Does luck find you, or do you create your own luck?
I think it will be easier to answer this question after reading about the process of preparing the Unknown Prisoners documentary and book, which I am about to describe!
There is no doubt that TRT holds a special place for every journalist of my generation who witnessed the era of a single-channel television system.
It is especially a point of reference for those working in television journalism. Our older brothers and sisters who worked at TRT were role models for us in their bearing, their diction, and their professional ethics. So, getting together with them was a wonderful opportunity to benefit from their experience. In my view, one of the most important aspects of journalism is listening to the experiences of our seniors in the profession and moving forward by learning the necessary lessons. That is why I believe the book you are holding now is extremely valuable to those of our colleagues who are just starting out in the profession.
From this perspective, the Foreign Press Association’s visit to Konya in 2009 was one of the turning points in my professional life. A delegation from the Ankara Journalists’ Association accompanied us on our visit to Konya, and we had the opportunity to meet some very distinguished veterans of our profession. One of those journalists was Ertürk Yöndem. Being on the same trip as Ertürk Yöndem and other master journalists like him felt like a dream beyond my wildest hopes.
At the dinner hosted in our delegation’s honor by the Konya Journalists’ Association, I had the chance to sit beside Ertürk Yöndem. Eager to hear his stories, we began chatting happily and continued throughout the evening. I suppose my keen interest in listening to his memories encouraged him to share with me some of his deeper professional recollections. As the evening wore on, he began to describe the days he was taken prisoner in Cyprus during the Cyprus Peace Operation, and what I heard deeply affected me. Perhaps it was a journalist’s instinct, but I told him that I wanted to record what he had told me. When he gladly agreed to give me an interview, I don’t think I can adequately describe how excited I was. But I had a problem. The visit I was taking part in was intended to develop cooperation with the Turkish press. I was the only person from the television channel I worked for who had joined the visit, and just in case, I had brought Ada TV’s microphone windscreen with me. But my cameraman wasn’t with me.
Still, I had to do that interview.
As part of our program, we had visited Selçuk University’s Faculty of Communication. The relationship we had established there could give me a chance to conduct the interview. So I asked the dean of the faculty for technical support. Thankfully, they didn’t turn me down and helped me carry out the interview. Ertürk Yöndem told me that there were also Turkish Cypriots being held secretly at the Limassol Police Headquarters, where they themselves were being secretly detained, and that they had rescued them after obtaining a list of their names. According to Ertürk Yöndem, nobody knew that the journalists or the mujahideen were there. After hearing this, the only thing on my mind during the interview was: Where could I find the list? At the end of the interview, I asked Ertürk Yöndem if he had a copy of the list. Unfortunately, Yöndem didn’t have it. In any case, I returned to Cyprus with the recording and aired the interview on Ada TV.
Was finding this story luck, or had I created my own luck? You decide…
This interview was chosen as the interview of the year in 2009.
It all began with that awards ceremony.
The interview we had aired was watched with great interest by those attending the awards ceremony. After accepting the award, I said in my speech that I was trying to find the list. Three days after the ceremony, my phone rang. I answered without knowing that it would be the most important phone call of my professional life to date. The excited voice on the other end said: “Hello, Cem Kar. I’m one of the prisoners Ertürk Bey mentioned, who was held in secret. I have the list in question. How can we meet?”
The person who called me was Fethi Akıncı, one of the 75 Turkish Cypriot mujahideen who had been secretly detained. I met him right away, got the list, and interviewed him. What I heard in that interview astonished me. I set to work with the aim of interviewing all the Turkish Cypriots named on the list who were still alive, and bringing their stories to the public through a documentary. I had a long road ahead of me, and the work was difficult. The people on the list had no surnames. At the time, people’s fathers’ names were added to their names and used in place of surnames. This made my task very difficult. Another challenge was my heavy workload. At the time, I was writing a newspaper column, teaching at the university in the mornings, hosting a television program in the afternoons, and working at the radio station in the evenings. On weekends, I spent my time looking for the people on the list who were still alive and interviewing them. There were people who helped me a great deal. Apart from Fethi İzzet (now known as Fathi Akıncı), I received the most important support from Ahmet Mustafa (now known as Ahmet Ced). They believed in this project as much as I did and helped me enormously in finding the people named on the list.
Besides Ertürk Yöndem, there were 10 other veteran journalists from Turkey, and like Ertürk Yöndem, they too had been taken prisoner. These journalists were Mete Akyol, Ziya Ergun, Yücel Hacaloğlu, Hüdai Bayık, Ahmet Kahraman, Teoman Fehim, Hami Sami Coşar, Sermet İpekçioğlu, Eyüp Sabri Kapıdağ, and Cengiz Kapkın. As I researched the incident, I also came across the name of Ergin Konuksever, who had been wounded and held in the same place. (I will describe the encounter between Ergin Konuksever and the journalists later in this article.) Along with the Turkish Cypriots, I now had to find the journalists in Turkey as well.
I witnessed some intriguing events while researching the names.
I met one of the people on my list while hosting a program. At the time, I had invited a Turkish Cypriot living in Australia as a guest on the program I presented on Ada TV. As he described what had happened to him, he began talking about the subject I was researching. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. During the program, I checked my list and realized he was one of the people I was looking for. At the end of the program, he agreed to be interviewed for the documentary.
It was very difficult to reach Cengiz Kapkın, one of the journalists in Turkey and an important figure for the documentary. After 1974, Kapkın had left journalism, which made him even harder to find. The first thing I thought of was to call directory assistance and ask for his number. I got the phone numbers of five people with that name. I called each one and eventually reached Cengiz Kapkın. He had settled in Bodrum. I went there and conducted our interview.
