Zeki Gorbuz, a Turkish asylum seeker in Greece, who was arrested on Feb. 12, remains detained today due to an international warrant that was transmitted by Turkish authorities to Greece just one day before his asylum interview. Turkish media were quick to report the arrest, describing Gorbuz as a radical leftist and regional leader of the Marxist Leninist Communist Party (MLCP), which has been designated as a terrorist organisation by the Turkish government.

On the same day that Gorbuz was detained, Bulent Aytunc Comert, who arrived in Greece as an asylum seeker in 2002, was also arrested. His request for asylum was approved in 2003 but was never cleared by the ministry of police.

Branded by Turkish authorities as a member of the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C), Comert is a fugitive. He was imprisoned in the notorious solitary confinement units known as the “White Cells” on what he says was a fabricated murder charge.

“Members of several civil society organisations and student groups [in Turkey] have been put into prison, often on flimsy evidence and based on the anti-terrorism law that can be used to charge pretty much any form of dissent as terrorism."
Having come here to escape persecution, Gorbuz and Comert, like many other Turkish political dissidents and Turkish Kurds, are now stuck in no-man’s land, suspended between the highly bureaucratic Greek immigration and asylum system, and an extremely hostile government in Turkey.

Indications of a secret deal to return asylum seekers in Greece to Turkey are surfacing, while human rights activists warn of the grave impacts of Greece’s plan to extradite persons in need of international protection against criminal charges that might be fabricated by Turkish authorities.

According to Turkish media reports, a Feb. 4 meeting between Turkish Chief of Police Mehmet Kiliclar and Greek Police Chief Nikolaos Papagiannopoulos ended with the Greek official’s promise to dismantle Kurdish as well as radical leftist “Turkish terrorist cells” here.

A month later, on Mar. 4, Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras visited Turkey for a high profile meeting with his counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Istanbul, where the two heads of state signed 25 cooperation deals covering areas such as health, tourism and fighting illegal migration.

That same day, the Ankara Strategic Institution pointed out that private Turkish investment in Greece has been used as a pressure tool in order to promote the deal on extradition. More reports followed referring to preparations for extraditions but the Greek government is yet to responded to any of them.

Besides Gorbuz and Comert, three more asylum seekers have been arrested since February, including Meric Serkan on Feb. 14, Fadik Adauman on Feb. 26 and Huseyin Cakil on Apr. 6. All are wanted by Turkish authorities for “terrorist activity” and, according to the Greek Council for Refugees, all five have been victims of torture during their detention in Turkey.

The activist group Movement for Freedom and Democratic Rights (KEDDE), which has been a whistleblower on the deal between Turkish and Greek authorities, says there is no guarantee of Turkish dissidents’ safety if they are forced to return.

“People arrested under the Turkish anti-terror law are subject to a long detention with an indefinite time limit and with no access to their case file until the beginning of the trial (which could be situated two years later),” according to a statement on the group’s website.

“It might also mean they become subject to the jurisdiction and judgment of special courts, for the operation of which Turkey has been several times condemned by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, since these courts make use…as means of ‘proof’ confessions extorted through torture.”

Cakil’s case was tried in the Greek city of Thessaloniki and, given that his asylum claim has been informally accepted and is pending ministry clearance, the move to extradite him was denied.

Gorbuz and Comert who were apprehended in Patras, about 215 kilometres west of Athens, were also spared extradition but they will now have to face a court of second instance.

Given that most cases here take months or even years just to reach court, let alone a decision, this “rapid response by Greek authorities…is indicative of political interests (both Greek and Turkish) behind the cases,” lawyer Dimitris Sarafianos, member of the European Association of Lawyers for Democracy and World Human Rights (ELDH), told IPS.

He believes it “strange” that the prosecutor of the court of second instance appealed the decision in “absolute contradiction with the fact that the prosecutor of the hearing had pointed out that the charges were heavily unfounded, requesting for the continuation of the detention of one refugee (Gorbuz).”

“Given the persistent rumours referring to a secret agreement between the two Prime Ministers, Samaras and Erdogan, concerning matters of extradition of asylum seekers to Turkey, it is clear that the Greek government is prompt to violate the Geneva Convention,” the lawyer said.

According to Sarafianos, who participated in an ELDH fact-finding mission to Turkey, over 10,000 citizens of Kurdish origin are currently faced with charges, as are scores of Turkish unionist in the private and public sectors, professors, students and lawyers defending human rights.

The extradition deal currently being worked out the with Greek authorities appears to be part and parcel of this ongoing wave of detentions and arrests of political dissidents as well as suspected members of the DHKP-C – branded a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the United States and the European Union — and members of Turkey’s Contemporary Lawyers Association (CHD).

Earlier this year, Erdogan rushed to connect the DHKP-C with the Feb. 1 bombing of the U.S embassy in Ankara.

Dr. Kerem Oktem, expert on contemporary Turkish politics and research fellow at the European Studies Centre at the University of Oxford, told IPS that although the detentions “caused a great outcry…many of the arrested people are intimately related to the DHKP-C, which took responsibility for the bombing of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) headquarters and the Justice Ministry in Ankara on Mar. 11.”

Although Oktem acknowledges that “members of several civil society organisations and student groups have been put into prison, often on flimsy evidence and based on the anti-terrorism law that can be used to charge pretty much any form of dissent as terrorism”, he believes it would be incorrect to characterise the crackdown as being directed solely against dissenting civil voices.

