It is important to understand that the 1980 military coup in Turkey was preceded by two years of terrorism, which had piled up some five thousand dead. At times, as many as twenty people a day were killed, and by all accounts the country appeared to be on the verge of civil war. Justification for the military takeover rests on this fact, which no one seems to deny. But some observers, including Suleyman Demirel, the prime minister at the time of the coup, find it suspicious that although seemingly helpless to curb the violence for two years, the military brought an amazing peace within a matter of weeks after taking power. In Demirel’s view, the generals deliberately allowed the chaos to expand until their intervention would be gratefully accepted. Support for the military government is still based on fears that the violence will return.
A former high-level government official told us that there are currently about two thousand political prisoners in Turkey. In addition, seven thousand people are said to have been arrested as terrorists; most of them are under the age of twenty-four, and some are as young as sixteen. Many of these young people were picked up on the street for scrawling slogans on walls or arrested for harboring others in their homes. It is generally believed that about forty-eight “terrorists” have been hanged and that seventy more are awaiting execution.
The Turkish Constitution permits the police under martial law to detain a citizen for forty-five days without notifying his family or lawyers, and most instances of torture take place during that time. We met a respected Turkish publisher who had been arrested with his brother and had seen him beaten to death. In spite of his anguish as he related the details, he insisted on conveying the horror to us step by step. He told how he and his brother had been put in a van and, on their way to the prison, had been struck repeatedly by four guards. He believed he had survived because he had been handcuffed with his arms in front of him, allowing him to use them to protect his head. His brother’s hands were cuffed behind his back, so he was helpless. When they arrived at the jail, the guards pulled them out and kicked his brother as he lay on the ground until he stopped moving.
Because of his prestige, the publisher was able to sue the police for assault. He won the case, but the four guards were sentenced to a few years in jail. Their superiors, who had ordered the arrests, were not mentioned in the proceedings.
We had looked forward to meeting U.S. ambassador Robert Strausz-Hupe, if only to hear the official U.S. view on the situation in Turkey. The dinner took place the day after we spent a deeply moving evening with the fiancée of Aly Taygun, a young director whose innovative work had created much excitement at Yale University’s drama school a couple of years ago, and the young wife of a painter who, like Taygun, is serving an eight-year jail sentence for his membership in the Turkish Peace Association. The second woman’s hope that we might help her husband in some way prompted her to show us several sepia drawings he had handed her during the five-minute visits she is permitted every two weeks. The drawings, mostly portraits of her, were packed with an almost palpable sensuous power.
When I found myself momentarily alone with the ambassador, I immediately began telling him about the imprisoned artist and his wife. To my surprise and pleasure, he was at once caught up in the story. He wanted to know their names, implying he would inquire about them. It seemed a good beginning. The ambassador, a spry, diminutive man in his eighties, is famous for his absolute deference to the Turkish military, with whom he has completely identified American interests. All I knew about him was that he had worked as a campaign adviser to Barry Goldwater. I learned later that he had been a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and has been considered a leading thinker of the far right.
That night he displayed a cultivated, literary air, not at all the image of a fiercely militant right-winger. He is an Austrian, naturalized in 1938; his rosy complexion and full head of silver hair, his blue baggy eyes with their soft drooping lids, his natty gray suit and sharp intelligence all suggested Vienna and civilized coffeehouse discussions. As we moved toward the dinner table, he confided to me that there might well be a declaration of amnesty in Turkey in the near future, giving the impression of cautious liberalism. “We can’t push them too far,” he said of the military. “We don’t want to lose them.”
Taking my seat across the table from the ambassador and to the right of his wife, I thought how functional the elegance of the table was, as though to protect power by enforcing good manners and empty conversations. The image of the imprisoned painter would not go away, but could such an unpleasant thought be introduced at a dinner given by my country’s ambassador in my honor?
Harold Pinter was seated on the same side of the table as I was, half a dozen places down. The soup had hardly been served when I heard his strong baritone above the general babble and caught in it the flow of a quickened mind. On my left, Mayrose Strausz-Hupe, a beautiful woman who looks less than half her husband’s age (the daughter, she volunteered, of a Ceylonese Ford dealer), was drawing a map of her country on the tablecloth with her fingernail, showing the demarcations between the religious factions that had been tearing the country apart in the years since the British left.
