What is more despicable than a nation doing "just enough" to address human rights violations to avoid domestic and international scandal? When a nation, while doing nothing at all, openly pretends to address human rights violations as a domestic and international public relations tactic. After extended and intense internal protests and political pressure, Turkey recently restored the citizenship of one of its famous modern poets, Nazim Hikmet. The catch is he died in exile in 1963, which exposes this empty gesture for what it is: an attempt to placate people and politicians for ulterior motives.
Sometimes turning a person, act, event or artifact into a symbol can serve to secure its place as part of a shared heritage and so become an agent of reconciliation and renewal. But when it comes to securing human rights, vacuously symbolizing progress towards doing so is not only weakly deceptive, but strongly counterproductive. Far from addressing criticism of its human rights record, Turkey post-mortem rehabilitation of Hikmet was for one unrelated purpose only: to grease the expedition of its aspirations for joining the European Union.
Somewhat satisfying the emotional and political desires of those who had long sought Hikmet's repatriation was also a convenient side-thought impetus aimed at deflecting attention from Turkey's more serious human rights problems: the (alleged or actual) genocide of Armenians at the beginning of the last century and the inhumane treatment of Kurds at the beginning of our own. The distortion is compounded by the latter being systemic and ethnically-based, and the "addressing" of the Hikmet violation being individualistic and politically-based on his unabashed leaning towards the left.
This isn't just a bad public relation tactic, it's a wrong one. And so let us remember Hikmet's personal story not as a culminating in a fake triumph of human rights, but as part of his lifelong struggle to enhance human rights in his country and around the world. These closing words of his "Invitation" double as a call for us to critically consider how human rights violations can and should be construtively addressed as current events shaping the future:
Shut the gates of plutocracy, don't let them open again,
annihilate man's servitude to man,
this invitation is ours.
To live like a tree single and at liberty
and brotherly like the trees of a forest,
this yearning is ours.
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