SCARS OF A PUTSCH

Abidin, the director’s husband, was a revolutionary in the 1970s. He fled Turkey for Vienna after the military putsch. Some of his comrades managed to escape like him, and rebuilt their lives in exile, but most were arrested, tortured and spent years in prison.

At that time, Western powers wanted to believe in Turkey’s positive development as a bulwark against the USSR and went so far as to support the Islamic brotherhoods. They did not condemn the coup d’état. Violations of human rights and the dismantling of democracy were condoned by the West because economic and geostrategic interests were stronger. Today, these same powers are astonished that Turkey has turned away from democratic ideas and towards political Islam.

This film tells the story behind the 1980 military putsch and the transformation of Turkish society in the form of a personal quest that begins with the scars on Abidin’s body: the scars of six bullets fired at point-blank range by a fascist militia. The wounds on his body have healed, but they still haunt him today. To understand what’s hidden behind them, the director (a Belgian woman) searches for traces of “her husband’s” Turkey, the one he grew up in, the one he fought for, and the one that is crumbling before his eyes. She wants to know how the putsch “operated”, how political Islam came to power in his country. Because these wounds are not just his own, they are those of an entire country.

This quest goes back and forth between Vienna and Ankara. On her journey, the director meets her husband’s family and former friends in the struggle, women and men who fought for social justice and democracy. It also takes her to communities, places and landscapes, symbolically charged and marked by the country’s transformation, as well as in the archives.

Little by little, this largely unknown page of Turkish history emerges in the form of a journey into the world of the man the director has been living with for 15 years, yet whose past she knew little about.