“You have to cut out her tongue”: the threat of the Turkish president to a pop singer

“No one should raise his tongue against Adam; if someone does, our duty is to cut out his tongue.” With these words the Turkish president intervened, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, last Friday in the controversy unleashed a week ago by a song by the singer Sezen Aksu, an icon of pop music in Turkey.

The president’s statement, made at an Istanbul mosque, did not name the 67-year-old artist, but was an obvious reference to the protests raised by the Turkish Islamist press against the verses. “We are going from bad to worse, straight towards the apocalypse, thanks to those ignorant Adam and Eve”, in a love song Aksu.

“Sezen Aksu is not alone”, responded today a manifesto signed by more than 200 Turkish writers and artists, including international firms such as Buket Uzuner, Ece Temelkuran or Elif Shafak, while the Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk has expressed himself in the same sense.

“We are all proud of the great artist Sezen Aksu. I’m with her. Millions are with her today. We will not be a State or a Nation that crushes artists. Sezen Aksu is our honor.” Pamuk said in a message published by the Turkish digital T24.

“I AM THE PREY, YOU ARE THE HUNTER”

The song was already published in 2017 but became the subject of controversy and lynching on social networks these days, when several Islamist newspapers accused of “blasphemy” to the popular singer, 67 years old with a musical career of almost half a century, 40 million records sold and dozens of awards.

On Saturday, “the little sparrow”, as Aksu is known in Turkey, responded on social networks, thanking the support received, assuring that he will continue writing and publishing a new song written the day before.

“You can’t make me sad / I’m already so sad / There’s pain everywhere I look / I’m the prey, you’re the hunter / Shoot me / You can’t track me / You can’t crush my tongue…” says the text, to finish affirming: “You can’t kill me / I have the voice, the instrument, the word / When I say I, I’m the whole world”.

“We are horrified to see that artists are targeted for their songs: a signal from above mobilizes certain groups below,” says Turkish political scientist Rasit Kaya.

“Before we talked about conservatism, but what we see now is a reactionary attitude”, assures in declarations to Efe.

THE OX IN PALACE

Some Turkish columnists stress, however, that Aksu supported several initiatives by Erdogan’s party, the Islamist AKP, in the first decade of the century, such as allowing the fundamentalist veil to be worn in universities or the constitutional reform that facilitated the Executive’s control over the Judiciary.

“Sezen Aksu is now being lynched by the mentality that she herself supported,” reflects the nationalist opposition daily Sözcü.

In the same newspaper he compares the threats against the singer with the arrest, on the 21st, of the prestigious journalist Sedef Kabas, who had used the Turkish saying in a debate on Erdogan’s management “When an ox enters the Palace, it does not become king”. , but the Palace becomes a stable”.

“Those who have a duty to solve people’s problems such as the cost of living and increasing poverty speak of cutting out Sezen Aksu’s tongue and arresting Sedef Kabas. Is it desperation, madness, fear?” asks Sözcü.

12,000 CONVICTIONS

Kabas, who remains in detention, is just the latest of thousands of Turkish citizens on trial for alleged “insults against the president”.

This crime carries from one to four years in prison, often for having spread texts from others on social networks that do not even mention Erdogan’s name or his position.

The social democratic opposition party CHP calculates that between the military coup of 1980 and 2007, the year of the election of the AKP’s first president, Abdullah Gül, 863 people were prosecuted for insulting the head of state.

During the seven years of Gül’s mandate there were 848 trials and since then, with Erdogan in power, there have been 12,881.

Several opposition deputies assure in this sense that a “threat to physical integrity”, such as asking to cut someone’s tongue, also constitutes a criminal offense.

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