Süleyman Demirel obituary
Dominant
figure in Turkey’s politics and seven times its PM
Wed 17 Jun 2015
Süleyman
Demirel in Helsinki, Finland, in 1975. Photograph: AFP
In 1983, three
years after a coup, Süleyman Demirel, previously five times Turkish prime
minister, was still being held prisoner in a military camp. Distressed at the
glowing publicity the country’s military junta was receiving in the west,
Demirel and his fellow prisoners sent a secret emissary to Britain, hoping to
contact the Conservative government, drawing attention to the dark side of
military rule and accusing western politicians of “clapping until their hands
were red”.
Despite
Demirel’s eminence, no notice was taken of the letter by the Conservatives, who
simply redirected its bearer to Edward Mortimer, at the time a foreign policy
commentator on the Times. This was the one time during Demirel’s 35-year
political career that he made a direct appeal to western liberals and
politicians. But, detecting no charisma in Demirel, they paid him little
attention, despite his obvious survival skills.
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Yet between
1965 and the close of the century, Demirel, who has died aged 90, waged a
largely successful battle for democratic politics and rapid economic
development in Turkey amid incessant turbulence. Though at times he made
serious mistakes, he not only made comebacks after two military coups but also
lived to see Turkey become a
prosperous middle-income industrial country, though under an Islamist
government that more or less obliterated the former tradition of centre-right
politics.
Born into a
family of peasant farmers in Islamköy, a village in Isparta province in
south-western Turkey, Demirel graduated as an engineer from Istanbul Technical
University. While there he was a classmate of Necmettin Erbakan, the
future leader of Turkey’s Islamist revival and attended his prayer meetings.
Demirel’s technical ability attracted the attention of the prime
minister, Adnan Menderes, and at the
age of 31 he became director general of the state hydraulic works agency, after
a period studying in the US on a scholarship from the Eisenhower foundation.
Turkey’s network of hydropower projects in the south-east was his brainchild.
After the military
coup in 1960 that deposed Menderes’s government, Demirel emerged as winner in
the contest to lead Turkey’s centre right, first becoming prime minister after
the 1965 general election. Though he and his Justice party seemed to have a
natural majority in the country, Demirel was hard pressed, even with his
considerable skills, to stay on top of a stormy situation. Leftists plotted
with the military to set up a government along the lines of the Ba’athist
administrations of Arab countries to the south, while his own followers were
riven by feuds, and annual population growth of 3% produced urban chaos and
protests at the nation’s economic backwardness.
Demirel was
forced to devalue the lira. In June 1970 there were massive protests in
Istanbul and martial law was introduced. Inflation began to rise into double
and sometimes triple digits and was used to finance major economic and
infrastructural projects. This mixture of pressures set the prevailing pattern
in Turkish life until the end of the century.
In March 1971
the military unexpectedly ordered Demirel and his government to resign but did
not shut parliament down. The withdrawal of the military from politics
coincided with the rise of Bülent Ecevit on the
centre left. Demirel allied with the Islamists and nationalist right fringes –
thus inadvertently gıvıng them a permanent place in national politics – and
became prime minister again in 1975 at the head of an anti-left “nationalist
front” government. The polarisation that he fostered led to political
paralysis, culminating in the military coup of 12 September 1980 with Kenan Evren at its
head.
In detention,
Demirel was held with his left-of-centre rivals, with whom he found himself on
surprisingly good personal terms. When civilian politics returned, Turkish
centre left and centre right for the first time found it easy to co-operate.
After 1981
Turkey moved away from protectionist economic policies to a market economy and
renewed growth, as Demirel’s rival Turgut Özalpursued bolder policies than his.
Demirel was banned from politics by the military until a referendum in 1987
reinstated him. By 1991 he was prime minister again, though now at the head of
a coalition, and in 1993 he was elected president, retiring after seven years.
His most
controversial act as head of state came in 1997, when he evicted Erbakan, by
this time the Islamist prime minister, from power by leading him to expect he
would still be part of a new coalition if he resigned, but then appointing a
rival. This blocked the Islamist movement from power in Turkey until its
comeback in 2002. Though the Turkish military are frequently blamed for this,
the decision seems to have been Demirel’s own.
