Interviewing Demirtaş
In April 2023, I had the good fortune to interview Selahattin Demirtaş, short story writer, novelist and jailed Kurdish politician. But why did I discover his work so late?
Last April, I visited a bookstore in Istanbul and saw book towers at the entrance. DAD, a new short story collection by Selahattin Demirtaş, was an instant bestseller and decorated every bookstore of the city. DAD was written behind bars, as its author, a Kurdish politician, has been jailed since 2016. Picking up a copy, I realized I didn’t read Demirtaş before. During the past half decade, he published three short story collections and a novel. Despite voting for him in the 2014 presidential elections, I didn’t buy his books. Why?
I remembered something I read about him years ago on social media. The piece claimed that Dawn (Seher), Demirtaş’s debut from 2017, was named after a militant who staged a suicide attack in March 2016 in Ankara that killed 37 people and injured 125. Was this claim true? I decided to buy Demirtaş’s books and find out.
Pro-government media made up the claims. Seher had nothing to do with the suicide bomber and yet I remembered that piece of fake news years later.
Infuriated to see yet another post-truth propaganda campaign of Erdoğan’s cronies in the Turkish media, I decided to interview Demirtaş and contacted him via his press team. He answered my questions in the course of two days in April, when he was tried in court for his alleged role in the 2014 Kobanî protests. The prosecutor had just asked for aggravated life imprisonment for him. My questions were delivered to Demirtaş during the court proceedings.
Hopes for political change were high in Spring 2023 and some predicted Demirtaş might be freed from the politically motivated court case. This didn’t turn out to be the case. Three months later, weeks after Demirtaş announced his exit from politics, our interview is out in the Summer 2023 issue of Index on Censorship.
You can read the first part of my interview with Demirtaş here, and the second part from here.
Before we part, just a reminder: don’t believe stuff you read on Turkey’s dissidents in the Turkish press. And realize how effectively the Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdoğan uses such propaganda.
Until next time,
—Kaya
