Narin: The Dark Face of an Era - 3
Lynch journalism, frame-up justice, and the Gürans
Media and Perception in the Narin Case
By now, I think we should know why we were locked, twenty-four hours a day and at every age, onto the incident of Narin’s disappearance, why we went to bed with Narin and woke up with Narin. Within a few days after Narin went missing, her family was targeted, in part due to a horrific journalism and media practice. Leave aside those who call themselves YouTubers, TikTok personalities, very famous or semi-famous people — I am talking about names who are treated as real journalists. They practiced a kind of dreadful reporting that trampled on journalistic ethics and professional codes. It was reporting done as if they knew nothing at all about these ethics. Perhaps they truly did not.
After all the pressure and all the devastation that the media has suffered, what we are left alone with is this kind of disastrous journalism. Until now I did not want to give any specific examples, but please, now, watch this report[1] and the previous interviews. See what poor Mother Yüksel is saying and how the journalist — who at that time had considerable impact on the public agenda — conveys it… In order to climb to the top of the agenda for angry and prejudiced crowds, she gives them exactly what they want. Is there any other explanation? If they want us to forget what they did, they must offer self-criticism and apologize for this kind of journalism.
The Responsibility of Celebrities and the Sexist Narrative
Speaking of celebrities, I did not want to reproduce it, but this post[2] is still up on X in a manner that is, to put it mildly, irresponsible. As you see, Yüksel Güran had not yet even appeared in court once, had not had the chance to defend herself, had not had the chance to explain what happened to her, and yet she was branded through a heavy, sexist insult that was reinterpreted. In response to the growing criticism against her, the owner of that post said on social media just yesterday, “Since August 21, we have only believed in the court panel, in proven evidence, and in the reasoned decision.” Yet in the first month of the incident — when neither a hearing had taken place nor a single piece of evidence had been found against her — she had shared that grave tweet without even entertaining the possibility that Yüksel Güran might be innocent. Moreover, no one who claims, in any form, a kind of rights advocacy or assumes responsibility when it comes to women’s and children’s rights can use that sexist language toward anyone, even if that person were proven guilty. In any reasonable country in the world, for a person who opens preschools here and there to use such language would draw a severe reaction. In short, they stomped for days, for months, with cleated boots on the wounded hearts of Narin’s family…
Meanwhile, for years and years, audiences had been watching all forms of domestic violence and strangeness in TV dramas at least three hours a day. Thanks to the daytime programming genre represented by Esra Erol, they had also long become familiar with so-called True Crime. In the post-truth era, the border separating reality from fiction had long been violated; the fact that the lives being trampled on were real lives had in many cases been completely ignored. In the Narin case, everyone had a storyline, and everyone wanted to shoot their own movie. Who cared about Yüksel Güran?
The Silence of Journalism
Of course, someone needed to recount what happened here in an orderly and detailed way — to be able to recount it. For example, I wish one of the journalists with a respected press tradition in that region, someone who knows the region and its people, someone who can foresee what is possible and what is not possible there, had focused on this issue. I wish someone could have seen, with the same rare perceptiveness and reflex shown in that magnificent photograph capturing the naked truth of Kemal Kurkut, the morbid attention that turned toward Tavşantepe with hatred, becoming a kind of demon-burning ritual… I wish someone had, instead of internalizing this hatred through a self-orientalist impulse or remaining entirely indifferent to what happened, properly analyzed it and investigated Narin’s killing from outside this state of frenzy.
Because I repeat once more: this incident was also a matter of investigative journalism. Unfortunately, for quite some time, no one investigated. As Pierre Bourdieu exposed years ago in his work On Television, they chose a form of newsmaking that was like mirrors reflecting each other. That was not journalism at all. Particularly in the early period of the incident, apart from journalist Rojda Altıntaş’s justifiedly cautious efforts to mention contradictions and to question Nevzat’s role, no genuine effort was made.
Yıldıray Oğur became the first to draw attention to the possibility that the family and the village might be innocent, by featuring a letter sent to him by Miham Akkul from Diyarbakır, who is doing graduate studies in France. Later on, both Yıldıray Oğur and Mihan Akkul wrote about this. However, although these writings dealt well with baseless claims and so on, they did not turn into a detailed and in-depth analysis or piece of reporting capable of drawing the attention of a broader public.
