An Artist of the Floating World is an examination of the turmoil in postwar Japan, seen through the eyes of a man who is rejected by the future and who chooses to reject his own past. This served as an excellent metaphor for my book: peace with the Kurds is rejected by the future, and they (the Kurds) and we (all those who have wanted to resolve the conflict through compromise and in human dignity) have chosen to reject the past. That rejected past was shaped by the war with the Kurds.
Yet, Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds could never have been written, at least in its current form, if there had been no coup attempt in Turkey on the night of July 15, 2016. The coup found me in Stockholm where I was busy with my five-month residency at the Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies. Two months later I was to begin my one-year residence at the Middle East Centre of St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. Prof. Eugene Rogan, director of the Centre and a brilliant historian of the Modern Middle East and late Ottoman period, had sponsored my participation. I had encountered Eugene Rogan’s name for the first time in 2010 while visiting Blackwell’s, the legendary bookshop in Oxford. It was inscribed over a brick-thick volume entitled The Arabs sitting solidly on the shelf. The publication was brand new and I was fascinated by a quick glance through its seemingly endless pages. I purchased it without any hesitation. A few years later what, for some, would be his magnum opus, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, 1914–1920 was fresh on the market. Probably I was lucky enough to be one of its earliest readers when by mere coincidence I discovered it on its first day in Berlin’s famous bookshop Dussmann das Kulturkaufhaus, in 2015. I avidly consumed it over a couple of hours.
With this background, I could not have been happier when I received an invitation from Eugene Rogan to deliver a talk on Turkey’s Kurdish question in October 2015. I was exhilarated speaking at the new auditorium of St Antony’s, a project newly completed by the renowned Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. What was more important though was getting to know Eugene Rogan in person and becoming good friends with him.
A few days after my conference at the University of Oxford, in Turkey’s re-run elections President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his party the AKP succeeded in reversing the results of the elections held on June 7, 2015. The results had denied single-party rule for the AKP and thus the constitutional amendments for the executive presidency, which would signify Turkey’s drift to authoritarian rule under Erdoğan. Turkey’s move from a relatively democratic political climate toward a twilight zone with gloomy prospects could be anticipated. The day after the elections, I received an e-mail message from Eugene Rogan. Its ending was brief and simple: “After this election result, you might want to seek asylum in Oxford.”
As if confirming his worries about me, the week after the elections, I received a notice informing me that President Erdoğan was suing me for my six op-ed pieces published in July and August 2015 on the daily Radikal where I was the senior columnist. I was accused of “insulting the President” and, according to Turkish Penal Code, if convicted I could serve six years in prison. Each one of the articles that allegedly “insulted the President” was critical of Erdoğan’s termination of the Kurdish peace process and the resumption of war.
I decided to take “intellectual refuge” for a while. Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies was interested in providing visiting scholar status for me, and I committed myself to do research and write a book on “Turkey’s failed Kurdish peace processes.” I had, after all, been actively involved in those processes over a long period, and I felt an obligation to put into print Turkey’s dismal experience with an issue, which indeed had long since become my lifetime commitment.
Oxford would follow Stockholm. I would undertake a mission as well. With the endowment provided for that purpose, I would establish the Jalal Talabani Programme for Kurdish Studies, as one of the sub-units of the Middle East Centre. It would be a tribute to Jalal Talabani, the former President of Iraq, an old and very dear personal friend of mine who was incapacitated because of a stroke in December 2012. He sadly remained paralyzed, able to see with only one eye, and had lost his faculty of speech. I visited him in Suleymaniyah, in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, and told him about the project. Although unable to talk, he could follow and understand whatever was told him, and I noted the tear in his good eye.
I visited Oxford several times for these arrangements. Eugene Rogan introduced me to internationally acclaimed historians who were associated with St Antony’s, Avi Shlaim and Norman Davies, whose names I held in high esteem. Avi Shlaim was considered a leading figure among Israel’s New Historians, the revisionist group that made a revolutionary impact on the historiography of the Palestine question, challenging the traditional versions of Israeli history and turning the official Israeli narrative upside down. Talking with Avi Shlaim and Eugene Rogan in St Antony’s Middle East Centre about its founder, the legendary Albert Hourani, gave me the feeling that becoming an Antonian would be the crown of my decades-old career concerning the Middle East.
Besides establishing the Jalal Talabani Programme for Kurdish Studies at the Middle East Centre of St Antony, I pledged to Eugene Rogan to write a book about “Turkey’s Failed Kurdish Peace Processes.”
In March 2016, the owner of Radikal, Turkey’s leading opinion paper and the only surviving liberal voice of Turkish media, finally pulled the plug as a concession to President Erdoğan. For the broader interests of the publishing group that were running other businesses, putting Radikal out of business was a gesture addressed to Erdoğan. Thus, critical views against the government would be denied a voice and its senior columnist—me—would be silenced.
My forty-year professional journalistic life had come to an end. Soon after, I arrived in the tranquility of Stockholm bearing the title “Distinguished Visiting Scholar” at the Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies. In the congenial atmosphere I enjoyed at the Institute—and as I tried to adapt to the Scandinavian tranquil rhythm which is almost the total opposite of the nervous vibrancy of my homeland—I was taking the preliminary steps in my research on “Turkey’s Failed Peace Processes.”
The coup in my homeland found me the very hour I arrived back at my temporary apartment in Stockholm, from Vienna where I had been working for two days. I had been taking notes on some confidential documents concerning secret talks between Turkish officials and PKK representatives that were kept by a person who had been involved. That was an essential part of my research.
Connecting to the internet, I could not believe what I saw on my screen: putting up checkpoints on the Bosphorus Bridge, military columns had seized control from the Asian side to the European side of İstanbul. There was a military coup underway, and it had started only ten, fifteen minutes ago! This was not a joke. It was real.
With over half a century of experience of Turkish military coups, I did not find this one convincing at all. It was real, but not convincing; it looked too amateurish, as if designed to fail from the very beginning. My hunch was that the coup was doomed to failure and the repercussions would be very severe—for my country and, more importantly, for its people.
I spent a large part of my adult life being very hostile to the repeated coups and also any other kind of military intervention in civilian politics. It is almost public knowledge in Turkey that the military establishment and I have been at odds most of the time.
Therefore, it was only natural that I would wish for the failure of the coup attempt on that Friday night, July 15. It eventually did fail—and my worries were confirmed with the relentless crackdown targeting hundreds if not thousands of people who had nothing to do with the coup, including my fellow journalists, academicians, and colleagues.
Less than a week after the failed coup, Turkey suspended the European Convention on Human Rights and declared a state of emergency.
There could be no serious academic life
