Three Decades After the Coup: Turkey Puts Generals on Trial
By Pelin Turgut / Istanbul Thursday, Apr. 05, 2012
I grew up in the long, dark, soul-numbing shadow of Turkey's 1980 military coup. Although just a child, I recall tanks, manned by young gun-toting soldiers, ominously patrolling our street, months of curfew, my parents' hushed and anguished late-night conversations over my uncle, a professor who was arrested and jailed without news for months. (He belonged to a left-wing NGO.) He was one of some 650,000 people, mostly young leftists, who were rounded up — an entire political class destroyed almost overnight. Arrest meant certain torture. "When someone you knew was arrested, your heart would sink because you knew for sure they would be subjected to unspeakable abuse. That's how widespread it was," says Sedat Ergin, a well-known journalist for Hurriyet newspaper. Above all, I remember the crushing sense of fear.
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