Five Days with an Atheist Socialist, a Democratic Kurd, and an Agnostic Turk…

Freedom Convention Turkey 2025: Six Years On, Meeting Face-to-Face for the First Time

The Freedom Convention Turkey 2025 has reached its sixth year—but for the first time, we gathered in person. And it was extraordinary.

For five days, people of Turkey scattered across the world sat at the same tables. We spoke about things that are hard to speak about; we questioned taboos, prejudices, and anger. But we did it with open hearts, and—most importantly—by truly listening to one another.

So what happened? What did we hear? What did we reach?

The differences we imagine separate us are not insurmountable mountains when placed beside the solidarity we are capable of building. When we speak honestly and listen courageously, there is nothing we cannot understand together, no wound we cannot begin to heal.

I want to share a few moments that moved me, challenged me, and taught me profoundly. For years, I had only known her through telephone and Zoom—an atheist socialist, as she calls herself. This was the first time we met in person. We spent five full days together, day and night. At first we were both slightly nervous—unsure what to say, what not to say. But once we understood that both of us were open-minded, comfortable, and ready to listen, everything eased.

In that natural ease, we examined our pasts, our present, our identities—while tearing down the walls imposed on us by those in power, by rigid ideologies, by barbed-wire traditions. In the mornings, while I prepared breakfast listening to a little Grup Yorum, a little Sezen Aksu, a little Tarkan, a little Aynur, she looked at me in disbelief: “Do you really listen to this?” she asked. I teased her by pointing at the prayer mat she had brought as a gift—“Some atheist socialist you are!”

We talked about democracy, freedom, change, resistance—only to realize that we wanted similar things, just using different words and walking from different streets to get there. I took her to a halal Japanese restaurant and joked, “Don’t worry, all the meat is halal,” knowing full well she had never asked for that. I had green tea; she ordered an alcoholic drink while looking me straight in the eye. I nodded—“Whatever you like.” During one event, I slipped to the back corner to pray. She waited for me.

“When are you going to switch paths and become a socialist?” she teased later.

“Why do you want to put me in a box?” I replied. “I can live my faith and be a socialist, a feminist, a freedom advocate. Sometimes one, sometimes all, sometimes none. Humans are dynamic—we change, we transform. That’s the beauty of it.”

Then we met with Professor Efe Çaman and former Sur Mayor Abdullah Demirbaş. We had meals, visited congressional offices, joined panels, recorded a discussion program, drank tea, met with the Kurdish diaspora, visited the African American Museum, and eventually rented a car to drive from Washington, D.C., to New Jersey. In short: we talked, and we listened.

Abdullah Bey described the multilingual public services they offered at Sur Municipality; how they built or restored temples for Yazidis, Syriacs, Jews, and Alevis; and how he lives with the emotional complexity of being a democratic activist father while his own son once joined the armed struggle in the mountains. “Let’s not compete over whose pain is greater; let’s not be divided by our pain,” he told us. “Let’s unite our pain and struggle together on common ground.”

Professor Çaman, as many know, is an agnostic academic in exile who was branded with the fetö (state imposed stigma on dissidents in Turkey) label. Think about that for a moment: an agnostic accused of belonging to a religious community (!)—only a dictatorship could fuse these contradictions into a single identity. The regime created yet another sack—this one called fetö—and tossed in Turks, Kurds, religious, secular, atheist, Sunni, Alevi, Armenian, right-wing, left-wing—everyone.

With such forced homogenization, how are we still unable to unite? I genuinely cannot understand it.

Difference is not division. Difference is abundance. It is richness. Why can we not grasp this basic truth as the people of Turkey? Instead of condemning people over a tweet, a word, their backgrounds, their ancestors—why don’t we try sitting at a table and listening? It’s such a simple, powerful solution. Of course, nothing will be solved in a day, a month, or a year—but everything begins with a single moment.

At one panel, Professor Çaman highlighted something many missed: the children—those with no guilt, no ideology, yet who pay the highest price for these conflicts. His daughter wrote in a school assignment:

“The cancellation of my passport changed my life in a single day. I want to believe I’ve overcome it, but writing this now, I see that I haven’t. Everything I lived through has shaped who I am today.”

None of us has the right to suffocate a child’s life or future in darkness. None of us has the right to ruin the very present that builds their tomorrow.

As we toured the African American Museum—Professor Çaman and I—we discussed confrontation, memory, transformation. And suddenly—bingo!—a brilliant project idea hit all of us at once. Stay tuned; it’s coming soon.

Exiled academic Dr. Murat Can expressed the same issue with a different depth: “Every number is a life—a child’s scream, a young person’s suicide, a spouse’s grief, a mother’s tears, a father dying in prison.”

Azra, a university student whose father spent years in prison, shook us to our core with her words:

“This conversation isn’t just about one place; it is about our collective stand against all forms of oppression. Children and youth suffer the most. Society is divided, and many remain silent—out of fear of losing jobs, fear of being labeled, fear of being called terrorists.

I am my dad’s daughter. I will not abandon my beliefs or what is right—not even at the cost of my life. Everyone must have a stance, and every stance has a price. My father and others like him paid that price with their lives and existence. Are you ready to stand tall, no matter the cost?”

AST Silent Screams curator Aslıhan Kaş echoed this resilience with a quote from Ali İsmail, the Alevi youth killed during the Gezi protests:

“Authoritarian regimes give birth to the individuals who stand against them.”

Exiled journalist Adem Yavuz Arslan described how repression expands from individuals to families and entire communities:

“I have hundreds of cases filed against me—including three aggravated life sentences. Despite his illness, my father was harassed. He died not long after. I watched his funeral on FaceTime.”

We even recreated, for everyone there, a symbolic picture of what we meant by shared struggle: we transformed the “Kum Saati” (Hourglass) program that Abdülhamit Bilici and Efe Çaman host into a four-person conversation around two coffee tables—talking not about problems alone, but about real, sustainable solutions.

There is much more to tell, more than fits in a single piece. Maybe someday we’ll do a live broadcast and share it all together. But here is the essence:

Not every Turk, every Sunni, every Hizmet (Gulen) movement volunteer, every Kurd, every secularist, every socialist is the same. We’re talking about millions of people— millions of names, lives, identities, stories. Stereotyping is the tool of authoritarian regimes, not of peoples. And stereotyping inevitably turns into othering—into dehumanization.

But we need those differences—those colors, shades, beliefs, ideas—if we ever hope to save our country, and our world, from the fires and transform them into blooming, fragrant gardens. This is not a utopia. This is real, and reachable.

And it begins simply—with all of us sitting together at the same table.

The post Five Days with an Atheist Socialist, a Democratic Kurd, and an Agnostic Turk… appeared first on Advocates of Silenced Turkey.

from Advocates of Silenced Turkey https://silencedturkey.org/five-days-with-an-atheist-socialist-a-democratic-kurd-and-an-agnostic-turk
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