Ms. Melek Çetinkaya is the mother of Taha Furkan Çetinkaya, a military student. She believes in her son’s innocence and tries to make her voice heard on social media so that her son, who is currently held imprisoned, is released. Ms. Çetinkaya stayed at home with her children for three and a half years, believing that the state would provide justice until she finally decided to take to the streets to protest government unfairness through peaceful demonstrations and marches.[i] According to the Turkish Constitution, every citizen has the right to act peacefully without permission, stone, stick or weapon. However, every time she protests, she is fined 390 Turkish Liras (TL) and is taken to the police station, where she is kept for several hours. One of the times she was arrested, she was forced to stay in the anti-terror department (TEM) for two days.[ii]
Melek Çetinkaya is known for her campaigns and peaceful protests to raise awareness on her son’s victimization known to large masses and for the release of his son and hundreds of others’ unlawful arrests. The protests stem from the ineffectiveness of the Turkish judicial system under Erdogan’s regime.
Çetinkaya’s son, Taha, was a military student at the Turkish Air Force Academy. Taha was on summer vacation at home after completing his first year at the Air Force Academy. On July 10th, 2016, five days before the attempted coup, cadets were invited to the annual 3-week routine military camp. These camps were one of the programs determined one year in advance and included in the military students’ yearly program calendar.[iii]
On the morning of July 15th, Air Forces Commander General Abidin Ünal made an unplanned visit to the cadet camp and gave a speech to the cadets. Ünal visited the cadet camp every year, but not unnoticed. He usually made a scheduled visit to the centre. The cadets would clean the campsite, cook, and upkeep the spaces s and, as preparation for high profile visits. Only once this is done will the visitors meet the cadets.[iv]
The cadets passed police points when arriving at the Osmangazi Bridge, but none of the police asked them where they were going. The commanders carried no money on them, so when they reached the toll, both the cadets paid the fee with cash they had individually collected and crossed the bridge. The authorities stopped the bus with the cadets in Sultanbeyli after crossing the bridge and were told there had been a coup, a news that came as a shock to the cadets. The public offered the cadets water and cigarettes and sang the national anthem.[v] At approximately 2 am, two policemen stated, “Okay, we have these kids; you can disperse”. The cadets did as they were told, reiterating they were not coup plotters. Later in the morning, the police arrested the cadets and made them wait on the bridge until 8 am instead of taking the cadets to the police station or the air force school.[vi]
Throughout the morning, people started arriving at the bridge carrying weapons, knives, skewers, and sticks and started attacking the cadets. They first broke the bus’s windows and proceeded to get on the bus and start kicking the cadets. One of the armed persons shot the gas tank and shouted, “kill them”. The cadets hid their weapons under their arms in response to the fear and terror that had broken out, and fortunately, no cadets were killed. However, the children present were taken to the police station in Sultanbeyli and held in detention for four days.[vii]
The institutional facilities had severely poor conditions. The fact that the cadets were arbitrarily detained for over five years, the children subjected to torture for four consecutive days under police authority, and dogs were tied up and deprived of food and water highlights grave human rights violations. When the cadets asked to go to the toilet, they were taken by banging their backs, shoulders, and heads against the wall. The prison authorities filled 40-person detention rooms with 120 people.[viii]
The cadet’s indictments sought three life sentences for overthrowing the Turkish Constitution. The authorities separated the imprisoned cadets into five cases, namely ‘the Sultanbeyli case’, the ‘TRT/Digiturk case’, the ‘Orhanlı case’, the ‘Bosporus bridge case,’ and the ‘Fatih Sultan Mehmet (FSM) bridge case’. The Court of Cassation overturned the ‘TRT/Digiturk case’ with 37 cadets, reopening the trial. However, the cadet students were sentenced to life after the Appeal Trial. The judicial process has proven that, in Turkey, lower instance courts do not abide by the higher courts’ decisions but instead act upon government orders. The ‘Sultanbeyli case’, where Ms. Melek Çetinkaya’s children are, is currently under review at the Court of Cassation and will probably be overturned in the coming months. Still, as in the ‘TRT/Digiturk case’, she believes the courts will not abide by this decision, and the detention of the children will continue. She hopes to be wrong and wishes that all the children are released, but the current government’s practices have proved it unlikely.[ix]
Ms. Melek Çetinkaya applied to the United Nations Human Rights Council Arbitrary Detention Working Group on behalf of her son for his case to be examined and decided. The file was indeed reviewed and decided upon, resulting in the immediate release of Taha Çetinkaya. Despite this, the Turkish legal system currently does not recognize either the European Court of Human Rights or any organs of the United Nations. As such, the decision is deemed invalid to the case at hand.
