Turkey briefly arrests renowned sociologist Ismail Besikci over tweet
ANKARA, Turkey (Kurdistan 24) – Police in the Turkish capital of Ankara on Wednesday arrested Ismail Besikci, a septuagenarian sociologist acclaimed for his academic work on the Kurdish people and Kurdistan, over a tweet posted in his name.
After an interrogation at the counter-terrorism department of police headquarters and at the Ankara chief public prosecutor’s office, Besikci was released, his lawyer Levent Kanat said.
The brief detention of the author, the most vocal non-Kurdish dissenter of Turkish state oppression of Kurdish people for decades, comes amid an increasing government crackdown on civil society, media, and opposition parties.
“There was an arrest warrant for Mr. Besikci over alleged membership in an armed terrorist organization,” the lawyer said about the 79-year-old who had already spent 17 years of his life in prisons across the country for his books on the Kurds and advocacy of a unified, independent Kurdistan.
Kurdistan 24’s Ankara bureau reported that the warrant was issued by a prosecutor in the Kurdish province of Sirnak as part of a social media investigation dating back to 2016.
“The investigation is ongoing at the Bureau of Constitutional Crimes of the Ankara prosecutor’s office. Yesterday, [police] had searched his house while he was not home,” Kanat said.
Social media accounts opened in Besikci’s name did not belong to him, his lawyer added, without elaborating the content of the posts authorities were investigating.
Twitter and Facebook users in Turkey often find themselves in hot water over statements of their political and ideological stances or criticism of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s administration.
Almost 5,000 cases were opened against people accused of insulting Erdogan as of the end of 2016, with 1,080 of them convicted of the crime punishable for up to four years according to the Justice Ministry statistics.
Wednesday’s arrest of Besikci was the first since 1999 when he was freed from jail. Though in 2005, 2007, and 2010 he faced various trials for writings critical of the army and defense of Kurdish people’s right to self-determination.
He has in total received over 100 years of imprisonment and fines of up to hundreds of thousands of dollars since the early 1970s because of his intellectual dissent from the ethnocentric principles of the Turkish state.
He was dismissed from Ataturk University in Erzurum Province in 1970 where he got his Ph.D. before serving as an assistant professor.
In the aftermath of the 1971 military coup, his lengthy ordeal in Turkish courthouses and jails began.
Authorities banned 36 of 42 books he penned, before the relative liberalization of the 2000s initiated at the behest of the European Union to which Turkey still has a bid for membership.
Editing by Karzan Sulaivany