Turkey's Cemetery of Traitors

On the outskirts of Istanbul, cut into the rough earth of a newly-constructed cemetery is a single, unmarked grave. The Cemetery of Traitors has been prepared specially for Turkish soldiers who died in the failed coup of 15th July, and the grave belongs to a major who shot an unarmed civilian before being killed himself. His family refused to accept his body, so it was brought here, where, according to Istanbul’s mayor, Kadir Topba, “those who pass by will recite curses.”

Turkey’s religious body, the Diyanet, has refused to grant soldiers who took part in the coup attempt the state funeral services usually given to Turkish citizens. “These [soldiers], with the action they undertook, have disregarded not just individuals but also the law of an entire nation and therefore do not deserve exoneration from the faithful.”

Civilians who died resisting the coup, on the other hand, have been immortalised. The Bosphorus bridge, where soldiers shot unarmed civilians and were later made to surrender, has been renamed the “15th July Martyrs’ Bridge,” along with Ankara’s new “15th July Square” (formerly Kzlay Square). During the celebrations in Taksim Square, Istanbul, images of dead coup-resisting civilians were projected on vast screens, and their names and faces publicised on Istanbul’s metro trains.

There is something ancient, almost elemental, about this polarised humiliation and reverence for victims of civil war, which is effectively what took place—briefly—on the night of 15th July. One particular classical parallel stands out; in Sophocles’s tragedy Antigone, Polynices leads an army to challenge his elder brother, Eteocles, for the kingship of Thebes. The two brothers kill each other, and the new king, Creon, passes judgment on their corpses in an almost identical fashion to the modern Turkish Republic. The brother who died for the state is “crowned with every rite that follows the noblest dead to their rest.” As for his rebel brother, “no one shall grace him with burial or lament.”

We will never know which of the soldiers who died on 15th July were coerced by their superiors, or even aware of what they were engaged in. On the night of the coup, I spoke to a teenage conscript in Taksim Square who had no idea why he was there. Survivors now plead their innocence in court, many of them will not be believed. Meanwhile, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has lent his support to widespread calls to re-introduce the death penalty for those guilty of masterminding the coup attempt.

A country that has narrowly averted a coup should feel relief and pride. The Turks who died facing tanks and gunfire deserve to be celebrated and mourned. But the flipside—the public humiliation at the Cemetery of Traitors—is deeply troubling. Anyone in Turkey who expresses any sympathy for the soldiers is branded a coup-sympathiser, a traitor, a murderer. I know this from personal experience. In the desperate, adrenaline-fuelled atmosphere of Turkey today, public morality is black or white. Either you side with the state, or you’re a traitor. You can’t mourn both civilians and soldiers.

In Islam, funeral rites have great significance—but the issue of granting proper burial is one of basic human rights. Now, a manically emboldened state is imposing itself on that most intimate of private affairs: the closing of an individual’s mortal account.

A few days after the creation of the cemetery, Topba announced he would remove its sign, after it was suggested that it could cause upset to the families of the fallen soldiers. But the Cemetery of Traitors is still there, a focus of national contempt for those who participated in the coup.

Antigone is a play about the realms of the public and private, the laws of men and of gods, and the dangers of state-decreed vengeance. Its themes are as relevant today as they were 2,500 years ago, and its lessons as valid. Yet again, they will not be heeded.