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NY Times, April 11, 2020
From Prominent Turkish Philanthropist to Political Prisoner
By Carlotta Gall
ISTANBUL — During a tumultuous day in court in February, the Turkish
businessman and philanthropist Osman Kavala was unexpectedly acquitted
of trying to overthrow the government and then rearrested before he
could walk free.
He described it as the best day of his life.
“We were acquitted,” he told his lawyers, referring to the eight others
tried with him.
Never mind that the two years he had already spent in solitary
confinement had been extended indefinitely — this time on specious
charges of supporting a 2016 coup. He was happy that at least in one
case, he and 15 others had been given the chance to show that the
original charges against them were baseless.
“Nothing can affect that composure and attitude,” Murat Celikkan, a
campaigning journalist and longtime friend and colleague, said of Mr.
Kavala. “I would be furious, but in all the procedures he never raised
his voice once.”
Mr. Kavala has become the most prominent political prisoner in Turkey,
and as he himself ruefully acknowledged after his rearrest, his case is
a prime example of the state of injustice in Turkey today under
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
His case is just one of half a million prosecutions underway amid a
government crackdown since an attempted coup in 2016, but it is one of
the most confounding.
Best known for his good deeds, he has been variously accused of
espionage, links to terrorist groups and trying to overthrow the
government. Even seasoned lawyers, well used to decades of political
trials in Turkey, have described the various charges against him as
“ridiculous.”
Mr. Kavala, 63, grew up and lives in Istanbul. He comes from a family of
tobacco traders who moved from the town of Kavala in northern Greece to
Istanbul in the 1920s as part of the population exchange between the two
countries after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
He studied management at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara
and economics at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. He
went on to study for his doctorate at The New School for Social Research
in New York, but broke off his studies when his father died in 1982.
At 26, he returned to Istanbul and took over the Kavala Group of
companies. In 1988 he married Ayse Bugra, a social scientist.
He soon began diversifying the family business, following his own
interests. He co-founded the Iletisim Publishing Company, which became
an important vehicle for democratic ideas at a time, after the military
coup of 1980, when there was a dearth of democratic institutions in the
country.
He became increasingly interested in environmental issues and civic
rights. He abandoned a hotel development in southern Turkey after
watching the movie “Turtle Diary” and learning that the beach was an
important nesting site for turtles.
“He did it very easily,” Ms. Bugra recounted in a recent interview.
“There was no hesitation.” He co-founded an environmental organization,
TEMA, among others.
The most troubling issue in Turkey from the late 1980s was the conflict
in the southeastern part of the country between the Turkish army and
Kurdish separatists, which degenerated into a brutal ethnic conflict
against the Kurdish population. When the armed conflict ended a decade
later, Mr. Kavala began the work that has become his lasting legacy.
“We started talking about the healing powers of art and culture,” Ms.
Bugra said, “and he started thinking about taking culture to different
parts of Turkey.”
That idea grew into the founding of Anadolu Kultur, an organization that
supports arts and cultural collaboration, and takes exhibitions and
performances all around the country.
He supported an arts space in Diyarbakir, the biggest Kurdish city in
the southeast; cultural memory projects for Yazidis, Kurds, Armenians
and other minorities; and a program to encourage a normalization of
relations between Turkey and Armenia.
In between came a 1999 earthquake that killed 17,000 people and had a
galvanizing effect on Turkish society. Humanitarian and civic
organizations took off.
“That was an important moment for the country as a whole,” Ms. Bugra
said. “That was the first time we saw a civil society mobilization. It
was something spontaneous.”
Mr. Kavala began building temporary housing. And he became one of the
leading philanthropists in the country, well known among embassies and
international donors, and an energetic supporter of civic and human
rights groups.
Among the many organizations he helped found was the Open Society
Foundation in Turkey, the organization created by the Hungarian-born
billionaire George Soros to support democracy and transparency around
the world.
The nonprofit sector flourished during Mr. Erdogan’s first decade in
power from 2002, as Turkey was pursuing peace with the Kurds and
instituting reforms to further its accession to the European Union.
The arrival of more than three million refugees fleeing the war in Syria
from 2011 was another milestone in her husband’s life, Ms. Bugra said.
He was visiting the southern city of Gaziantep, working on a project for
Syrian refugees in October 2017, when he was detained. Police boarded
his plane in Istanbul and led him off before passengers were allowed to
disembark.
What has taxed Mr. Kavala and his friends the most in the 29 months
since his incarceration is the question of why he has been singled out
so harshly.
The answer may be simply: everything he stands for.
He represents the leftist-leaning, secular elite, which in Turkey’s
polarized society is the opposite of the president and his supporters.
They are from religiously conservative, Islamist circles that were long
sidelined from power.
“Osman represents another culture,” said Asena Gunal, who runs his
flagship organization, Anadolu Kultur. “Someone who is open, cultured,
who speaks English, can talk to foreigners, active in society. Something
they see as dangerous.”
As he spent 16 months in detention without knowing the charges against
him, the pro-government news media and even Mr. Erdogan himself accused
him of nefarious connections, including being part of a so-called Jewish
conspiracy led by Mr. Soros.
Some analysts say his work with Armenians and Kurds is hated by elements
in Turkey’s security establishment. Others have described him as victim
of an internal power struggle in Mr. Erdogan’s cabinet.
“It’s really hard to see people talking about him who don’t know him,”
Ms. Gunal said. “He is a nice person trying to be nice to people.”
The indictment, when it was finally revealed, charged him with trying to
overthrow the government by financing and organizing protests in 2013
that began as an occupy movement of Gezi Park in Istanbul’s Taksim
Square to prevent the construction of a shopping mall.
Mr. Erdogan, who has grown increasingly authoritarian, insists the
protests were not a spontaneous social movement, as they were widely
seen at the time, but an effort to oust him from power.
“This is not an innocent uprising,” he told his parliamentary group the
day after Mr. Kavala’s rearrest. “Behind the curtain there are those
Soros-like types who meddle in some countries.”
He added that he had thwarted a “maneuver” to have Mr. Kavala released.
Interpreting the president’s comment, Mr. Celikkan, Mr. Kavala’s friend
and colleague, said it did not bode well for Mr. Kavala. “Unless the
president leaves office, dies or changes his mind, he is going to stay
in prison forever,” he said.
Mr. Kavala sees his case as driven by politics — in other words, Mr.
Erdogan’s desire to stay in power.
In answers to questions sent to him in jail through his lawyers, he said
judges and prosecutors were acting in line with the political discourse.
“As a result of this, legal norms are being eroded and many people are
in prison unfairly,” he wrote.
“As I am the lead actor in the fiction of the indictment and also the
only arrested defendant of the case, I believe my situation is seen as a
striking example of punishment for political reasons,” he wrote.
The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg found in December that
the Turkish courts had held him without reasonable cause.
“His detention was intended to punish him as a critic of the
Government,” the court concluded in a statement, “to reduce him to
silence as an NGO activist and human-rights defender, to dissuade others
from engaging in such activities and to paralyze civil society in the
country.”
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