Too fast for memory to hold

When a young colleague from Athens called me the other day to ask me about the "forgive me" campaign, I reacted as if I had just been woken from a deep sleep.

"About what?" I asked again. "You know, about the Armenians, Turks feeling sorry about and all that." What could I say, but the obvious: that I had forgotten all about it.

Since I chose Turkey as my place of residence, there have been periods when I have been seriously disturbed about the tricks played to me by my memory. There are periods which I can remember with great accuracy, and other longer periods which have settled somewhere in the back of my mind covered in a mist of nothingness, neither black nor white, periods of events that were little analyzed or explained to us, hence quickly forgotten.

Yet, there are some periods that I remember very well, like it was yesterday.

For example there is a picture in my mind that can never go away. It is the picture the "casino king," Omer Lutfu Topal, on the first page of a Turkish newspaper, leaning over the front seat of his car, just after being shot dead, with blood running down his face. From that same period of time, I also maintain a very clear recollection of a personal video shown again and again on Turkish television of a well-built man who was playing at home with his child. It was Huseyin Kocadag's in one of his last moments alive before his fatal accident at Susurluk. Of course, I remember that famous black Mercedes 600 SEL being shown over and over again after the accident, even the unfortunate driver of the truck, Hasan Gokce, who was held responsible for the crash and then could not pay the fine.

One of strongest TV faces for me those days was Mehmet Agar in his chic camel coat delivering strong speeches defending his devotion to the Turkish state and then later in a devastated state at the funeral of his daughter. I remember like now opening my balcony door every evening at 9 p.m. and checking how many people on my street would flash their lights and bang their pots and pan in protest of the Susurluk scandal. And there was another strong face on our screens then: Tansu Ciller, the prime minister, whose modern dress style had impressed my father so much that he had predicted that Turkey "had a great future with a good looking woman at the helm."

The year 1996, was a memorable year. For me, too. I had just moved to Turkey and Turkey was a country where you could immediately feel that there was a very fine line between legality and illegality, politics and corruption, light and dark. And it was then that I learned the most frequently used phrase in Turkish: "derin devlet."

Thirteen years later that first impression of Turkey is coming back as strong as the first time. As if very little has gone on in between; of course this is not true and a great deal has changed in Turkey since then. But that is how my selective memory wants me to believe.

However, there may be a reason for that; that is probably how I have caught myself during the last few weeks stuck in front of my television screen checking how many of the suspects who appear on endless "flash news" interruptions to the program flow, were the faces I first came to know from the much fewer TV screens back in 1996.

And they are many. Veli Kucuk, Ibrahim Sahin, Korkut Eken and many others whose faces I knew from 1996, they are now led as suspects of the Ergenekon case to their police cells waiting to be tried, in this gigantic legal case whose framework and legal logic is still expanding.

But many are missing; and those are the politicians who were then the legitimate face of the Turkish state.

The avalanche of events that are popping up constantly around the Ergenekon issue has been so powerful that has made us shut off parts of our brain in order to concentrate on this. So when three weeks ago we were all debating the rights and wrongs of a group of Turkish intellectuals to ask forgiveness for the Great Catastrophe of the Armenians in 1915, three weeks later we are discussing whether 1996, the year of Susurluk is organically linked with 2008 the year of Ergenekon. We are now hooked upon our daily dosage of police catches of caches of dangerous weapons, we became experts of lethal arms and dangerous explosives; we now prefer to watch police grab excavators digging out in deserted forest areas under strong spotlights for more hand grenades and bullets and regret the fact that a humble ancient pot can delay the work. We are secretly enjoying the humiliated retired generals dragged out from their homes, from the hospital, from their offices by emotionless guards who do not protect them against the ruthless TV cameras.

Long before the trials have taken place, we have already declared every suspect guilty. The Turkish media of all formats are supplying us with enough food for not thinking but judging. We have become a bulimic audience who wants more and more of the same food which these days, is called Ergenekon.

So as long as the Ergenekon monster continues to produce new flaming hisses, there is no place for Armenians.

The Armenian issue can be shelved for later. No time for the moment.

Despite the fact that Hrant Dink was assassinated two years ago, today.