As my research went deeper, one of the intriguing things I came across was the story of Ergin Konuksever’s wounding, the shooting of Adem Yavuz, and the shared fate of Emine and Mehmet Mesaryalı. When the second operation began, Ergin Konuksever and Adem Yavuz were taking part in the operation on the Mesaoria plain. Since the facilities available at the time were not like those we have today, film was first sent by helicopter to Adana and then by plane to Istanbul. As Yavuz and Konuksever desperately looked for a way to get the photographs they had taken to the helicopter that was due to depart from Nicosia, soldiers stopped a minibus speeding through the village where they were (Ergenkon). Raşit Erden, the village headman who was driving, told the soldiers that there was a pregnant woman and her husband in the vehicle, that she was in labor, and that they needed to get to a hospital in Nicosia as soon as possible. When they heard this, Adem Yavuz and Ergin Konuksever said they needed to go to Nicosia and asked if they could accompany them. With the approval of Raşit Erden and the soldiers, they set off for Nicosia. Near Hamitköy, they took a wrong turn and headed toward Greek Cypriot positions. At the first shot fired from the south, the driver, Raşit Erden, died on the spot, and the vehicle stopped with a harsh screech of its brakes. A terrifying ordeal began. Then Ergin Konuksever calmly got out of the vehicle, showed his press card, and shouted, “Journalist.” But he too was shot and wounded in the shoulder. The Greek Cypriot soldiers stopped firing and took those in the vehicle prisoner at gunpoint. Their first stop was Nicosia Hospital. Ergin Konuksever received first aid. The pregnant Emine Mesaryalı was taken to the delivery room. Mehmet Mesaryalı and Adem Yavuz, meanwhile, were interrogated and tortured by the soldiers. After Ergin Konuksever received initial treatment at the hospital, he and Mehmet Mesaryalı, with Adem Yavuz between them, walked handcuffed toward the prison van that would take them to the Limassol Police Headquarters, where they were to be detained. At that moment, a Greek Cypriot soldier shot Adem Yavuz in the stomach for no reason. The soldier was quickly taken away. Adem Yavuz was rushed into surgery. In the end, Emine Mesaryalı gave birth, but the Greek Cypriot doctors there said the baby had died. Adem Yavuz underwent surgery several times, but to no avail; he became a martyr. Mehmet Mesaryalı and Ergin Konuksever were taken to the Limassol Police Headquarters, where the Turkish Cypriot mujahideen were being held in secret. A few days later, they met there with the other 10 journalists who had come from Turkey.
The facts I came across while investigating the story behind a list I had obtained allowed me to set the record straight. In the process, I learned previously unknown details about Adem Yavuz, the first and only journalist from the Turkish press to be killed during the Cyprus Peace Operation.
Finding Takis Çagaris, who took the journalists to the Limassol Police Headquarters where they would be detained after they were captured, and who at the time was Makarios’s chief of personal security, was very important to my research. The only thing I knew about him was that EOKA-B members tried to kill the journalists on their way to Limassol, and Takis protected them. Hasan Kahveci, one of our veteran journalists, helped me greatly at this point. Takis had written a book and collected in it his memories of the journalists who came from Turkey during the Peace Operation. He was trying to reach the journalists, while I was trying to reach him… At this point, Hasan Kahveci acted as an intermediary, and I got the chance to interview Takis. I went even further and brought Takis together in Istanbul with the veteran journalist Mete Akyol, one of the journalists, 37 years later.
Finding the first covertly filmed footage in the history of Turkish television was an invaluable detail for the work I was preparing. Amid the chaos in which the journalists were taken prisoner, Ertürk Yöndem, who was working as a cameraman at TRT at the time, turned on his camera and managed to record the people who arrested them. When the journalists were captured, the Greek Cypriots didn’t touch the camera or look at the recordings, and the footage survived until they were freed. In Ertürk Yöndem’s words, “the camera wasn’t hidden; the filming was.” Thankfully, Ertürk Yöndem gave me the footage, and I was able to use it in my research.
Was all of this luck, or had I created my own luck? You decide again…
As part of my project, I interviewed the mujahideen while also questioning myself. I couldn’t help asking myself whether it was right to ask questions that brought those days back to mind and plunged people into grief again. In many interviews, the mujahideen cried or became deeply distressed as they recalled those days. I was overcome by the same sorrow and had to stop the interviews partway through. My motivation was to have those who had lived through those days tell today’s young people something about them. The mujahideen had also been held secretly for more than a month: neither they nor their families had heard from one another. They were considered missing. In fact, memorial services had been held for some of them. So, what does it mean to be missing? What did those who were considered missing for a time go through? Through this project, which I prepared around those questions, we came to understand the psychology and experiences of those who had gone missing. And, of course, I also got answers to questions such as: What does it mean to come face to face with death at every moment?
The interviews I did with the journalists brought unforgettable moments, as I tried to carry out the difficult task of asking questions of masters of the art of questioning. Believe me, it’s very difficult…
One day, I would be in Lefke, Doğancı, or Gaziveren for interviews. Another day, I would be in Ankara, Istanbul, or Bodrum, trying to reach the people on my list. One day I would make a meal of halloumi, bread, and tomatoes in Gemikonağı; another day, I would be dining at Çırağan Palace in Istanbul. I would meet and interview our founding president, Rauf Raif Denktaş, regularly. On the other hand, I would also visit Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew.
In short, the interview I conducted with Ertürk Yöndem in Konya sent me down a path that brought me together with different people in different settings, gave me the chance to experience every aspect of journalism, and allowed me to use every technique.
And so, as the result of two years of research, the Unknown Prisoners documentary film and book came into being.
I think the answer to the question of whether all this was luck or whether I created my own luck is this: “People create their own luck. Opportunities always come your way; the real challenge is to recognize them, work hard, and, most importantly, believe in yourself.”
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