Widely read,
he could talk easily both to farmers and visiting foreign professors. He was an
ebullient but also in some ways a personally shy man. The Islamist course of
Turkish politics after 2002 disappointed him and he made few public statements
in the final years of his life. He is likely to be remembered as an arch-compromiser
who steered Turkey through critical decades.
In 1948 he
married Nazmiye Demirel, a cousin. She died in 2013.
• Sami
Süleyman Gündoğdu Demirel, politician, born 1 November 1924; died 17 June 2015
Kenan Evren obituary
Leader of
Turkey’s military coup of 1980 and president of the country for seven years
Kenan
Evren in his presidential office in 1982. Last year he was given a life
sentence for crimes against the state and stripped of his ranks, honours and
medals. Photograph: Depo Photos/EPA
In June last
year, a Turkish court in Ankara wrote a final humiliating postscript to the
career of the former president Kenan Evren, who has died aged 97. Evren,
permanently hospitalised after the removal of his large intestine five years
earlier, received a life sentence for crimes against the state, along with the
sole surviving member of the junta he had once headed.
Unable to
attend court in person, the former general received news of the judgment via
closed-circuit television. He was stripped of all his ranks, medals, and
honours. It is not clear how much impact these rulings had. According to his
relatives, Evren was no longer able to understand the proceedings.
For many
Turks, particularly on the left, the condemnation of Evren in a now mainly
Islamist Turkey helped bring
closure to painful wounds suffered in 1980 at the hands of military
coup-makers, who threw out an elected but feeble civilian government and ruled
the country directly for more than two years.
However, the
judgment ignored the fact that during its short period in power, Evren’s regime
had restored law and order to a country where at the time of the coup about two
dozen people a day were being killed in political clashes. It also set the
stricken and paralysed Turkish economy of 1980 on the road not just back to
stability, but also to a vastly more prosperous era, the largely inadvertent
outcome of Evren’s style of government.
He was born in
the western Anatolian town of Alaşehir. His father was an imam, but Evren was
educated in military schools as an army officer and grew up as a secularist.
His family background gave him a less unfriendly view of the religious
establishment than most Kemalist bureaucrats. His early career, which included
a spell in Korea in the second half of the 1950s, was successful but not
notable until August 1977 when the then prime minister, Süleyman Demirel,
promoted him to be chief of general staff over the head of a more liberal general.
It was a fateful decision. Three years later Evren would lead a military coup
which deposed Demirel and sent him, along with senior ministers and opposition
colleagues, into detention.
Evren was more
the figurehead than the architect of the coup. Bluff, cheerful, and
surprisingly considerate of others, he lacked intellectual forcefulness at a
time when Turkey’s future hung in the balance and the military were expected to
decide the outcome. Bitter polarisation between right and leftwing
parliamentarians had spilled over into street violence between revolutionary
Marxists and ultra-nationalist “Grey Wolves”. The daily death toll grew
steadily and even the imposition of martial law in Turkey’s major cities failed
to restore order.
The military
dragged their feet in backing the civilian government, allowed the situation to
ripen to ensure support for a coup and put out feelers to the US and Britain
about their intentions. In the summer of 1980, parliament was unable to agree
on the election of the head of state, impeached the foreign minister and left a
minority government in office which was powerless.
On 12
September, Evren and his colleagues moved and declared him head of state with a
junta of top generals exercising legislative power. Order was restored within a
few weeks. The price was high – and became more severe in the second year of
the junta as its composition changed. The generals hanged 35 militants (one of
them a boy of 17) and placed many thousands of others, particularly journalists
and academics, on trial in martial-law courts. Torture was ubiquitous. A
long-standing personal foe of the Grey Wolf leader, Alparslan Türkeş, Evren
jailed ultra-nationalists as well as leftists.
