Free Enlightenment by Maureen Freely Page A

have related here as the first chapter in a yet to unfold story – to ignore the history – is to miss the point. Above all, it is to misunderstand what it means to live in a country ruled by never-named outside interests, where thought is still a crime, where truth-telling has long been a prisonable – and life-threatening – offence. Where the most dangerous thing that any journalist can ever do is to suggest out loud what all Turks acknowledge in whispers – that this is a democracy in name only. That it is ruled by a network of faceless entities known as the “deep state”.
    The thing to know about Sinan Sinanoğlu – and the same holds for most of his friends, and indeed, his entire generation – is that he has never controlled his own destiny. All his life, he has been fought over, manipulated, lied about, jealously guarded, framed. All his life, he has been feared – for the very thing that has landed him in prison. He is feared because of the very power he’s never been allowed to exercise – the power that comes from being conversant with more than one system of thought, from being able to travel between and draw from cultures that pretend to be in opposition to each other. To those who have seen fit to incarcerate him, Sinan Sinanoğlu bears all the tell-tale signs of a double agent. Such a pity, then, that no one’s thought to look more closely at the three or four men most likely to have had a hand in his entrapment.
    At least two of them were, by their own admission, working for intelligence networks in Turkey in 1971, when parties unknown had Sinan and several others framed for a murder that was later established never to have happened. By the time the truth came out, two of those falsely accused young innocents had spent a decade each in hiding and three had served time in prison. One nearly died after jumping out of a fourth floor window during what has been euphemistically described as an ‘interrogation.’ Though all were fortunate enough to return to fruitful and reasonably peaceful lives, all have done so more quietly than they might have done had they not endured those years of torture and terror.
    All, that is, except for Sinan Sinanoğlu, who with each new film has asked bolder questions. And never has he been so bold as in My Cold War , when he turned his camera on his own childhood.
    As his case continues, we should, of course, devote our first efforts to his prompt release. But we should also be looking at the would-be fathers who have always hovered over him. Why is his silence so important to them? As Cicero might have put it, cui bono ?’
    I filed these words on a Friday evening. They came out in England that Sunday, at which point anyone who might have wanted to read them in Turkey (or anywhere else in the world, for that matter) could have done so on the net. That Monday, my piece appeared in translationin three Turkish newspapers. It appeared in three more on Tuesday, and on the same day there was quite rabid coverage of the case and my take on it in various columns. Some went so far as to denounce Sinan as a traitor and Jeannie as a missionary who had come to Turkey to ‘complete the dream first hatched in the Treaty of Sevres, namely to destroy the Turkish nation and parcel it out to the powers of the West.’ I was denounced as a fifth columnist, a meddling human rights campaigner, and an agent provocateur. And how dare I suggest there was such a thing as a deep state? None of this particularly concerned me, nor did it seem to concern Suna when we met to discuss them (though she told me I’d been an idiot to mention the deep state), and any colleague familiar with the Turkish press will back me up on this, I’m sure. It’s routine for Turkish papers to cover stories about Turkey in the Western press, and when they do, the lesser papers routinely twist the original words to suit whatever the editor’s agenda happens to be that day. The misleading headlines are not,