Shortly after the Russian invasion began, Turkish writer Yavuz Ekinci retweeted an image from the Vaclav Havel Library Foundation.

It shows the colors of the Ukrainian flag and the words "Stand with Ukraine".

Ekinci also retweeted photos of the peace demonstration in Berlin and a picture of a woman protesting against the war.

The forty-three-year-old does it often, showing solidarity with people who experience suffering and injustice.

In 2013 and 2014, when the Kurds in the Syrian city of Kobane were desperately defending themselves against the terror of the so-called "Islamic State", he tweeted statements of solidarity and photos that were shared thousands of times on social networks at the time.

Karen Krueger

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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None of the messages called for violence, Ekinci is an extremely peace-loving person.

At the time, Turkey was in a brief process of reconciliation with the Kurds, and Ekinci posted congratulations on the Kurdish Newroz festival.

The tide soon turned, however, and things that could have been said publicly for a brief moment have since been unsaid again.

They are now once again serving as a reason to put people in jail.

On Thursday, an Istanbul court found Yavuz Ekinci guilty of "terrorist propaganda" for his statements of solidarity with Kurds, which he tweeted, and sentenced him to one year, six months and 22 days in prison.

The judge did not consider the timing of Ekinci's messages, the location, or her tone of voice.

Speaking to this newspaper after the verdict, the writer said: "It was not me who was tried and convicted, but freedom of thought and expression in our country."

Ekinci, who was born in a Kurdish village near Batman and works as a teacher in Istanbul, offers a lot of potential for attack in this regard.

He is one of the country's well-known writers and one of the few Kurdish-speaking voices in Turkish literature.

He has published numerous novels that have been translated into several languages ​​- two also into German.

Ekinci is not a political writer in the sense that he would openly denounce the grievances in Turkey.

He describes many things in secret.

In 2017's The Day a Man Came from Mount Amar, a Kurdish village awaits destruction without the perpetrators ever being named.

The novel is an outcry against the injustice that the Turkish government has been doing to the Kurdish population for decades,

In “The Tears of the Prophet”, Ekinci describes the grimaces that social indifference can take on.

In it Mehdi, an ordinary man, appears the archangel Gabriel.

From then on, Mehdi walks through his city as a prophet, whose buildings were built on the ruins of Armenian houses and churches and in whose streets the law of the strongest applies.

It is reminiscent of Istanbul in many ways.

The people Mehdi meets and wants to tell about God don't want to be saved at all.

Their world is disenchanted, it needs neither God nor a prophet.

The book was published in Turkey in 2018. Shortly thereafter, the newspaper "Akit" published two articles that described it as an attack on religion.

In other countries, such reporting has no consequences.

However, when a pro-government newspaper attacks an intellectual in Turkey, that is a signal for the army of zealous Erdogan loyalists to start hatching.

Soon after "Akit" labeled Ekinci's novel as anti-religious, criminal charges were filed against him for his social media activity, which at the time was at least four years old.

Someone must have scoured the writer's Twitter account and found eight tweets on the basis of which an indictment and now the court verdict were constructed.

The court suspended the sentence on probation.

Ekinci is not intimidated.

"As a writer, I am the soul, the memory and the conscience of our time," he says.

“It is inconceivable that I exist completely detached from what is happening in the world around me.

Of course I can't keep silent.

I have not remained silent and will not remain silent in the future.” Ekinci has announced that he will appeal.