NOTE TO SELF: NEVER VISIT TURKEY
Metal Insider has the inside (see what I did there?) scoop, as originally reported in The Irish Times, on a recent incident in Turkey in which five metal heads in town for a music festival made the mistake of throwing horns at a passing convoy of cars with darkened windows. I’m just gonna print a huge chunk of the story now, as it’s pretty funny/disturbing shit:
“The tinted windows of one of the cars opened and a guy in dark glasses shouted ‘what the hell are you doing’,” says Yusuf Sengul, who was attending the first day of a heavy metal festival with his friends.
Five minutes later, the men in black came back with police, bundled Sengul and four others into cars and took them to a police station.
“They said they were acting on the orders of the prime minister,” Sengul remembers. “We were laughing. We thought it was a joke.”
But it wasn’t. Accused of “disrespect of a senior official”, the five youngsters spent the rest of the day and night being taken from one police station to another.
“I unfortunately saw the state of some of our young people, and it was depressing,” prime minister Tayyip Erdogan told reporters the day after, before news of the arrests had appeared in the media. “This endless, uncontrolled moral erosion is really worrying. We must defend our family structure.”
A former Islamist who heads a “conservative democrat” party that has been in power since 2002, Erdogan is well-known for his outbursts of intolerance.
Dozens of caricaturists who satirised him have been fined. His advisers lean on media patrons to remove journalists who take too independent a line.
But the arrest of the heavy metal fans shows signs of blowing up in his face. On July 27th, the opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP, held a press conference with two of the fans to condemn what had happened.
“We didn’t see this level of intolerance even from the fascists of September 12th,” CHP’s Istanbul head Gursel Tekin told reporters, referring to the brutal junta that took power in 1980. “A yearning for dictatorship never did anybody any good. Everybody needs democracy.” CHP lawyers are now working with some of the fans to open a case for wrongful arrest.
All five were released without charge after 21 hours in custody, but not before they had been handcuffed, fingerprinted, subjected to repeated questioning and – bizarrely – forced by the police to listen to a cocktail of classical Turkish music and pop.
The article concludes:
A fan of the German heavy metal band Kreator, Yusuf Sengul shares the younger Turkish generation’s complete disinterest in the politics of music. “The prime minister should pity himself,” he says. “We pity him.”
In my youth here in NYC, I was picked up by the cops on several occasions for total bullshit, but it was enough to teach me never to tempt fate by, say, throwing horns at a convoy with tinted windows.
That being said, this is obviously bullshit. And it would be pretty funny if five metal dudes inadvertently ruined the career of a right-wing politician.
-AR