Two years of
redesigning Turkey’s institutions followed, intended to reshape the country’s
political system along semi-authoritarian but outwardly democratic lines. The
new system was intended to proscribe all political activity outside the narrow
limits the generals regarded as permissible. Evren also revived Islamic religious
education in schools, believing it would curb the growth of the left, and made
it compulsory.
He and his
colleagues intended that a pro-army conservative party should run the country.
A dubious referendum in June 1982 endorsed a new constitution, followed 17
months later by a general election in which only three approved parties
competed. Evren had formally become president in the June 1982 referendum and
watched helplessly as Turgut Özal, whom he disliked, won the general election
in November 1983 and set Turkey on the path to greater political and economic
freedom.
Evren himself
served out a seven-year term as a figurehead president without fuss before
retiring to a life of painting by the seaside at Bodrum, making only very
occasional (and usually poorly judged) public remarks.
Evren’s wife,
Sekine, died in 1982. He is survived by three daughters.
• Kenan
Evren, military officer and statesman, born 17 July 1917; died 9 May 2015\
-------------------
Yasar Kemal obituary
Turkish
writer best known for his novel Memed, My Hawk
Sun 1 Mar 2015 13.22
Yasar
Kemal at his home in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2008. Photograph: Yoray Liberman
The Turkish
writer Yaşar Kemal, who has died aged 91, found fame after the publication of
his first novel, Ince Memed (1955), translated into English as Memed, My Hawk
(1961). It became known around the world in other translations, the first
Turkish novel to make a big impact internationally. Kemal was then working as a
journalist in Istanbul, but the story dealt with the harsh life of farmers and
ordinary people in the Çukurova plain and Taurus mountains around Adana in
southern Turkey.
Memed, My Hawk
is a sort of Robin Hood tale, rich in autobiographical elements. Its hero,
Memed, grows up in a village cut off from the rest of the world and owned by an
oppressive landowner, Abdi Agha, who viciously exploits the farmers and their
families. A feud springs up between Memed and Abdi: Memed, accompanied by the
young woman he loves, Hatche, is driven into the mountains as a bandit and
eventually kills Abdi, though only after Hatche has been killed and he himself
betrayed.
It is an
extraordinarily violent story, told with great vividness and simplicity in
language that not only brings the luckless villagers to life but also evokes
very strongly the sounds, smells, and colours of Turkey’s Taurus region. The
message is clear – the oppressed need to stand up firmly against oppression and
fight injustice rather than endure it uncomplainingly. The novel became a
classic, even though some Turkish readers do not think it is necessarily
Kemal’s best.
Not everyone
approved. When a leading Hollywood producer contemplated a film version, he was
warned that the Turkish authorities considered Kemal to be a communist and he
backed off. It was not until 1984 that Peter Ustinov directed
and starred (as Abdi) in a film version of Memed My Hawk. Even then Ustinov was denied
permission to film in Turkey.
Kemal was born
in the village of Hemite (now renamed Gökçedam) a couple of weeks before the
demise of the Ottoman Empire and the declaration of the Republic of Turkey. He
was named Kemal Sadık, after his father, and in 1934 the family took the
surname of Gökçeli. His parents, Sadık and Nigâr, were Kurdish peasant farmers
who had escaped from the first world war by trekking a few years earlier from
their home on the shores of Lake Van to live in what is now Turkey’s Osmaniye
province, near the north-east corner of the Mediterranean. The only Kurdish
family in the village, they spoke Kurdish at home and Turkish with their
neighbours.
A childhood
knife accident left Kemal blind in one eye, and when he was five years old his
father was murdered before his eyes by his stepbrother. His interest in
literature began with folksongs. Unable to play the saz – the Turkish
long-necked lute – well, he became interested in the world of ballads, and
their stories of bandits and protests. Working part-time as a casual labourer
in the cotton fields around Adana, he put himself through some secondary
schooling but was forced to leave in his mid-teens.
In 1943, he
published a book of folk ballads locally, and while doing his military service
in Ankara a year later his first short story. For the next few years he
combined working as a labourer with offering his services as a public letter
writer, moving gradually into journalism and in 1950 served a short spell in
prison for alleged communist activities.
