u/secretvelvetbeyz

Erdoğan’s son ran a red light at high speed. A police escort with sirens was following him. While trying to escape, he hit my wife just five meters before the pedestrian crossing. She was dragged for about 30 meters and died six days later. When he was caught, he told the police he was Erdoğan’s son. From that moment on, everything changed. We went to the police station, but nobody even asked whether he had a driver’s license. When we reminded the officers, they told us, ‘Don’t be arrogant. We know what we’re doing.’”
“Immediately after the crash, municipal water trucks arrived. It was the first time in history that our street had ever been washed from one end to the other. There were 35 meters of skid marks, and everything disappeared overnight.”
“He didn’t have a driver’s license. After the accident, a license was allegedly issued as if it had been granted three months earlier. When the trial began, he never appeared in court even once. His father had sent him abroad. Erdoğan’s people were always there. Whenever we tried to seek justice for my wife, we were threatened, harassed, and pushed back.”
“All eyewitnesses to the crash were threatened and intimidated, including someone close to our family. During the trial, the families of the police officers who had failed to ask about the driver’s license and the traffic officials accused of issuing the allegedly backdated license repeatedly came to us, begging us not to pursue the case because their husbands would lose their jobs and they would be left without income. We did not file complaints against them.”
“At the time, Erdoğan was the mayor of Istanbul. That’s when we realized we were facing a giant we couldn’t fight. As a family, we eventually decided to let the case go because we believed no justice would ever come. They were simply too powerful.”

Turkish stand-up comedian Deniz Göktaş recently referred to the death of singer Sevim Tanürek during one of his performances. Shortly afterward, he was detained as part of an investigation into his show, and the case returned to public discussion in Turkey.
In 1998, Sevim Tanürek died after being struck by a car in a traffic collision involving Burak Erdoğan. The case has remained controversial for decades. The victim’s family has repeatedly alleged that the investigation and trial were affected by irregularities and that justice was never fully served.
Whether people agree with those claims or not, the case continues to be discussed because many Turks see it as a symbol of unequal accountability before the law.

The first time I was detained, I walked into the streets believing I wasn’t alone.
A politician I had voted for had been imprisoned without any convincing justification, and I genuinely believed this would bring people together. I thought it would make my friends angry. I thought even people who had never protested before would come out.
I thought there would be millions of us.
There weren’t.
We could barely gather a thousand.
Even after the police surrounded us, I didn’t fully understand what was happening.
I remember thinking,
“What do you mean? They’re not actually going to detain us for exercising a constitutional right.”
I was angry—not because I was afraid, but because I couldn’t understand how the police themselves seemed to ignore the rights they were supposed to protect.
We stood inside police lines for hours.
One circle of officers.
Another circle outside that.
Then another.
I remember feeling ashamed.
Ashamed that people outside those barricades simply watched us.
I kept asking myself,
“Am I the one who’s wrong?”
I argued with the police until the very last moment.
“What legal right do you have to detain me?” I kept asking.
The only answer I received was reverse handcuffs.
My wrists stayed tied behind my back for hours.
Fourteen women were taken to the same police station.
Some had been detained because of their hair color.
Some because they had accepted a leaflet on the street.
That was enough.
On the floor were old blue gym mats covered with filthy blankets.
For the first time in my life, I pulled my coat over my face because I wanted the air to smell different.
There was no daylight.
No clock.
No idea when—or if—I would leave.
From the tiny space left by my untied shoelaces, I watched police officers walking back and forth.
Lawyers kept telling us,
“Stay strong. Don’t sign anything.”
I kept asking them something else.
“Are people still outside?”
Because I believed that if people stopped raising their voices, we would never get out.
I refused to lie down.
For three days I sat on a wooden bench because I couldn’t bring myself to sleep under those blankets.
The same officers who decided when we could go to the bathroom went home every evening.
I kept wondering,
“Do they tell their families they simply finished another day at work?”
One of the women beside me cried because she was hungry.
An officer told her,
“We’re hungry too.”
Then lit another cigarette in front of us.
I’ll never understand that kind of indifference.
On the way to the hospital, almost everyone on the bus became sick.
After two days with almost nothing to eat, the police handed each of us two cigarettes and told us,
“Finish them in five minutes.”
Empty stomachs and forced cigarettes made many of us throw up.
One moment has never left me.
We were waiting in the hospital when one of the women quietly said,
“I wish I had something sweet.”
I noticed a chocolate bar tucked beside a police officer’s chair.
I pointed at it and said,
“She can have that.”
The officer immediately took it away.
“You’re not allowed.”
I still wonder how someone can do things like that all day and go home believing they simply did their job.
When I joined that protest, I believed our anger had reached its limit.
I believed we would finally show those in power who we were.
That didn’t happen.
A year later, many of the people whose imprisonment pushed me into the streets are still behind bars.
Artists I admire have also been detained.
Some of my own friends now tell me,
“I don’t follow the news anymore. It drains my energy.”
But when I think back, I don’t remember the politicians first.
I remember the courthouse.
Around 120 young people waited together to learn their fate.
We smiled at each other across holding cells.
We played rock-paper-scissors.
We sang folk songs.
Every time a police officer shouted,
“Be quiet!”
another cell joined the song.
None of us had even spoken to a prosecutor.
We simply waited for our names to be called.
As more and more people were released, I slowly lost hope.
I told myself,
“They’re not letting me out.”
Then I finally heard my name.
I cried while tying my shoelaces.
I cried even harder when I stepped outside and heard my friends shouting,
“Beyza!”
among families and journalists waiting at the courthouse.
Today, my pride is still wounded.
The anger inside me hasn’t disappeared.
Sleep hasn’t been enough to quiet it.
There are still so many things I don’t understand.
How can millions of people fail to stop life from moving forward?
How can so few hold so much power over so many?
And the question I ask myself most often is this:
What can one person do?
Because despite everything,
I’m still ready to try.

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If your first instinct is to hide poverty instead of addressing it, you’ve already admitted the problem.
For many of us, this is the story of modern Turkey: hide the evidence, silence the protests, and hope no one notices.

Publicly available information indicates Ankara’s shelter capacity is far lower than that number.
Where are these animals being kept?
Can authorities provide a transparent accounting of where the collected animals have been transferred and what their current condition is?
If there are official reports or records, the public deserves to see them.

Videos circulating online appear to show the killing and mistreatment of stray dogs after mass collection operations. Animal rights groups are calling for independent investigations. If you’re sharing this, please focus on verified information and documented evidence.

While NATO leaders are welcomed with red carpets, our government’s own governor confirmed 52,000 stray animals were “collected” from the streets — buried, out of sight, before the summit. Protests are banned in three cities for ten days. We know because we tried to protest and were detained.
Our elected mayors sit in prison without evidence. Eleven cities were flattened by an earthquake tied to decades of ignored building codes — codes ignored while an earthquake tax was collected from us since 1999. Public contracts go to companies connected to the same families running the country.
We’re not asking you to fix this. We’re asking you to see it. Share this. Say our name. That’s enough to start.