Narin's true secret

Throughout the novel, Madame Defarge knits the family crests of the aristocrats who persecuted the people in the courts of the French Revolution. In Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, the dour woman who runs a tavern with her husband adds names with knitting needles while she works at the counter, gossips and watches the trials. She knits and knits. Members of the old order, nobles condemned to death, parade in her knitting.

Since the disappearance of little Narin in a small village in Diyarbakır, millions of people have been working like detectives, adding up every finding, every guess, every sensation, every contradiction in the statements of the suspects, trying to draw a picture of a family, a village, an order from every scrap of information. Power relations, symbolised in the person of the "uncle", the village chief, appeared in the interweaving of the people.

The primary defensiveness of the gendarmerie's search and investigation, the uncanny elements of 'provincial sociology', the fear of the 'strong family', the patriarchal darkness, HÜDA PAR, the Koran school, the dark relations between local power centres, the anatomy of the villagers, who seem to be organised in lies... In a case where all this was tied up in an inextricable knot, finding Narin's killer meant getting to the bottom of a bigger mystery.

Many children have disappeared and been murdered in this country. Some have been found dead, others are still being searched for. The world has visibly become a worse place for children, many of whom are crushed in the gears of industry, left destitute for a morsel of bread and confronted with countless cases of abuse of their defenceless bodies. Narin, playful, cute, cheerful, full of life; a child whose clothes did not fit into the many migrations taught to girls at an early age and who went to Qur'an classes wearing a green headscarf and an elifba; a child who was both urban, peasant, Kurdish and outside the scope of the state's perception of Kurds; suddenly became the symbol of the innocence of a people destroyed by a disaster that sucked everything, every value and identity into its vortex.

If the mystery of Narin's murder in that small village were solved, the mystery of the religious-political Leviathan would be understood, along with the monster that devoured the life of a small child.

The mystery of why personal lives collapse with a great crack every day, the inability to make ends meet, the injustice; the crushing of others while some rise with the marginalised clan, the lawlessness, the correspondence with Sisi who was a coup plotter yesterday and a brother today, the trade with Israel while shedding crocodile tears for Palestine, and the economic staff who say "we are doing well" while hunger is a reality, The need to unveil the unfathomable secret behind a series of contradictory and unregulated issues, in which the 'what goes around comes around' sheikh, to whom the sycophants and interest groups have given a sacred halo, has played a role, has reached the point of explosion with Narincik.

But this is a national explosion. As we have seen in many cases, the peculiar way in which the potential of the people, which has to overcome a series of cultural and moral barriers in order to be transformed into energy, has found its strongest grip, its most legitimate and unifying force in the idea of children. The knowledge that childhood is free of identity and politics has united the stubborn conscience of the people.

The Narin case has now shown more than the spontaneous establishment of provincial sociology. The uncle, who was the mukhtar in Tavantepe at a time when countless replicas of one-man rule were being distributed, is now a modern feudal capitalist overlord, taking and distributing his share of the rent. The guns and bullets hidden in the father's house merge with the spirit of the ready-made population who say: 'There are some people living in our complex, we will finish the work we left unfinished on 15 July'. The AKP MP Galip Ensarioğlu, who says 'I shouldn't say what I know because the family is my friend', is the family's contact with the government. In the midst of all this, the secret that is being covered up with two marriages, incest, adultery, animal abuse, child molestation and murder is actually a story of governance. It is about the state of the country.

How many other Tavantepe villages are like this one, in limbo, so close to the city and the airport, where the ruling family is so rich, where Porsches roam the streets, where the zoning of the surrounding area has capitalised on the land of the village landlord, where the archaic and the new live together? Who knows how many more Narin will fall victim to family rent sharing? Who knows how many more children will be wasted for the survival of the corrupt family, environment and social order?

The form of power that feeds its caliphate based on profit, rent and the division of the sovereignty mandate in localities with what it steals from the pockets of the people, distributes its own corruption as a hyena share from top to bottom to its subcontractors at lower levels. They know that they will be protected in any case. They are the loyal extremists of this regime. Narin's massacre gathered the population divided by the knife of power, the same people in the same place and different people in different places. The mystery of the class has been removed to the point of saying that the king is naked with the insistence and stubbornness of the people.

Didn't the former Minister of Defence say, on the day the schools were opened, that the purpose of education is not to acquire knowledge, but to fear and obey God? Without creating an ignorant and poor, ummah and silent, cowardly and helpless population, the flywheel belt of top-down power cannot turn.

This was the secret of Narin's innocence, which was known but could not be expressed. It was pursued and woven into the fabric of publicity with question marks.