As the roast veal was served, Pinter’s voice rose higher, his British diction sprouting angry ratchets. I could hear that he was engaged in a cross-table discussion with Nazli Ilicak, a widely read columnist whom we had met at the offices of her husband’s newspaper, Tercuman, some days earlier, and Frank Trinka, the American deputy chief of mission, an unsmiling, tight-bodied man, with tinted glasses and a knife-like self-assurance. I could not make out what Pinter was saying, but I could hear Ilicak and the deputy chief replying, “That’s your viewpoint. We have to see it in the round. You are only seeing part of it . . .” The ambassador, forking his veal, did not even glance in Pinter’s direction as the playwright’s voice reached the volume of an M.P. in the House of Commons. Madame Ambassador continued with her geographical drawing, maintaining an admirable aplomb. Her husband was trying to engage his neighbor in conversation, when Pinter, with open rage, shouted across the table at Ilicak, “That is an insult and was meant as an insult and I throw it back in your face!” As I learned later, she had told Pinter that although the Turks would have to remain and face the realities of their country, he could go home and put it all into a profitable play.
The ambassador quickly tapped his crystal water glass with a silver spoon and brought silence. “I wish to welcome Mr. Miller as our honored guest,” he said, and went on to extol my work in the theater. He ended with a glance around the table which came to rest only for a moment on Pinter. “This demonstrates that all viewpoints are welcome here,” he said. And then, pointing to the floor of his residence, his voice thick with emotion: “Here is democracy. Right here, and we are proud of it. Imagine this happening in a communist country!” Whereupon he thanked me for coming.
I understood that it was up to me to respond to the toast. Protocol must be observed, and the ambassador had been an engaging host. But as we sat there in the brightly lit room, an image popped into my mind: the painter’s wife staring at an empty pillow; her husband lying on his mattress hardly a mile away, with six more years of prison ahead of him, all for an offense that, had I been a Turk, I surely would have committed myself.
I began by quietly thanking the ambassador for the dinner and the welcome, at which he looked relieved. “Whatever our political differences,” I said, “we share the same faith in democracy.” The ambassador nodded appreciatively. I went on:
As democracy enhances candor, my speech being without fear, it is impossible for us to ignore what we have witnessed in Turkey. We are playwrights, and playwrights are different from poets or novelists or perhaps any other kind of writer. We deal in the concrete. . . . An actor has to be moved from point A to point B, and so you cannot act in general, only in particular. We do not know what the situation in Turkey was last year, so perhaps it is better now, as is claimed. We don’t know what it w
ill be in the future. We do know concretely what we have seen, and what we have seen has no tangency with any democratic system in Western Europe or the United States. I wrote in The Crucible about people who were jailed and executed not for their actions but for what they were alleged to be thinking. So it is here; you have hundreds in jail for their alleged thoughts. We are told that Turkey is moving closer and closer to democracy, and that may turn out to be so, no one can say, but what it is now is a military dictatorship with certain merciless and brutal features. We are helping Turkey, and I am not saying we should not; but the real strength of a state in the last analysis is the support of her people, and the question is whether the United States is inadvertently helping to alienate the people by siding so completely with those who have deprived them of their elementary rights. Not a single action is alleged against the hundreds of Peace Association people in prison.
As I continued, I thought I saw the eyes of the ambassador glaze with astonishment or horror. But at the same time, he seemed to be listening to a kind of news: not political news, for he knew better than I did the state of affairs there, but news of an emotion, an outrage. After twenty minutes I ended my speech:
There isn’t a Western lawyer who could come to this country and see what is happening in these military courts who would not groan with despair. The American part here ought to be the holding up of democratic norms, if only as a goal, instead of justifying their destruction as the only defense against chaos.
The ambassador turned, gazed at the faces around the silent table and asked Erdal Inonu, son of a former president and prime minister and head of a political party, if he would respond to my remarks. Inonu, sixty, balding and squinting, a man with a gentle face and long hands which he softly clasped above the table, said that in general he could not help agreeing with my views and wanted to add his welcome to that of the ambassador. I could hardly believe this apparent victory. The ambassador gestured toward Ilicak; she simply shook her head, her eyes rounded in shock. A bearded journalist was then invited to comment; he chose simply to rub his hands together, smile and welcome me to Turkey (though Pinter later revealed that this man had exchanged approving glances with him while I was speaking). And so, with no more takers, we all rose, as the ambassador said something to the effect that it had been a fascinating dinner. Before I could stop myself, I added, “This is one you won’t forget soon,” to which the ambassador responded with an uncertain smile.
The company adjourned to the sitting room for coffee, and I sought out the deputy chief, sensing that he occupied the center of power in the place. But I had hardly sat down when once again I heard the awesome baritone of Harold Pinter. Near the entry hall, Pinter was just turning away from the ambassador, who, half his size, was shouting something and walking abruptly toward an astonished guest. Pinter came directly to me and said proudly, “I have insulted your ambassador and have been asked to go.”
