"Rethinking Turkey’s Past
Thirty years after its military coup, the country grapples with laying old ghosts to rest in order to move forward.
It’s not often that Turkey’s tough prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, weeps in public. But a few days before a referendum on overhauling Turkey’s Constitution in September, Erdogan broke down as he read out excerpts from letters written by young men condemned to hang in the aftermath of Turkey’s last military coup, in 1980. Twenty-two-year-old Mustafa Pehlivanoglu was one of 49 suspected leftists and nationalists executed by the military junta. “The men responsible for this unjust sentence will answer to God one day,” wrote Pehlivanoglu in his parting letter to his family. Now, with the Constitution written by the generals about to be scrapped and three decades of legal immunity for the coup’s leaders ended, the usually stone-faced Erdogan teared up: “The day this young man spoke of has come.”"
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