(Written on January 11, 2020)
*This article is about the story of a professor and his experiences after the coup attempt of 2015 in Turkey. Title poem "Dura dura bir sel oldum erenler": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FM4kUWfRd8
My name is Zekeriya Aktürk. I was born in a village in Trabzon. You have to drive 30 km up the mountains to reach our place. My father was an expatriate. He worked in Germany for 16 years.
When I was just 10, my dear mom died in a traffic accident. From then on, I moved to Germany to my brother and his family. I studied there in secondary and high school. Most of my grades in the school were “Gut” and “sehr gut”.
I was studying hard. I knew that I had to… There was no fortune in my village from the perspective of schooling. Before me, there were just a few people in our town, who earned a license degree...
In 1984, my family decided to move back to Turkey. Similar to many other expatriates, when we were reaching the border of Turkey at Kapikule, we were exiting the cars and kissing the earth. Patriotism… How could I know that one day I will be stigmatized as a terrorist...
As you probably figured out, I am coming from a classical Turkish family with conservative cultural values. I studied/I was supported, and finally got an MD degree from Marmara University.
I could describe myself as a person full of love for his nation and people. I served both in the east of Turkey, as well as the west. I served in Şenkaya, an eastern district of Turkey during a time of dense terror attacks.
During the 1999 earthquake, I was in Kocaeli. Although I was assigned to my post as an assistant professor, I stayed there for another month and served the victims of the disaster.
Then, I joined the academic life in Edirne. There I served for seven years.
I can proudly say that my life if full of success. I am among the first professors of family medicine in Turkey. Turkish is my mother tongue. Additionally, I speak English, German, and Arabic.
For four years, I was employed at the Saudi Ministry of Health as a consultant. In 2009, we again started to miss our homeland and decided to move back. This time, it was my dear wife, who pushed for the change.
We settled in Erzurum. I started to work at Atatürk University. Also there, I made a lot of contributions. We developed the first student exchange automation system and called it the “World Web of Mevlana.” It was an excellent opportunity for internationalization. We were conducting regular post-graduate courses for Kazakh students. I was the dean of the school of pharmacy for one year. I contributed to many projects concerning education and curriculum development. I was the department chair of both family medicine as well as biostatistics, where I contributed to the training of many students and academic staff. I organized scientific student congresses. Three of them were done during my time. Please compare the time before and after me.
The number of my articles, conference proceedings, and books surpass 400. Also, I own a YouTube channel with more than 500 educational video recordings. I do not know any other scholar in Turkey with a similar contribution to the same field... Who else has a similar service in Turkey, I do not know...
I have memberships to many international organizations. Being one of the co-founders of the organization, I represented Turkey in EQuiP for many years.
In 2015, we decided to move to Izmir. I was employed by Sifa University, which was an institution with many achievements. Everything was looking fine for us. We had our dream house and dream city. However, “We make our own plans, but the Lord decides where we will go.”
There was this unfortunate coup attempt; the university was shut down by the government, and I was unemployed.
I started to search for employment opportunities abroad because the institutions in Turkey were even not responding to my queries. I should mention that, in the past, they were sending their chauffeurs to invite me for conferences…
Finally, I had a position as a consultant in Medinah. The monthly salary was 15000 US Dollars. It was a big project with the possible contributions of many other Turkish scholars.
On September 2, 2016, while I was on my way to leave the country, I was taken under custody and arrested. I was kept in prison for 14 months and a week.
Too late, I realized that stone is hard, water can suffocate, fire can burn...
Of course, my values went upside down. It was a devastating trauma for me. Indescribable. You may have an opinion if I tell you that I lured for being dead.
First, I thought they are joking. My own landspeople, the country I loved and was ready to die for, could not do this to me. I was the one who carried wounded soldiers from a battlefield in Senkaya… I was the guy who sold all the assets of his wife to represent the country abroad… How could this happen??
However, the reality is that plain people from rural Anatolia, who dug their way in academic life, bureaucracy, or trade were extinguished. The majority of the nation, on the other hand, have applauded this massacre or at least overlooked it.
You see, I think we've been sacrificed for simple interests like home, car, road, positions, and money. Hundreds of thousands of educated people like me have been eliminated.
Now, I've been semi-free since two years. I earn my living by doing translation and giving academic counseling on the internet on the balcony of my house.
I'm waiting for the process to be completed.
If I am allowed to live the rest of my life as a free man, I must, of course, migrate to another country. When my passport and freedom of travel are returned, I'm thinking of leaving the “Great Turkish nation” on their own devices, and not disturbing them anymore with my presence.
My value perceptions are significantly modified. Many things I considered right in the past prove to be wrong. In the process, I was labeled even by some of my relatives. Some friends didn't call or ask. Some others also deleted me from their social media accounts. Some scientific boards of the journals and associations removed my name from their lists... The Turkish Association for Family Medicine stopped publishing my book composed of 1000 pages, a project where >60 scholars had contributed...
I ask myself: What is the definition of sacred? We have to revise our perceptions of the divine. We must stop worshiping the state, race, power, and money, and be a servant of the Lord. But, first of all, you have to be human. We could not manage to become real human beings.
My French colleague Marc Jamoulle shared my story in his presentation. My German colleagues, my Saudia friends, my teacher Deborah from the United States, colleagues and friends from all over the world have shared their concerns.
I explained my condition to the Scholar at Risk. They have shown interest not comparable to anyone from Turkey. On the other hand, I observe that the Human Rights Association in Turkey is striving to support the victims of this purge.
These events have revealed people who are sensitive to human rights, animal rights, as well as the environment. My children are far more sensitive to the rights of the oppressed than I am. The saying “The oppressed can’t be discriminated by their beliefs, language, or color” is becoming true in the practices of these people.
Many persons sensitive to human rights gather under the umbrella of the KHK platforms to work together. In the old Turkey, it could not be imagined that these people could collaborate in a project. I consider these people and subsequent generations as hope for global peace.
I invite you to shoot a video of yours. If you think you're not contaminated with dirt, nepotism, bribery, theft, slander, persecution, then, come and share your story. In the end, maybe we will not only be a society crying to their own dead but also learn to care for others.
Sometimes I share the feeling in the poem of Mahsuni Serif, who says, “I stayed so long idle; maybe it’s time to gush out”:
Yes, after everything I've been through, my life has gone upside down. But who knows, maybe it better than before. Let's wait and see. Don't lose hope!
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