Being a Decree-Law Dismissee

Isn’t it ironic that those who carried out one of the greatest mass persecutions and most sweeping social exclusions the world has ever seen call themselves reformers?

While writing his book 1984, George Orwell may have wondered in places whether he was exaggerating state oppression and social decay. Faced with what is happening today, we see that he even understated it. When it is not even normal for a society to remain so silent in the face of injustice and cruelty, what else but sociological trauma and fear can explain its applauding the oppressors and approving every kind of torment for people it has never met?

Although the common assumption is that anyone who is a victim of the decree laws (KHK) is immediately branded “FETÖ”, the truth is different. People from every part of society, Kurds, Turks, Alevis, Sunnis, atheists, Muslims, right-wingers, left-wingers, secular nationalists and members of religious orders, are subjected to this othering. They can neither explain their plight to anyone nor find anyone to listen. The treatment they receive is worse than that of the most ruthless murderers, the most hardened terrorists and the cruellest rapists. While the PKK leader’s niece can enter parliament as a deputy and his brother can give an interview to state television, the families and relatives of decree-law dismissees are profiled and cannot even become civil servants. While members of the ISIS terrorist organisation can be treated in state hospitals and obtain weapons from the state, dismissed civil servants and their families are deprived of even the most basic health services and citizenship rights. Because they and their families suffer trauma upon trauma, they begin to develop psychological problems and withdraw from social life.

Decree-law dismissees, seen as the greatest terrorists, may even think of killing themselves, but it does not occur to them to harm others. Have you heard of a single dismissee in whose home drugs, illicit funds or weapons were found, who embezzled money or who clashed with the police or gendarmerie? Has anyone among the people held in cells and prisons for years started a riot? How many of the tens of thousands of dismissees left unemployed can you show who have turned to crime?

You excluded the decree-law dismissees from society and ignored them. Is there anyone in their right mind who can say that we as a country are better off than in past years?

There are experiences that those who follow events in the country only through certain news channels will never learn about. Forms of injustice and cruelty so unheard of that they seem to have been invented for these people alone. I would like to recall a few of them for the record:

• Some civil servants who died in prison or custody after being tortured or after their illnesses were ignored were formally acquitted or reinstated only after their deaths.
• Dismissees were in practice blocked from insured employment, and some companies that hired them were threatened into dismissing them.
• Before the truth came out and before trials were even concluded, there were attempts to bury some branded dismissees in a “cemetery for traitors”; hearses were refused for their funerals and imams would not lead their funeral prayers.
• Some suspended soldiers and police officers were deliberately assigned to critical and dangerous duties. If they died in operations they were martyrs; if not, they were dismissed as traitors.
• The same treatment is applied not only to the dismissees but also to their families: strip searches, insults, refusal of employment, and even children being insulted at school because of their parents.

Did you commit murder without batting an eyelid? Surely you have mitigating circumstances.

Did you abuse little children or rape someone? How do we know there was no consent?

Are you involved in theft, corruption, smuggling or bribery? If you do your job, aren’t you entitled to that much?

Are you a terrorist who beheads and burns people? Surely something must have angered you, right?

But… If you are a civil servant, academic, bureaucrat, soldier or police officer dismissed by decree, then you are finished. You are the greatest traitors this country and its people could ever see. You have no right to live. No job while you live, no doctor when you are ill, no imam and no grave when you die…

In the last 6 years hundreds of thousands of civil servants have been investigated on terrorism grounds, more than a hundred thousand have been dismissed from public service and thousands have been imprisoned. Those who have died by suicide, illness and accidents number in the hundreds. Many of them and their families continue to feel to the marrow the psychological effects of the trauma, social pressure and exclusion. What they all have in common is that they have experienced first-hand the pain of the deadly affliction called the decree law… That they carry the burden of being a decree-law dismissee, the plague of the age…

O decree-law dismissee… They intend to make you invisible and deprive you of even the most basic rights. They want to leave you with no one who will believe your account or listen to your side of the story. You are expected to be a diseased being from whom even your closest ones flee and whose greeting they refuse to return. And not only you… Your family, your spouse and everyone you love are to be condemned to live like this. They want to turn you first against the state, then against the nation and then against your homeland.

In the 6 years that have passed, decree-law dismissees have mostly taken on the psychology of the guilty, bearing responsibility for crimes they did not commit. As civil servants, these people never even thought of rebelling against the state. They dreamed of getting their jobs back in the hope that those governing the country would change. They had to take short-term jobs outside their fields of training, because they were made unable to practise the professions they had trained for. And where we stand now, there are still people who have not been reinstated despite being acquitted.

Although I know it is easy to say and hard to put into practice, instead of a conclusion I would like to note the following few sentences for this article:

• No decree-law dismissee should give up seeking their rights and pursuing every legal avenue to the end.
• Against the negative effects of this difficult process, all family members should receive professional psychological support wherever possible.
• Without losing faith that the usurped rights will be restored, one should hold on to life with a new job or profession one believes one can succeed in.
• Hopes should be pinned not on political parties and elections but on educating and raising awareness among people, and one should never stop setting an example of one’s good qualities to everyone around.