Prisons with and without four walls

It was as if the senders had entered a covenant. One after another seven emails, five (no, it was six) private messages via Twitter and two letters from jail arrived.
Their common thrust could be summed up as: “You wrote, ‘Have you noticed - we have gone to war?’ and the next day your man did a 180 degree turn. It is high time for a Claw Mark revelling in the delight of this.”
They are right. No instance of brazenly disregarding to this degree what you said the day before has ever been witnessed. I have strained my memory. Er, no I can’t remember anything this blatant. A Claw Mark that would be a great delight even for its scribe beckons.
But I am not going to do this.
It is most certainly good that he has turned over a new leaf and confessed to having abandoned the idea of “ending the reign of a sovereign country’s president.” I mean, what if war were to be officially declared on Syria and the coffins started coming home? I mean, what if Turkey, already in deep trouble, became embroiled in bloodshed in the Middle Eastern quagmire that is no different from a gunpowder keg?
It is also for sure good that he has turned over a new leaf and forsaken heedless comments that address the president of a parliament saying, “Will you just look at that loudmouth!” or that fly in the face of the most elementary rules of diplomacy and intimidate him saying, “Well, who do you think you are? It’s none of your business. If you had the whole EU behind you, what difference would it make?”, in favour of statements that seek to heal the rift like, “Turkey is a European Country ... The difficulties we are experiencing with certain European countries are run-of-the-mill political quarrels.” After all, to do otherwise would amount to a rupture, not with Europe, but with democracy, secularism and freedom of thought, publication and organisation.
Even so, I am not going to pen a Claw Mark on these things.
***
With ten of my colleagues, ten of my buddies from neighbouring offices, in a country in which simply engaging in journalism and engaging in true journalism is deemed to be an offence, pacing up and down in a confined space awaiting the indictment that a prosecutor who is both a defendant in a Fethullah Gülen Terrorist Organisation trial and a witness in a Fethullah Gülen Terrorist Organisation trial never gets round to drafting, I just cannot bring myself or psych myself up to write about anything else.
What with my scholarly friend Ahmet Türk having been brought from Mardin and banged up in Silivri just to make him suffer;
With my friend whose sparkling eyes display not an inkling of deceit, Selahattin Demirtaş, shut in a cell even further away, in a prison set in the wilds of Edirne;
With my friends Necmiye Alpay and Aslı Erdoğan unrelentingly and unyieldinglyconfined between four walls;
With the prosecution calling for a 320-year prison sentence for Diyarbakır’s elected and now jailed Mayor, Gültan Kışanak, who once left the hell of Diyarbakır Prison in the 12 September period without even her shadow bowing its head;
With the refined Kurdish politician İdris Baluken on trial facing a life sentence;
With Şahin Alpay, Nazlı Ilıcak and Murat Aksoy shut up and detained between four walls without even having been brought before a judge, despite for one thing having had absolutely no involvement in the bloody attempted coup and with their open opposition to coups being common knowledge, and for another their having never been witnessed doing anything other than carrying out their profession, that is writing articles;
With not a single word emerging in reply to inquiries by foreign journalists and politicians as to what my friends Ahmet Altan and Mehmet Altan stand accused of;
With my colleagues, men and women, whose number is apparently unknowable to the Ministry of Justice and which I know to be 142, thrown in jail with a crassness that does not even feel the need for trumped-up charges;
And ...
And with people like me and thousands upon thousands of democrats, academics, teachers, judges and prosecutors whose worth far outweighs mine released pending trial and condemned to live in a “prison without four walls”.
How am I supposed to pen Claw Marks that will give great delight even to their scribe?
We are going through days in which merely wishing readers a nice Sunday would be an insult to their intelligence. It is enough for us not to lose hope and surrender!