We were chatting and drinking coffee at a cafe with family friends Robert and Nenke. When the topic of my parents came up, I was overcome with emotion. So many memories came flooding back. My father passed away in January 2015. He had been married to my mother for 57 years. My siblings and I buried him. I laid him in his grave. I was the last person to touch him.

At that time, the Turkish judiciary was relatively free. It was not completely controlled by the Erdoğan regime. There were journalists who wrote and spoke freely. There were judges who did not make decisions based on political instructions. At the end of 2013, the Turkish judiciary launched a corruption investigation into several government ministers.

Erdoğan, then Prime Minister, responded by putting political pressure on the judiciary to suppress the matter. It wasn’t the individuals alleged to be involved in the corruption who were imprisoned, but the judges, prosecutors, and police officers who investigated it. This was because recordings of Erdoğan’s phone calls with his son had led to widespread media coverage of his own involvement in corruption. Indeed, newspapers and television channels that had reported the corruption allegations were shut down, and hundreds of journalists were imprisoned.

Now, let’s get to my side of the story…

From that date on, the political process in Turkey rapidly devolved into a dictatorship. Pressure on opposition groups intensified. I was one of the first victims. In early 2014, I was fired from my position at the university where I also served as acting rector, and from the newspaper where I had been a columnist for many years. I was one of the most widely read columnists in Turkey. The newspaper’s management made this clear to me and even issued a report demonstrating this. This was one reason I was targeted by the regime.

I couldn’t bring myself to tell my elderly father that I had been fired from all my jobs under government pressure. When the country became uninhabitable for dissident journalists, intellectuals, artists, and academics deemed anti-Erdoğan, I left Turkey for the US at the end of 2015.

Since I couldn’t return to my country, my mother and I frequently video chatted. Every time we spoke, she’d ask, “When are you coming back?” To keep her from getting upset, I’d have to reply, “Soon.” When my mother passed away on October 2, 2017, I couldn’t go to Turkey to attend her funeral because, as a journalist, I was worried I’d be arrested.

Indeed, my concerns were proven correct. On the morning of my mother’s funeral, government agents raided and ransacked my home in Istanbul. They did this on the premise that I might secretly come to Turkey and attend her funeral. Indeed, exactly a year before my mother’s death, government-affiliated forces had attacked my home with sledgehammers and demolished part of it.

My mother wanted to be buried next to her husband (my father), because her mother, who died in 1957, was also buried there. When we buried my father, who passed away in 2015, we left a space between the graves of my mother’s mother and her husband. When my mother was buried there, her grave would be between her mother and her husband. Moreover, right next to that grave was the grave of my mother’s first son, Ibrahim, who died when he was one year old. In fact, two of my mother’s brothers, who died in childhood, were also right there.

Why am I telling you this?

I was a well-known figure in my country as a journalist and academic. For years, I hosted popular political and current affairs talk shows on television. When I saw that Erdoğan was moving the country towards dictatorship, I was one of the first prominent figures to speak out against him. I voiced my views on this matter in my commentaries on television programs, newspaper articles, and academic publications. In fact, I was detained on April 29, 2015, while traveling on a ferry, for a speech I made on television criticizing the government.

As the political landscape in Turkey rapidly changed, regime elements began to incite and target their own supporters against those who oppose Erdoğan. Even Erdoğan supporters here secretly filmed me and provided me to the Turkish intelligence service and pro-government media.

My mother was one of the people they vented their anger towards. They wanted to punish her for being Osman Ozsoy’s mother. The title of this article was chosen precisely for this reason. Indeed, when my mother passed away, they refused to allow her to be buried next to her husband, mother, and son. The headman of the village where the cemetery is located said that Erdoğan supporters were against this. The only reason was that they wanted to punish my mother because I was anti-Erdoğan. My mother’s only crime was that she was my mother. They also vandalized my father’s grave several times.

I’d never brought up the acts of violence against my parents’ graves before. When Robert and Nenke had coffee and these issues came up, Nenke said; “This is exactly what fascism is.”

We were seeing that Turkey was rapidly heading towards dictatorship and that various examples of genocide were taking place, but we had not determined that these actions were also a form of Fascism.

Because no one expected Turkey, a European country, to drift so rapidly away from democracy. Moreover, the country’s democratic decline continues apace. Turkey has the highest number of journalists imprisoned in the world. Due to corruption and mismanagement, it also has the highest inflation and interest rates. It tops the list of corruption indices and opaque countries. More than a thousand babies are imprisoned, along with their mothers. Bedridden patients are imprisoned. Their only crime is their opposition to Erdoğan.

Thirty years ago, I was the first scholar in Turkey to publish the most comprehensive academic publication on German dictator Hitler, providing detailed coverage in my books. While publishing those publications, we never imagined that Turkey would one day find itself in the same situation. Now I understand that Turkey’s democracy and universal human rights were buried in the empty grave next to her husband, son, and mother, where we couldn’t bury my mother.

By Prof. Dr. Osman OZSOY