An authoritarian, outdated sultan

The writer Orhan Pamuk, one of the few Turkish intellectuals who spoke publicly about the Turkish genocide against the Armenians in 2005, for which he was prosecuted several times in his homeland, publicly opposed the policies of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and among other things, he considers him guilty of the terrorist attack in Ankara. in October last year.

Writer Orhan Pamuk was born in 1952 in a more affluent part of Istanbul and grew up in the Western-oriented Turkey of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. He is the first Turkish writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, and in 2012 he was awarded the Legion of Honor, France's highest award. Many of his novels have already become classics: "My name is red", "Black book", "Other colors", "Snow", for which he received the Medici award for foreign literature in 2005, "Museum of innocence" and others. With his latest novel "A Strange Feeling in Me", Pamuk was among the six finalists for the Man Booker International literary prize.

In his novels, he dissects the relationship between Islam and Turkey from the Ottoman Empire to modern Turkey, and in his political everyday life he does not hesitate to draw parallels between Ottoman and present-day Turkey.

When President Erdogan welcomed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in January this year, welcoming him to his court with soldiers in Ottoman uniforms, Pamuk compared him to an outdated sultan.

However, it is not the wearing of Ottoman uniforms for ceremonial purposes that bothers Pamuk so much as the manipulations that Erdogan uses to win absolute power.

Because of his statement in a Swiss magazine in 2005, that "30.000 Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in Turkey, and no one dares to talk about it", Pamuk earned a series of lawsuits in his country, and after moving to the United States in 2007, extremists they threatened him with death. He remained adamant and said that he considers it his duty to speak freely about forbidden topics, and he criticized the Turkish legal system, saying that "it is bad when legislative institutions determine democracy."

Although the official Turkish policy never acknowledged the Armenian genocide, in 2005 Recep Tayyip Erdogan was the first Turkish Prime Minister to speak about the "Kurdish problem" and thus broke the taboo that the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) only represents a terrorist problem. His government held talks with the arrested PKK leader Öcalan about a peaceful solution to the Kurdish conflict that has killed more than 1984 people since 40.000.

In addition to the opportunity to go down in history, Erdogan also saw in the cessation of bloodshed an opportunity to win the votes of voters in the presidential elections, both Turks and Kurds.

In 2014, Erdogan became Turkey's president, but in parliamentary elections in June 2015, Erdogan's ruling party lost its absolute majority in parliament for the first time and his plan to amend the constitution to increase presidential powers failed.

In October of the same year, at least 97 people were killed in a terrorist attack in Ankara, and the Nobel laureate Pamuk harshly attacked President Erdogan, accusing him of manipulation and calculation when it comes to the Kurds.

In an interview in "Prospect" magazine, Pamuk reflected on Erdogan's influence on Turkey's loss of secular identity.

"Before he came to power 13 years ago, everyone rightly thought that secularism was under threat. "Today, only five percent of the population is worried about Turkish secularism, but 67 percent of them think it is too authoritarian," said Pamuk.

Erdogan won a convincing parliamentary victory in 2002 thanks to the support of mainly poor and religious Turks, and since then he has been intensifying his power in the government, including the ceremonial function of the president, for which he was elected in 2015, and is trying to make it the fundamental political force of the country.

A country living in peace was suddenly plunged into war by Erdogan

Pamuk explained in an interview for the Italian "Republika" that the election defeat enraged Erdogan and that due to the lack of Kurdish support for his plan for a presidential republic, the government and the army decided to start a war against the Kurdish movement again.

"Today the whole nation understands Erdogan's calculation. At first he did not want to join the international coalition fighting the Islamic caliphate, and then he agreed when the Americans asked him to do so. But at the same time that he started bombing the caliphate, he also started bombing the Kurds. A country living in peace suddenly found itself at war, simultaneously against the Islamic Caliphate and the Kurdistan Workers' Party. "Erdogan does not want to share power, and what is worrying is that he wants to rule alone, at any cost," Pamuk said at the time.