can take many forms, not just putting bodies on streets with placards.  Complying with the directive from Ankara prompted more than 100 film-makers to publish an open letter decrying government ‘oppression and censorship’.  More than 23 Turkish film-makers withdrew their entries from the festival, undermining the latter to the extent that the organisers announced that all competitions – and the closing ceremony – were cancelled.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will probably not lose too much sleep over such protests – indeed, it may do him some good ahead of June’s General Election as his conservative, Islamic base, the bedrock of the success of his Justice and Workers’ Party, will view it as another example of the secular, liberal elite trying to smear their leader.  But that it provoked such a furious reaction from the artistic community with the coded warning to the film festival’s organisers, proves that though the country may be free from military interference in politics, plurality is nevertheless under threat.
Twitter services and other social media have been interrupted on several occasions.  It will not have been lost on Ankara that Twitter was the main method of communication among those involved in the abortive Green revolution in Iran and the later Arab Spring.  Other echoes of the Arab Spring also are grim – the arrest of a 16-year old boy for insulting the president is eerily reminiscent of Syrian schoolchildren being taken into police custody and maltreated for daubing some anti-President Bashar al-Assad graffiti, the catalyst for what has become the Syrian civil war.  It is not surprising that Erdoğan should turn inwards to assert his power, given the comprehensive failure of his foreign policy vision, with relations with the EU at an all-time low, his (only recently mended) break with Israel and the supposed neo-Ottoman outreach to the Middle East torn asunder by Assad completely ignoring his advice.  A film that chronicles an internal rebellion is too near the knuckle for Ankara.

Maybe the allegations of a threat to free speech should be treated with caution as sour grapes from the traditional secular ruling nomenclatura who have lost out in the new political settlement that Erdoğan has forged.  In the immediate years after the 9/11 attacks in the USA, it became very fraught to criticise the George W Bush administration, the country and western band the Dixie Chicks finding to their cost (and leading to their recanting their disavowal of support); something similar happened when Miss Turkey recited a poem critical of Mr Erdoğan.  But whereas after eight years Bush’s approval ratings were less than 30% and he could serve no more terms, Erdoğan sees little slippage in his general popularity and takes this as validation to go on and on.  If June’s elections go his way and his party can change the constitution to deliver ever greater powers to the formerly symbolic role of president, more protests against the curtailment of artistic freedom seem certain but there will be a greater sentiment just to keep quit altogether.

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