At the Gezi Park trials in Turkey, sixteen people are charged with “threatening to overthrow the state” for actions they took in 2013, protesting the proposed closing of Gezi Park, a unique public green space in the heart of Istanbul. They are architects, lawyers, citizen journalists, urban planners, and a businessman and philanthropist named Osman Kavala. They face prison sentences between ten years to life. Dutch writer Simon(e) van Saarloos, who covered the 2016 political trial of the Dutch right-wing populist, Geert Wilders, went to Turkey to see what many expected would be a “show trial.” Simon(e) arrived to find that the differences between “show” and “trial” were hard to parse, and so pursued other strategies of writing and reporting to “stay with the trouble” that was the Gezi Park trial of February, 2020.
1 March, 2022
