Selahattin Demirtaş - Bir Siyasi Rehinelik Öyküsü

“(To the book) While writing this foreword, I am also reading Sevilay Çelenk's article dated September 16, 2021, published in Gazete Duvar. Sevilay Çelenk begins this article about Aysel Tuğluk, Osman Kavala, Ahmet Altan and me with a quote from Norman Ohler's book Harro and Libertas: A Story of Love and Resistance.

Harro Schulze-Boysen, a 33-year-old member of the Berlin-based anti-fascist resistance, leaves a letter to his parents before his execution: 'If you were here, you would be invisible and see me laughing in the face of death. I'm already over it. What can we do? In Europe, it is customary to harvest the mind with blood.'

The book you have in your hand is a historical work written for this purpose. My heartfelt thanks to the millions who resist to prevent the "harvest of the mind" and to Hayri Demir, the author of this book, and to everyone who contributed..."

Selahattin demirtaş
Edirne Prison

Friend or foe, everyone is aware that Selahattin Demirtaş is on trial. Moreover, everyone has an opinion on this issue. However, except for his relatives and lawyers, almost no one knows the details of the case process. Millions of people do not know what happened or what is going on during this trial. The government stubbornly continues its manipulation efforts.

Demirtaş was arrested as "a political hostage" in his own definition, was tried, and the trial process continued with this approach. Demirtaş's trial process makes it easier to take a multidimensional x-ray of the politics-judiciary relationship in Turkey.

Unfortunately, along with the process developed from the first moment, the trial stages and the case files that form the basis of the trials were not adequately examined in this process. Although a large part of the society agreed that these trials were carried out politically, there was no source they could refer to regarding the trial process. The trials were conducted in special courtrooms created in prisons where people were kidnapped from society.

If the real political history of Turkey is to be written in the future, it is necessary to record this dark period in all its aspects.

This book was prepared to answer how and in what way a political hostage was implemented by filtering thousands of pages of case files, minutes and defenses. The process was not limited to the events that developed in the focus of the case. In parallel, developments outside the case also took place as a direct part of the cases. One part of the study was to take these developments and analyze them in the context of the case.

The main concern of this book is to pull the handbrake against the tendency to leave a process and the relationship between actors, which will be the subject of history, at the mercy of the present and prevent it from being transmitted.