Forced to be practical by Pinter’s visible emotion, I wondered about transportation and found a guest whom we had met at a gathering of Peace Association supporters. He was happy to share his car, but the French ambassador intervened, at the risk of offending Strausz-Hupe, his colleague and friend, and offered to drive us to his residence. On the way out to the black Peugeot, Pinter explained that the ambassador had remarked that there can always be a lot of opinions about anything, and he had replied, “Not if you’ve got an electric wire hooked to your genitals.” The ambassador had stiffened and snapped, “Sir, you are a guest in my house!” Whereupon Pinter had concluded he had been thrown out. Pinter was brimming with admiration for my peroration, as I was for his righteous indignation, without which I could not have launched my twenty-minute speech. We decided we ought to form a team that would visit American embassies around the world.
Throughout our stay we had declined interviews, promising instead to hold a press conference on our last day. It took place in the building of the Journalists’ Association in Istanbul, and was attended by twenty-five or thirty men and women and a television crew from United Press International. What we said at the press conference was more or less what we had said at the ambassador’s dinner. We understood that Turkish journalists would be forbidden to print more than scraps of such opinions, but we felt we had to speak candidly. The next day, in London, we learned that reporting about the press conference had been banned by the government and that an investigation was to be launched into the whole visit. But news of it has nevertheless penetrated the prisons, as we have indirectly learned, and has brought some hope that the world has not forgotten these people. Unhappily, Prime Minister Ozal could stand before the Washington Press Club a few weeks ago and declare there are no political prisoners in Turkey without causing a ripple in his audience. There is nothing farther away from Washington than the entire world.
What’s Wrong with This Picture? Speculations on a Homemade Greeting Card
1974
Here is a New Year’s card I recently received many months late. Like couples everywhere, this one decided to celebrate the occasion with a humorous photograph. It could have been taken in any one of a number of countries. It happens to have been made in Czechoslovakia.
The wife is wearing just the right smile for a woman standing hip-deep in water with her clothes on. It is a warm and relaxed smile. The husband, likewise, expresses the occasion with his look of grave responsibility, his walking stick and dark suit, his reassuring hand on Eda, their beloved dog.
The wife’s floppy hat and gaily printed dress and the husband’s polka-dot tie and pocket handkerchief suggest that the couple might have started off for a stroll down a Prague boulevard when, for some reason unstated, they found themselves standing in the water. One sees, in any case, that they are fundamentally law-abiding people who do not make a fuss about temporary inconvenience. Instead, the couple displays almost exhilarating confidence in the way things are.
Actually—although of course it does not show in the picture—the man and woman are within a short drive from the encampments of the Red Army, which entered their country some six years ago to protect it from its enemies, and has never left. This contributes to the calm atmosphere of the photograph, for with the Red Army so close by there is no reason to fear anything beyond the Czech borders, or, for that matter, within them.
One can see, in short, that these people live in a country blessed by peace. True, a certain tension arises from one’s not being certain whether the water they are standing in is rising or falling. But, either way, it seems certain these people will know how to behave. Should the water rise to their chins, the man and woman will swim away, without in the least altering the amused resignation that animates them now. They will be accompanied, of course, by their dog, whose life preserver they will continue to grasp.
So we may conclude that here is a couple that has learned how to live without illusions and thus without severe disappointment. He happens to be on a list of 152 Czech writers who are forbidden to publish anything within the borders of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic or to have their plays produced on a Czech stage. But one does not see the man and his wife thrashing about angrily in the water, as might be expected.
Instead, they stand in the water for their New Year’s photograph, not in the least resentful or angry but with the optimistic obedience the present leadership of Czechoslovakia expects of all its citizens. Since it has been decreed that the couple stand in the water, so to speak, then that is where they will stand, and nothing could be simpler. Their dog, of course, is not blacklisted, but she always follows them so closely that they allow her to share their fate.
Considering all this, one might conclude the husband and wife are expressing utter hopelessness, and there is indeed some truth in this interpretation. In its desire for peace, the United States, much as it might wish to, cannot officially raise the issue with the Soviet Union, and this leaves the writer and his wife standing in the water.
On the other ha
nd, the Soviet Union, much as it might wish to, cannot withdraw its military support of the regime it placed in power in 1968. At the same time, however, many Czechs believe the cultural cemetery their country has become is even too extreme for the Russian taste. The problem is that only mediocrities have been willing to take positions in the regime, and of course mediocrities lack the finesse to deal with the country’s intellectuals, except to sentence them to an internal exile or force them to emigrate.
When some people, like the writer in this photograph, refuse to emigrate, they are nevertheless described in the controlled press as having left the country. A more bloodless and efficient solution is hard to imagine, but it is another reason why the writer is standing in the water fully dressed. When he and his wife are on dry land, walking down the streets of their neighborhood, they know that the official version is that they are living in another country; therefore, the couple’s hold on reality—all that is really left for them—requires some expression, and so they occasionally stand hip deep in a lake or a river.
Collected Essays Page 54