A year later,
on the advice of several of Turkey’s leading leftist writers, he went to
Istanbul and was given a job as a reporter on Cumhuriyet newspaper. It was at
this point that he adopted the pen name of Yaşar Kemal.
From then
onwards his life was a story of high-profile success: three travel books based
on his work as a reporter, and more than 20 novels between 1955 and 2013,
continuing to deal with the people of the southern Turkish
countryside whom he had known in his earlier life and their sufferings and
feuds. He won a stream of Turkish and international awards, though
he seems to have been more appreciated outside the English-speaking countries.
He was particularly liked in France, becoming in 2011 a grand officier of the Légion
d’Honneur. But though nominated for the Nobel prize in 1973, he never won it.
Kemal’s
lifelong passion for social justice led him to join the newly legalised
Workers’ Party of Turkey in 1962. He also always publicly affirmed his Kurdish
identity even when tensions between Ankara and the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers’
party, were at their height.
In the late
1970s he moved temporarily to Sweden at a time when there was a spate of
political assassinations in Turkey. In 1996 he was sentenced to 20 months for
an article he wrote for Index on Censorship, but although he asked the court
not to suspend it, he did not actually go to jail.
Kemal married
his first wife, Thilda Serrero, in 1952, and they had a son, Rasit. Thilda died
in 2001, and the following year he married Ayşe Semiha Baban. She and Rasit
survive him.
• Yaşar
Kemal (Kemal Gökçeli), writer, born 6 October 1923; died 28 February 2015
--------------------
Mehmet Aksoy obituary
Rahila Gupta is a writer and
journalist. Her last book, Enslaved: The New British Slavery explores the role
of immigration controls in enslaving people with no formal status here
Mehmet
Aksoy was the programme director of the annual London Kurdish film festival
My friend
Mehmet Aksoy, who has died aged 32, was a film-maker, journalist and prominent
figure in the Kurdish community in the UK. He was killed in an Isis ambush while
documenting the fight between Kurdish forces and Isis in Raqqa in northern
Syria.
I met Mehmet
in 2015 after he had given a rousing speech about an unbelievable place in
northern Syria called Rojava
(now known as the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria), where a
self-governing, Kurdish-led democracy based on the principles of gender, race
and class equality had been set up in 2012 with a special focus on women’s
liberation. Such were Mehmet’s persuasive powers that I travelled to Rojava to
have a look for myself. Everything he had said was true. Over the next two
years I was also to discover his vast range of achievements in such a short
life.
Mehmet was
born in Istanbul, Turkey, the oldest child of Zeynep (nee Konca) and Kalender
Aksoy. When he was four his family moved to London, where his parents now run
an off-licence. Educated at Leyton college and then Barnet college, he started
going to the Kurdish Community Centre in central London as a teenager and there
became increasingly aware of the Kurdish freedom struggle. Important milestones
in his political development were the writings of the Black Panther activist
George Jackson and ideas on democratic federalism put forward by Abdullah Öcalan, the Kurdish leader now
imprisoned in Turkey.
After gaining
a first class degree in film studies from Queen Mary University of London in
2007, Mehmet worked as editor of the Kurdish.com website, but was also founding
editor of an internet-based news portal called The
Region and of the website Kurdishquestion.com, the place for
information, news and analysis on all things Kurdish.
In tandem with
his journalistic efforts he maintained his interest in film and in 2014
completed an MA in film-making at Goldsmiths, University of London: his 2014
film, Panfilo, an apocalyptic
fairytale about three generations of men coming to terms with loss and death in
rural Italy, won prizes at the Italian Short Film festival and the UK Student
Film Awards. He was also the programme director of the annual London
Kurdish film festival, and at other times could be seen wielding a
megaphone or a placard in support of Kurdish self-government.
In his search
for answers to the Kurdish question, he tragically paid with his life.
Mehmet is
survived by his parents, his sister, Gonca, and his brother, Ali.
