In the Beyoğlu district of Istanbul, a short walk from Taksim Square, a tourist may pause to admire the graffiti. On İstiklal Avenue, a pedestrian thoroughfare that six million people stroll down on a typical weekend, a striking installation depicts an oversized smiley-face holding up his comrades with a gun. He looks “cool” – a red baseball cap sits sideways on his head, hip-hop style – but menacing. The words “Hands Up” float above his weapon and his emoji captives seem genuinely afraid.
The comic premise of this piece of street art may prevent a casual observer from noticing its potentially subversive details. A closer look reveals that among the threatened emoji there is a businessman, doctor, policeman, photographer/journalist, and a soldier. One may also notice that the “gloves are off” the emoji-man with the gun, and that he seems to be a true gangster.
Boyar Eller the street artist who created this image has an Instagram account and several thousand Facebook followers. Mercifully his take on the politics of Emojistan has not yet caught the attention of the authorities there. Had it done so he might have faced the humourless prosecution which president Erdoğan has taken up against a German comedian who recently made fun of him.
During the last year Mr Erdoğan’s government has imprisoned several local cartoonists for similar trespasses and his administration has used Turkey’s insult law to investigate more than 200 public figures – resulting in more than 100 indictments. This crackdown has been justified as a necessary response to nefarious plots by a “parallel state” determined to undermine the country’s stability.
Two journalists from the Cumhuriyet newspaper are the latest casualties in Erdoğan’s ongoing repression. Hikmet Cetinkaya and Ceyda Karan were recently sentenced to two years in jail for republishing a Charlie Hebdo cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed last year – a week after the staff of the French weekly were murdered in their offices by radical islamists. Some readers my recall that in the solidarity marches through Paris which followed the killings, Turkey’s Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu stood prominently among the political leaders who claimed to defend free speech. Little that has happened since then lends credence to this claim.
While Cumhuriyet’s journalists are jailed for a religious insult in a notionally secular state, Mr Davutoglu reassures the public that a new constitution will uphold Kemal Ataturk’s secular principles. Meanwhile the parliamentary speaker, Ismail Kahraman — who presides over the drafting of the new document – has explicitly called for a religious constitution.
Each new arrest and “insult” prosecution in Turkey tilts the current, fragile constitutional balance, further in Mr Kahraman’s favour. But, outmanoeuvred by Turkey’s deft handling of its role in Europe’s migrant crisis, in Syria, and the delicate diplomacy around Iran, the international community has had little choice but to let president Erdoğan silence his critics with impunity.
President Erdoğan and the Justice and Development party (AKP) he founded in 2001 have consistently presented themselves as a special case of political Islam. The AKP has sold itself as an alternative to the sort of political intransigence that took root in Iran and other parts of the Middle East. In the Turkish model, democratization and neoliberal free markets would coexist with an Islamic government. This promising argument foundered noticeably in the wake of the Arab Spring however, particularly after the dissatisfaction of the Turkish middle class became evident in the 2013 protests. Since then the government has displayed increasingly intolerant attitudes, especially towards its political critics both local and foreign.
The Russian poet Osip Mandelstam once observed of Stalin’s repression that “If they are killing poets, it’s because they respect poetry.” Turkey’s repression is being undertaken in a similar sprit, because its government fears the power which artists, journalists, comedians and writers have to speak out against its autocratic tendencies. Sadly, apart from the Erdoğan administration, the wider world hasn’t yet shown them the respect they deserve.
