Intersect Conversations: Rebecca Eneyni

So I wanted to get into the heavy stuff. First, your current crisis that is ongoing and its historical resonance. I want to start with the micro and move to the macro because we both know the personal is political.

He's actually my partner, which has made it very personal. But at the beginning of July, July 7th, I was heading back home to our apartment, which we share, and he had been supposed to meet me at coffee around 5 or 6 P.M., and I hadn't heard from him. He was also supposed to work on something with his friend after, so I assumed that he had run into a time crunch and just continued on with what he was going to do after, but he wasn't replying to me.

So I started to get a little bit suspicious that something could have happened, especially given the fact that in the past two months, maybe four months, since March, there's been a significant increase of police presence in Istanbul and elsewhere in Turkey, in major metropolitan areas in particular. And so he had been missing for a few hours.

I woke up that morning at around 5 A.M., surprised that he wasn't home. And I received a call from one of our mutual friends, the one he was actually supposed to continue to meet for work later that day, saying, “Just come to this address.” And I said, “Where is he? What's the issue?” Because I could feel that something was wrong. I felt it all night. I had a lot of trouble sleeping.

And then I woke up and got that message, went over there, and then discovered that he had been arrested alongside one of our other friends who is a trans Palestinian who at the time was actually stateless because her residence permit had expired just two days prior and the renewal was still in Göç İdaresi, the immigration management center in Istanbul. She's trans and he's visibly queer and Armenian, and they were meeting near a park in Beşiktaş which is the district where we all live near a mosque.

The police had apparently been trailing the trans friend all the way from her home for no apparent reason. And then when they met by the park, they arrested them both. The police beat him up quite severely –– enough to take him to the hospital. And there is no official police report. Normally they have to submit a report that there has been a beating or the use of violence. There was no report submitted.

“In general, the justice system in Turkey is very flawed and it’s usually used to arbitrarily punish people that the state is otherwise unfriendly towards, especially ethnic minorities and queer people of late.”

But we had the hospital intake at that time taking him in for physical chest pains from being hit so hard in the chest he couldn't breathe. And they also roughed up the trans woman, our friend, who he was meeting. The tactic of Istanbul police often is to separate people and then interrogate and threaten them until they unwillingly sign whatever report they have on the table. So they offered that to Furkan, my partner, first. He said, “No, I won't sign anything,” but then they did the same thing to our friend who is not a Turkish speaker (there was no translator present) and they told her that she would be immediately deported if she didn't sign this document and so she signed unfortunately. 

Since then, she's been released but he has remained in police custody even though there's no legal grounds for him to still be there and the reason that it's been so long, in part, has been because the judge was on a summer holiday for forty days where there was little to nothing going on in terms of actually hearing out appeals and releasing people. But, in general, the justice system in Turkey is very flawed and it's usually used to arbitrarily punish people that the state is otherwise unfriendly towards, especially ethnic minorities and queer people of late.

He told me something in the brief time we were able to essentially bribe someone to let me give him a hug before they took him. He said to me in that very brief time that the judge opened his file, saw all the political arrests that he had, (he was never charged with anything, but he was arrested for activism previously) shut the file, didn't review any of the evidence, and put him in pretrial custody. This has unfortunately become more common, though this is definitely an extreme example, especially given it's now about two months he's been there.

It's unfortunately reflective of a larger police crackdown. But, right now, we're working on getting him fair legal representation so that they can release him after the first trial, hopefully, given that there's no evidence or legal cause for him to be in there. So we'll see how that goes. Unfortunately, he's in the Silivri Prison –– a large prison outside of Istanbul that holds a lot of political cases.

And there are tons of university students. I mean, he said it basically looks like a university there from how many students are there. People within our peers who are just researchers, academics, journalists, et cetera who are all being held there for one reason or another. That's a brief overview of what happened. 

Thank you for explaining it. My next question was “are ethnic minorities and queer people subjected to systemic or social discrimination?” But it sounds like it’s both. It's both being socially ostracized and then also this systematic crackdown by the police state. 