There are approximately 341 imprisoned student cadets. Three of them are female, and three of them passed away.[x]
Murat Tekin and Ragıp Enes Katran were brutally murdered by being lynched on the Bosphorus Bridge during the July 15th bloody coup attempt. They were found in the morgue after 12 days together and were unrecognizable. Their parents recognized the children by their fingernails. The families were not given a funeral vehicle or coffins and were refused to perform prayers. In addition, no funeral ceremonies were held, and they were told to bury the children in silence. The families were not given burial land for the corpses of these students. Still, their respective relatives had bought a family cemetery in advance, and the bodies could be buried there. The third student, Yusuf Kurt, died later. He was incarcerated for nine months, and extreme stress and pressure levels exacerbated a cancer development. Yusuf passed away a year ago with the burden of the pain he endured.[xi]
As mentioned above, three female students are held behind bars for the same reasons. They are detained in the Bakırköy Women’s closed prison. Their names are Nimet Ecem Gönüllü, Nagihan Yavuz and Sena Ogut Alan. These girls were 20 years old when they were arrested. Nagihan lost her father on 1st March 2022, but she could not attend her father’s funeral. Nimet Ecem, on the other hand, is a martyr’s daughter. Her father was martyred when she was three years old while he was serving as a senior lieutenant in the Turkish Air Force (TAF). Albeit a martyr’s daughter, she received a life sentence on a baseless allegation of being a member of a terrorist organization. The father of the other female detainee is an officer who retired from the TAF. Despite this, she was sentenced to life imprisonment for being a ‘traitor’ and a ‘terrorist’.
Melek Çetinkaya became the subject of a European thesis. Helena Vodopija, a graduate of Turcology and Anthropology, met with Çetinkaya for her master’s thesis “on the memories” of military students and their families who were sentenced to life imprisonment within the scope of the European Human Rights and Democratization Master’s Program of Luxembourg University on July 15th and the following period.[xii]
Melek Çetinkaya was a mother of three, living a modest life in Turkey. On the evening of July 15th, 2016, she became a mother seeking justice on the streets. She will continue her rightful struggle until she accomplishes releasing all arbitrarily detained cadets.
Written by Berkan Doğan Ünes
Edited by Olga Ruiz Pilato
Sources;
[i] https://politurco.com/arrest-of-ms-melek-cetinkaya-is-an-intervention-to-democracy.html [Accessed on 03/04/2022]
[ii] https://politurco.com/melek-cetinkaya-turkish-state-under-erdogan-regime-took-me-out-on-the-street.html [Accessed on 03/04/2022]
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] https://www.duvarenglish.com/human-rights/2020/01/25/my-son-is-not-a-coup-plotter-a-mothers-struggle-to-prove-her-cadet-sons-innocence [Accessed on 03/04/2022]
[vi] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ND5snMwA2JQ [Accessed on 03/04/2022]
[vii] Ibid.
[viii] https://politurco.com/melek-cetinkaya-turkish-state-under-erdogan-regime-took-me-out-on-the-street.html [Accessed on 03/04/2022]
[ix] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HB6cRgf15w [Accessed on 03/04/2022]
[x] https://politurco.com/melek-cetinkaya-turkish-state-under-erdogan-regime-took-me-out-on-the-street.html [Accessed on 03/04/2022]
[xi] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tofQTvdJlqk&t=290s [Accessed on 03/04/2022]
[xii] https://ahvalnews.com/tr/melek-cetinkaya/melek-cetinkaya-avrupada-tez-konusu-oldu [Accessed on 03/04/2022]
*Crop image from: https://www.tr724.com/melek-cetinkayanin-ogluna-hucre-cezasi/
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