Often it is aimed at apprehending “groups and individuals that maintain relations with real terrorist groups”, he said.

(END)

A reserve soldier went on hunger strike in solidarity with Palestinian prisoners last week, vowing to surrender his citizenship and live as a Palestinian in a refugee camp; another activist was briefly jailed. They are Israel’s new dissidents. An e-book now comes to light, shedding light on their raison d’être.

Symbolically, non-violently, they stand up against the social, political and racist iniquities perpetrated in their country against fellow citizens (the poor, women, activists, the Palestinian-Israeli minority), against ‘the other’ in their midst (the migrants and political refugees from Africa), and against ‘the other’ (the Palestinians).

They fight ‘the system’. Systematically, they test their nation’s Zionist promise – to establish an independent, sovereign, free-for-all, equal-for-all, and democratic Jewish state in the Promised Land, as officially inscribed in Israel’s declaration of independence.

“The State of Israel…will be based on freedom, justice and peace…it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture,” stated the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.

They feel betrayed by their State having long reneged on its original pledge. For them, the real promise is not land, but justice.

“Despite having won independence and political sovereignty, we’re enslaved. Enslaved to our conquest, to the injustices we create; to foreign labourers whom we exploit and oppress; to the Sudanese refugees whom we – the persecuted people, the refugee people – throw in jail,” protested Na’ama Carmi, former Chair of the Israeli Civil Rights Association (ACRI), in a prescient blog written six years ago.

Marking 40 years of the now 45-year occupation of Palestinian lands, Carmi mourned June 1967 as “the time when we ceased to be free,” concluding, “The enslaver cannot be free himself.”

Now, 35 such blogposts are included in an e-anthology entitled ‘Israeli Dissidents: Notes from a slippery slope’.

They were originally written in Hebrew by ten alternative media and human rights activists from local NGOs, such as ‘Anarchists Against The Wall” (the wall which separates Palestinians from families and lands under the arguable pretext of security); or, “Boycott From Within” (which supports the Palestinian boycott, divestment and sanctions call).

“All is ripe, just waiting for the match to ignite the fire that’ll consume Israel’s democracy, and it’ll surely come,” warns Noam Rotem.

Cassandra-like prophets of doom predicting the demise of the Jewish people’s dream to live free on the land, they’re disregarded, often damned as “traitors”, by fellow Israelis. Their dissidence is critical patriotism, they retort.

“We do not hate this land, on the contrary we love our homeland, its landscapes, flavours, scents, sounds and languages to not only live here despite the hardships and the policies we find infuriating and indefensible, but to openly champion highly unpopular ideas we believe to be crucial for the future well-being – and even existence – of a liveable polity in this country we love,” writes Rechavia Berman, editor of the compilation in the preface.

They’re branded as “self-hating” and “anti-Semite” Jews, accused of abetting terrorism.

“We do not hate ourselves,” counters Berman. “Our anger and struggle are directed at apartheid and occupation, abuse and oppression, those who support them, and those who stand in our way as we seek to battle them.”

Conscience objectors of the Internet era, they’ve taken an oath – to respect the commandment of memory, not to forget, conscientiously documenting abuses by their country. A country, they point out, born out of the ashes of the Nazi Holocaust, the extermination of six million Jews during World War II.

Shaking off the shackles of – or perhaps truly shackled to – the unfathomable tragedy, they dream of, act for, the establishment of an exemplary society that ought to abide by universal justice. Saving Israel against itself is their quixotic crusade.

Throughout the compilation, they warn against “the gradual, accelerated process in which Israel’s polity is drifting even farther away from core principles and guaranteed rights inherent in democracy.”

Some blogs relate to religious coercion – especially against Jewish women – by radical, ultra-orthodox Jews, whom the authors call “the Jewish Brotherhood”, in reference to the Muslim Brotherhood movement.

Most reckon the difficulty of instilling a stringently peaceful message stems from their country being rooted in a strongly-knit society. Solidarity precedes tolerance when the prevailing – albeit sometimes irrational – sentiment is of living under the constant fear of existential threats.

The political and religious establishments have managed to maintain a powerfully consensual narrative. “There’s no negotiating partner on the other side”; the ultimate Palestinian goal is “to throw us into the sea”, are public mantras.

When national extinction is believed to still hang in the balance, the occupation becomes the lesser of two evils. Living by the sword in the foreseeable future seems to be the best recipe for those – and they’re the majority – who remain convinced that a huge Damocles sword is hanging above their heads.

“It’s impossible to discuss these issues with most of my friends. They don’t want to hear, they don’t believe me, or they think ‘the Arabs’ deserve what happens to them,” laments Lisa Goldman, feeling “increasingly isolated”.

The tragedy is, most Israelis would probably be ready to support a two-state solution that would entail a withdrawal – military and civilian – from the occupied territories, if only to preserve the Jewish and democratic character of their state.

But most also believe that the endeavour would be Sisyphean, with over half-a-million settlers living in Palestine. And, they wouldn’t easily relinquish occupied east Jerusalem.

Noting that “the worst decisions can be made in a perfectly democratic manner” – a clear reference to the democratically-elected Nazi regime in the 1930s – Berman acknowledges in the foreword, as if posthumously, “We may be unable, or too late, to sway the disastrously misguided majority, but I for one refuse to let it be said that there was no other way, or that the danger could not be foreseen.”