Queer people, in particular, have become the most politicized and the most criminalized. There's an informal bill that not a lot of people know about, but it's very similar to the Russian bill that effectively outlawed being gay, and it's circulating in the Turkish parliament behind closed doors. But they've started to act on it, which is illegal, but it's been a tactic by the current AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, or Justice and Development Party) government to criminalize queer people and essentially prepare society for a full manhunt.

For instance, there was the first Pride parade in a long time at the beginning of June. There were a ton of people arrested. And I remember, on that day, seeing the police everywhere throughout the city at every corner. My primary friend groups are all queer people and also there are certain pockets of Istanbul that are known to be primarily young queer people and you could see the differentiation in police presence in those areas as opposed to traditionally conservative outskirts of Istanbul. They were essentially trailing people with no cause and then harassing them, emptying out all their belongings, et cetera, and even taking some people who were directly protesting for public disorder and other political charges.

“So yes, I would say it’s both social and systemic.”

It's been a definite uptick in [arrests and detentions] of Kurds and Armenians and other ethnic minorities. It's very interesting in Turkey because it's an ethnostate in terms of how it's transitioned from the Ottoman Empire into modernity. There have been two paths for minorities. The Kurds, who are localized in the Southeast, have formed more organized resistance and political representation, which makes them more actively demonized. Whereas Alevis and Armenian people (a Harvard Kennedy researcher called them a “secret nation”) are often casting themselves as Turkish so they're less distinguishable.

For example: my partner. His first name is Muhammad, even though he's not Muslim. And that was a change that his grandfather made after the Armenian Genocide because anyone remaining in Turkey who had Armenian names was subject to, if not forced deportation, than other forms of institutionalized discrimination. And so he actually changed their names to become more “Turkified.”

And that's the case with, as I said, ethnic minorities like Armenians and also Alevis, who are a religious subgroup within Sunni Muslims. They keep a lot of their practices quiet to avoid said discrimination. So yes, I would say it's both social and systemic. The social climate has become noticeably more antagonistic as in the States, as in Europe. It's a transition that we're seeing everywhere, the rise of the far right and the populist right. But I think in Istanbul and Turkey, more broadly, it obviously has a very long historical legacy.

The famous Turkish writer, Orhan Pamuk, was put on trial for stating that three hundred thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed during the Armenian Genocide. Is that censorship still prevalent in Turkey? Is it still very “hush-hush” surrounding the Armenian Genocide? Can you be punished for talking about it? What's the discourse around it like? 

It's not only “hush-hush,” there are direct historical corrections or they frame it as contested history. So they say, for example, “Yes, a lot of Armenians died, but it wasn't a genocide. It was a war. It was wartime casualties.” That's how they're framing it. Even higher education to the graduate level, if it’s a public university, which is under a lot of supervision of the executive board, which has direct appointees from President Erdogan, they have restrictions in terms of acknowledging the Armenian Genocide.

All public figures have this restriction even in society, and I mean young educated people our age. I mean, I would say Kurds, Alevis, and Armenians will all recognize the genocide. Turkish ethnic groups, even if they're highly educated, oftentimes refuse to even say the word “genocide” and oftentimes refer to it as wartime casualties. Obviously, that's a sweeping generalization and there are people who have really made the effort to educate themselves.

But, for instance, President Erdogan formed a historical committee to address this issue, but it was composed in equal part of Armenians and Turks. So the view of it as a contested history, as an uncertainty, is definitely still present in Turkish pedagogy. And then general community views. I myself worked on the Guerguerian archive, which is one of the premier archives, including Istanbul court documents taken during the martial trials. [The trials] essentially happened when the Allied Powers and former Ottoman Empire put the new Turkish Republic figures on trial for the Armenian Genocide.

“[At Koç University,] all the professors, most of whom were trained in the West, openly discussed the Armenian Genocide. But that is definitely not the case at public universities in Turkey.”

A few years after the formation of the Turkish Republic, they had martial courts. And there are tons of court documents that definitively show that it was a genocide, that it was an organized and systematic ethnic cleansing. In a more Turkish view of history, they say, “Okay, we were deporting these people because we think they were affiliated with the Russians who were an enemy of the Ottoman Empire at the time.”

