The officer who shot a protester in the head this summer is doing everything he can to hide his identity in court…
It gets weirder. At the first hearing in September, there were five people sitting in the defendant’s seating area, so the lawyers for Sarisülük’s family didn’t know which one was Şahbaz [the officer who murdered the protester, Sarisülük]. Sarisülük’s lawyers added that at this hearing, around 80 police officers—not in uniform—showed up at the courtroom. Eventually, the court forced Şahbaz’s cohorts to fall back. But when the real Şahbaz emerged, there was something peculiar about him. “The officer who appeared in the video [of the incident] and the person in the courtroom did not look the same,” says Hüseyin Aslan, one of the lawyers representing Sarisülük’s family along with the state-appointed prosecutor.
The reason: He was wearing a wig and a fake mustache. Both disguises came loose as a scuffle broke out between Şahbaz and Sarisülük’s relatives during the hearing, and the wig wound up on the floor. Neither the police nor Şahbaz have commented about his costume, though some observers say it may be for his protection. Sahbaz’s lawyer said that his client was going to be lynched by Sarisülük’s family.
The weirdness, which does not end there but continues to the end of the post, is not only a symptom of the gap between the two forms of state power—the ideological apparatus and the repressive one—but also between the modern state and the older and deeper order of the family. Turkish society seems to be still tied to the tension we find in the heart of the ancient Greek play Antigone—the tension between the rights of the state (peace, compliance, respect) and the rights of the family (the right to bury and claim the debt on their dead).
