Some people do not choose their comfort zone. Because giving up what they know is right is heavier for them than losing. That's why they walk knowing the price. In this country, these people are called “iron chickpeas”.
Uğur Mumcu was like that. He knew he could live in silence. Even if he didn't write, no one would hold him to account. But he wrote. He wrote about state-cult-gun-money relations. He told the truth at the wrong time. He paid the price with his life.
Ahmet Taner Kışlalı was the same way. He could have stayed in academia, stayed away from politics and lived a safer life. He didn't. He did not step back from secularism, reason, the Republic. He wrote, he warned, he was left alone. He paid the price with his life.
Türkan Saylan could have kept quiet. She could have lived a comfortable medical life. She did not. She spoke for girls, for science, for secular education. She was targeted, discredited; even her illness was made the subject of politics. But she did not retreat. Iron chickpeas sometimes come with a white coat.
This line is not unique to us. George Orwell could have lived more comfortably in silence. He didn't. He wrote the language of totalitarianism. He paid the price with poverty, loneliness and his health. Rudolf Virchow could have considered diseases only a matter of germs. He didn't. He included poverty, inequality and political conditions. He was exiled and ostracized, but he did not back down.
One of the most prominent examples of this line in Turkish politics is Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu.
Years ago, I heard this word for the first time from someone who had worked with him. He was described as a bureaucrat who would not do what his superiors wanted him to do if it was contrary to the law and legislation. “He would not choose the easy way out,” he said. “If it was wrong, he would not do it, no matter who asked him to.”
This line did not change when he entered politics. If he wanted, he could follow the power. He could have remained silent and protected. But he chose to limit power. Because in his understanding of politics, power was not a privilege to be used, but a responsibility to be controlled.
He paid the price for this. He was lynched, insulted. He was left alone by those closest to him. He was stabbed by his own companions. In the presidential elections, he called the “gang of five” and openly said that he would be held to account. This statement disturbed not only the government but also the big capital circles. Everyone did their best to make him lose. And they succeeded.
But he did not retreat. He saw the Republic as a trust, not a political tool. He defended law instead of fear, principle instead of loyalty. He was tried to be diminished as “Mr. Kemal”, but that word fell elsewhere. He became the name of a stance that points to consistency, not noise.
This is why Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu is an “iron chickpea”: Not in his hardness, but in his unbending. Not in his showmanship, but in not backing down.
Not everyone who pays the price is right.
But most of those who remain right pay the price.
There are many winners in this country;
Those who are remembered are often those who resist.
This is what it means to be an iron chickpea:
Not easily chewed, not easily swallowed.
All hail Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu.
All hail his companions who stood upright with him.
Those who do not leave principle alone, who do not negotiate value.
And those who walk knowing the price.