But then they go further to say, “Okay, armed gangs or other diseases were the cause of these deaths on these long deportation walks when, in reality, there is tons of evidence of them lining up people and killing all of them during these deportations in a very systematic way. And there was an organized delegation of where these towns and pockets of Armenian people were going to be killed. So I think that, despite the ample historical evidence which is publicly available, Turkey is still promoting this kind of false view of history through its educational system. It is quite surprising. 

When I came there, I was expecting it to be different. And I will say, I study at Koç University which is a very American-influenced private university. There, all the professors, most of whom were trained in the West, openly discussed the Armenian Genocide. But that is definitely not the case at public universities in Turkey.

So I am going to butcher the pronunciation but: Boğaziçi. What’s happening there? 

This is the subject of my thesis, so I have a lot to say about it. It's very related to this topic because in 2021, for the first time in decades, President Erdogan appointed a rector, which is a very high administrative position in the university. He directly appointed it and he bypassed the faculty elective procedures which had been commonplace up until that point. Since then, so many researchers have been leaving that university because of threats to academic freedom and the changes that have been made at the departmental level and within classrooms. 

They've actually been protesting since 2021 in January at that university. Every single day, there are a group of faculty and students who stand in front of the rector's office with their backs to it to show that they don't acknowledge him as a leader of their university, given that he was a previous major party member in the governing party in Turkey, and he does not have the academic credentials that are usually expected of someone with that stature in a university.

And in terms of police brutality, also with Boğaziçi, that was the first time in 2021 where there was an overt police mobilization against students and people in general of dissenting opinions. There were police blockades outside the campus. Two of my friends who are currently political asylum seekers in Switzerland came from Turkey. They're also friends of my partner Furkan, and they protested together at Boğaziçi.

“So it’s become statewide censorship of the educated left which is not entirely incomparable to, for example, what went on at Harvard and is still ongoing there.”

That was one of the arrests on [Furkan’s] case file for political reasons. And they had a friend who was in their apartment and then left their apartment. The police broke in, planted a gun in their apartment. The police came back and broke in again and said, “This is the police, we're going to search your apartment.” They came in, found the gun that they had planted, and then charged them all. So this is one of many examples of both the police deliberately fabricating evidence to peg people who are known progressives who, for example, may advocate for queer people, for Armenian people, for genocide recognition. They're flagging all these people in a very systemic way by showing up at these university-level protests, at student organizations, and arresting people.

So it's become statewide censorship of the educated left which is not entirely incomparable to, for example, what went on at Harvard and is still ongoing there. It's a very similar case. And there are a lot of similarities with Central European University in Hungary and Viktor Orbán's policies towards that. These are all universities that are public, but they were American founded in their start. And they continue to be kind of like vestiges of the left and usually relatively higher economic classes which for a populist leader is kind of the perfect enemy. 

So I do think that Boğaziçi used to be a kind of left haven. Now it's very much being tempered with and a lot of people are choosing to leave. For example, my university has a lot of transfers from Boğaziçi who are studying political science and found that their research was no longer being supported so they had to go to a private institution. It's definitely the case that, even though Boğaziçi was really considered a shining gem, both in Turkey and in the region, now its quality of education has really decreased in the past few years because of free speech being antagonized. 

I really liked this quote in your essay “On Tolerated Temporality” and I was just wondering if I could have your thoughts on it. You write, “For many, existential temporality is sharpened at the blade of austerity capitalism and state-sanctioned violence.” If you could explain in layman's terms what you were getting at with “tolerated temporality”?

So I briefly encountered the term, to give it proper credit, in an article by a Turkish academic, Dr. Baklagioglu, who was studying Syrian women and girls under the “temporary protection regime” in Turkey which is the legal statute regarding refugees from Syria. They don't have Geneva Convention-level protection because Turkey is a geographic exception. But they have some sort of refugee rights that are temporal, so they can be taken away at any point.

They're always living under the threat of deportation which is “voluntary” but often isn't. And so I took this term to describe the general feeling that you get in Istanbul. There's not a lot of future planning. Thirty percent of Turkey's youth are not in NEET’s (not in education, employment or training). So they're just essentially sitting ducks. 

