An attempt to sound like the puppet press – public thanks to Erdoğan
Dear President, the whole world knows that we have your personal complaint and the blind obedience of the first-instance penal judges at your beck and call to thank for our past three months’ detention.
I think that, for a number of reasons, we owe you a debt of gratitude for this detention.
I lacked experience of imprisonment in my professional career; thanks to you I have filled that gap.
In the comfort of lacking a telephone to attend to, I read plenty of books that I had been unable to read and I wrote more articles than I had ever been able to (and even wrote more easily given that there remained no risk of being detained by you); I was unable to do sport outside, but inside I did plenty of exercise marches and played ball. I became acquainted with other people and lives. I mulled over enough material to last a wordsmith a lifetime. I was host to more parliamentarian and lawyer friends than I had ever seen. All thanks to you.
I don’t know how many remain in my life, but you saw to it that I spent one of my New Years inside; thanks to this, you reminded me of the value of a New Year spent with loved ones.
By throwing us inside, you saw to it that we were protected from the country’s escalating atmosphere of civil war, swine flu epidemic, air pollution, and winter snow.
You granted us the privilege, which one normally earns after death, of knowing how loved you are and of sensing the support you enjoy; you caused us to revel in attention that we neither courted nor deserved.
Thanks to you, even though I didn’t write any books last year, I was voted number one in the “Best writer of the year” rankings, overtaking Orhan Pamuk.
You put yourself out.
You granted us the opportunity to show that not every newspaper will be cowed into toeing the line; that there are those who will not bend.
We convey our sincere gratitude.
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Our three month’s detention pales into insignificance beside those who have been inside for years buckling under terms of strict solitary confinement and those at the receiving end of the thousands of defamation lawsuits you have brought, but, by throwing us in jail, you gave us a podium and gave us the opportunity to speak out for them; we especially thank you for this.
And then, you know, there was that affair of the National Intelligence Organisation lorries that you had tried to hide from the whole world by wielding the stamp of state secrecy – the affair you threw us inside for reporting – well, with you throwing us inside news of it has spread from Japan to Canada and from Oceania to Indonesia; nobody is left in the dark; we can never thank you enough for the part you played.
Good thinking.
Does it end there? We gained the opportunity to tell the whole world from the dungeon about authoritarianism, lawlessness and the threat of war in Turkey - what power could have created for us the opportunity to write articles in everything from the Guardian to Der Spiegel and the Washington Post to Le Monde in the space of the same month, who could have seen to it that the American Vice-President would wish to speak to my family, apart from your uncontrolled power?
With the support of you and your henchmen, we were able to bask in a kind of professional solidarity on a national and international scale that we had yearned for over the years; we were able to bring hundreds of people together on the “Watch of Hope”; on our release we were both able to wallow in an atmosphere of triumph for which we had yearned so earnestly; we were able to sit in a mixed sex group and sing songs; thanks a million.
Finally, we have your authoritarian attitude that is heedless of the law to thank for the Constitutional Court’s ruling saying, “Enough, we have clout, too”; we cannot deny this, either.
On a discordant note, the household has got into quite a bit of debt; we hope you will go some way towards allowing us to pay this off with the compensation we will receive for unjust detention and I ask you to accept my expressions of gratitude.
Worst Regards,
Original article:
http://www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/koseyazisi ... ekkur.html