John Freely obituary
Brooklyn-born
historian of science and passionate traveller whose 1973 book, Strolling
Through Istanbul, became a classic
Mon 5 Jun 2017
In 1960
a chance encounter with a former teacher at Robert College, Istanbul, persuaded
John Freely to move his young family to Turkey, where he took up a post
teaching theoretical physics at the college
In books such
as Before Galileo (2012), Light from the East (2010)
and Aladdin’s Lamp (2009), John Freely, a historian of science and inveterate
traveller, who has died aged 90, showed how much modern science and indeed
modern thought in the west owes to ideas forged in the eastern past. His
non-scientific works, including The Grand Turk (2009), Storm on Horseback
(2008) and Jem Sultan (2004), range widely throughout Turkish history.
Istanbul, at
the crossroads between east and west, was the locus of his life and his work;
and John’s travel book Strolling Through Istanbul (1973,
with Hilary Sumner-Boyd), has established itself as a classic. As a guide to
the city, John was peerless; it is doubtful whether any westerner in the late
20th century had a better understanding of it than he.
What makes
Strolling Through Istanbul so unusual is its combination of erudition and
first-hand observation. The New YorkTimes described it as reading like a
novel. Of the Topkapi Saray (palace), for instance, he wrote: “In all the Saray
there could have been no more agreeable place for the Sultan to enjoy his keyif than from his balcony,
cooled by the gentle breezes from the Bosphorus, watching the lights twinkling
like captive constellations on the hills of his beautiful city.”
John was a
born storyteller, and his encyclopedic knowledge of history and culture enabled
him to treat Istanbul in an informed but very personal way; the book is shot
through with anecdotes as well as facts. This applied to all his travel books,
which included volumes on Athens, Venice and the islands in teh Aegean known as
the Cyclades. He was an indefatigable walker – nothing escaped his eye when he
was touring a place, and he was able to situate the things he saw in a human as
well as a historical context. He was also highly irreverent.
Born in
Brooklyn, New York, John was the son of Peg (nee Murphy) and John Freely. His
mother took him for two periods to live in her native Dingle, in County Kerry,
Ireland, while his father, whose jobs included trolley conductor, gardener and
gravedigger, tried to find steady work in Brooklyn. By the time he was six,
John had crossed the Atlantic four times, thus setting the pattern for his
restless life.
After being
expelled from high school in Brooklyn, for neglecting all studies except the
humanities that interested him, he enlisted in the US navy just in time to have
adventures on the Burma Road and in China before the second world war ended.
The GI Bill enabled him to study physics at Iona College and New York
University, and from there he went on to carry out thermonuclear research at
the Forrestal Research Center, Princeton University.
In 1947 John
had married Dolores Stanley (affectionately nicknamed “Toots”); in 1960 a
chance encounter with a former teacher at Robert College, Istanbul, persuaded
them to move with their young children to Turkey, where John took up a post teaching
theoretical physics at the college.
Over the
course of the following 50 years, and inspired by the example of the Ottoman
traveller and historian Evliya Çelebi, he became
steeped in the history and cultures of the eastern Mediterranean. The young
family took extensive trips in college vacations; the inspiration was often
Homer and the Odyssey, and by the end of his travelling days John had easily
outdistanced his mythical precursor.
John’s life in
Istanbul in the 1960s was both scholarly and hedonistic, the expatriate crowd
he hung out with being noted for hard drinking and party-going, and for
inebriated midnight swims in the Bosphorus. John’s elder daughter, the novelist
and translator Maureen Freely, dramatised this in her novels The Life of the
Party (1984) and Sailing Through Byzantium (2013). Alcohol later became a grave
problem, however, and John eventually quit drinking altogether.
At Robert
College, which has since become Bosphorus University, John devised a course in
the history of science that over the years attracted countless devoted
students. Recently the institution named one of its principal halls after him.
Dolores died
in 2015. John is survived by his daughters, Maureen and Eileen, and son,
Brendan.
• John
Freely, writer, born 26 June 1926; died 20 April 2017
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