Turkey, and particularly Istanbul, is overdue for a massive earthquake that would essentially decimate the entire city. It would be equivalent to detonating thousands of nuclear bombs, the force that seismologists are projecting. So, at multiple levels, there seems to be this sense that everything is so temporary. You're sitting on a house of cards, basically.

“For many, existential temporality is sharpened at the blade of austerity capitalism and state-sanctioned violence.”

The government switches its policies with complete flippancy. As I said, you can be a person who's meeting their friend at the park and then you can be spending two months in prison. So it's like this existential temporality that all young people face, which is this sort of changing world that we're seeing, these things looming on the horizon of environmental changes and electing presidents that we don't think resonate with our goals or visions of the future in our generation.

This is heightened in so many levels in Istanbul and in Turkey in particular. President Erdogan is what it would look like if President Trump was an incumbent for twenty years. That's essentially what happened. Turkey is twenty years ahead of the United States in terms of what that kind of leadership does to a population and does to their long-term planning in terms of their willingness to participate in the economy and their willingness to participate in institutions such as higher education.

And as I said, this existential temporality is common to everyone, But, in Turkey, it's sharpened at the blade of austerity, capitalism, and state-sanctioned violence. Because when you're both unsure that you can get a meal on your table that night, and also whether or not you are even safe in your own apartment, it becomes an exacerbation of this sense of temporariness. That really hinders engagement and resistance to a certain point because people are just so fed up with the changes that they've been seeing over time and the clear unwillingness of the incumbent government to release power. 

Even though there have been other challengers, [the AKP] has a very strong grip through manipulation of the electoral system, including changing it into a presidency rather than a parliamentary system. That has been perpetuating their rule. That's specific to Turkey and also many other countries that have similar relationships with the government and the economy.

I guess we can end with, “How has this experience affected your research? Are you more wary now? Are you kind of emboldened?” It takes a lot of courage to talk about it publicly. And as someone who lives in Berlin, I live in a liberal society, I feel very comfortable with my free speech guarantees here. But for you, it's much more tenuous. 

Yeah, I do think it's very scary. And I would like to get both him and myself out of the country as soon as possible after he is released because I don't think, especially after this experience, that he would ever feel safe there again. And he hasn't felt safe, actually, for quite some time. This has been the final straw. But I, for instance, was working on an article in April for The Nation about Ekrem Imamoglu who is a very famous dissident leader of the democratic dissent to Erdogan.

He was going to be the presidential nominee for the CHP (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, or Republican People's Party) and he was arrested in March. And then the AKP started arresting tons of opposition mayors. And then they started arresting academics and I started to see the circle close in on me and it really was terrifying. I mean, in my apartment, you can hear police sirens everywhere. I'm constantly wary of being recognized for my work, which is why I promote things that are relatively distant from myself.

“This has been the final straw.”

But I will say that being an American is a privilege here. I would be evacuated by the US Embassy probably immediately if something did happen whereas he, for instance, doesn't have that privilege. I feel relatively safe in terms of knowing that I won't be kept in prison, I'll just be deported, but it's still relevant in terms of how many fellow academics I'm seeing who are publishing work that's not quite so different from mine and then facing these really harrowing circumstances and police confrontations.

So I will say that the climate right now for many researchers has been a mass exodus from Turkey because of these safety issues which are definitely a consideration for myself. I really like Istanbul and I would have liked to stay there for a few years. But, in this current climate, I don't think that's wise.

Rebecca Eneyni is the GLODEM Center’s Fulbright Visiting Researcher at Koç University. She holds a joint Bachelor of Science in Economics and Bachelor of Arts in History from Duke University with a certificate in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. She is a recipient of the Massachusetts state-certified Seal of Biliteracy in Spanish and English and received the US Department of Education’s FLAS grant for the study of Arabic language in Amman, Jordan. She is a current graduate student at Koç University in the Department of Political Science and International Relations. Her research focuses on policy advisory systems in autocracies with special reference to the externalization of policy advice.