Still, the Serbestiyet circle, in the following period, not only brought to the agenda the hatred and unlawfulness directed at Narin’s family, but also continually opened space for reports and new information on problematic evidence such as the so-called narrowed-down cell-site analysis[3]. This was a very important effort. The piece I wrote in January titled We owe Narin the truth was published in a media environment that was, in this sense, a desert of truth. Considering the outlet in which it was published, it must be admitted that it was a relatively long piece. Had it not been so — that is, had it not been written at length, step by step, with the care of walking through a minefield — it is likely that both I and the outlet that published it would have faced a brutal lynching. Thankfully, that care protected me, protected bianet, and protected a family that had already suffered enough.
The Uniqueness of the Case and the Contradictions
Now let us return again to the question of how unique this case is. There are indeed families who kill their children and do terrible things to them. But in the Narin case there were so many contradictions and inconsistencies that prevent us from accepting this crude information as an explanation… Simply taking the trouble to address these inconsistencies and these contradictions that defy the normal course of life, stepping out of one’s discursive and mental comfort zone, and having the courage to do so regardless of the result — that alone would have sufficed. In other words, examining the claims that were presented as concrete evidence, examining much of the information and documentation that is actually accessible, and seeing that almost none of it has any evidentiary value — this already led us to that simple truth. Sadly, this was not done. People remained in an ideological comfort zone. A family assumed to hold great power, great money, or great influence suddenly turned into the symbolic counterpart of the AKP government — in other words, of Leviathan.
Political Symbols and the Frenzied Reaction
Yet it was impossible not to notice how truly defenseless they turned out to be in a very short time. In addition to the AKP, other hatreds — Hizbullah, Hüda Par, JİTEM — were added to the picture… It was as if, if Tavşantepe and the Güran Family were punished in the most merciless way, all the missed opportunities up to now would somehow be redeemed. I have written about this before. I will not dwell on it. It was as if, for the first time, the impunity in cases of violence against women and children had finally reached an end, and as if an opportunity had emerged to punish the killers in the person of a supposedly powerful family aligned with the government, and no one wanted that opportunity to be lost. It would not be allowed to slip away.
Yet the family was not one of the powerful families of the region. The AKP government’s representatives in the region should have known that better than anyone — and I believe they realized it instantly. And they largely abandoned both Tavşantepe Village, said to be the core of their own voter base, and the Güran Family to the frenzy of a media and public reaction turned hysterical. A single sentence spoken — probably offhand and to this day unexplained — by the AKP Diyarbakır MP also, unfortunately, had a significant effect in destroying the family. In short, the government-state that the Güran family wanted to trust, and did trust, simply placed its mask before the Tavşantepe hunters and quietly stepped aside.
The Repeated Face of the Frame-Up
Moreover, if the family is innocent — and I believe those on the government side formed that opinion — the experienced legal professionals who intervened in the case would have seen it in the judicial process… Yet things at home did not match things in the marketplace. Thus, they did not prevent the torture and the imposition of aggravated life sentences on the residents of a village said to be largely close to the AKP, on members of a wounded family, in the so-called Year of the Family. In sum, this was also a kind of frame-up case. Those who struggled for years against the Kobanî Frame-Up Case foresaw that, if silence prevailed here, such frame-ups would engulf society as a whole. In fact, the Gezi Trial had emerged with the same frame-up pattern. I think what was not taken into account was that now, setting aside “opposition” or not, any ordinary citizen in any non-political case — even purely criminal matters — could suddenly fall prey to frame-ups of a massive scale that spill across the entire country.
Through days and nights of hearings, from Kobanî to Gezi to all the political cases dragged toward statute of limitations, judges, chief judges, and prosecutors — who sat there in the courtroom as if filing their nails under the table or surfing the internet at leisure, exhibiting not a pursuit of justice but merely a presence — had by now perhaps nothing left to offer… These legal actors, who for years had never been entrusted with any meaningful share of responsibility for ensuring justice, and who themselves had never tried to claim such a responsibility, had also lost any reflex for justice in criminal cases.
The truly horrifying thing, however, was that lawyers who for years had intervened in those same courtrooms in political trials, when they took part in a criminal case like the Narin Case, became unable to see the sack being pulled over the head of the victim family, or the frame-up, because they identified the victim family with the centers of power and authority. The reason why they too maintained a similar lack of reflex or were drawn into defenses focused not on achieving results but on performance and rhetorical dominance must be sought, at least in part, here.
The Blunting of Critical Vision
Critical vision had become so dulled that it was no longer sufficient to grasp and accept the simple truth standing in plain sight. Speaking to the cameras became the prevailing stance. The effort to produce answers for the broad masses who reflected their unrestrained anger at the political power onto Narin’s family also prevented seeing the chain of events in the Narin Case, as a criminal case, in all its starkness.
The political character of the Narin case must be understood in this way.
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