At the risk of sounding like a broken record.

Autocrats do what autocrats do: lock people up, steal months, years, even decades from them and mess up their lives so thoroughly that their children and grandchildren get to feel it.

I know what I'm talking about.

My father grew up in Syria under Hafez al-Assad and was tortured in a Turkish prison near the picturesque city of Mardin while fleeing to Germany in 1980.

It's nothing special, many grew up under Assad's tyranny and tens of thousands of Kurds were tortured in Turkish prisons.

Nobody destroys your life as thoroughly as autocrats and dictators.

Once again Erdogan has locked someone up.

Osman Kavala, a patron of culture.

Kavala has been in custody since 2017 and has now been sentenced to "life imprisonment" for the fantasized reason for the "attempted coup" in connection with the Gezi protests in 2013. Kavala is said to have only distributed pastries and face masks to the demonstrators at the time.

In the prosecutor's closing argument, it was also said that it was common knowledge that Kavala was particularly devoted to Armenian and Kurdish citizens.

In other words, anyone who doesn't hate Kurds and Armenians makes themselves suspicious in Turkey.

conspiracy myth, hello!

Kavala is now facing solitary confinement with no prospect of early release.

And only Erdogan could pardon him, but he considers Kavala to be an agent of the "famous Hungarian Jew Soros".

And Soros, according to Erdogan, would use his money to divide nations - conspiracy myth, hello!

Back to the verdict.

That was spoken on the day UN chief Guterres traveled to Ankara to talk to Erdogan about mediation attempts in Ukraine.

But nothing helped Kavala in the end, not the international solidarity campaigns, not the threats of sanctions from the Council of Europe and the initiated infringement proceedings, at the end of which Turkey could be thrown out of the Council of Europe.

On the contrary.

Erdogan even boasted: "We don't care what the Human Rights Court or the Council of Europe say."

Kavala is one of the best known, but by no means the only political prisoner.

Among the thousands of others is Kurdish singer Nûdem Durak, who has been accused of terrorism for singing in her native language.

And the Kurdish journalist Nedim Türfent, whose crime it was to publish a video showing Turkish police officers abusing construction workers.

In Turkey, the one who points out the dirt is considered dangerous, not the one who makes the dirt.

For years one has read that Turkey is well on the way to autocracy and only five steps away from a dictatorship.

In the last few years alone: ​​corruption, restructuring of the judiciary, dismissed university professors, imprisoned journalists, censorship.

Now you can't even talk about Emine Erdogan's 45,000-euro crocodile leather handbag without ending up in court.

Democratically elected HDP mayors were deposed and replaced by compulsory administrators, wars of aggression in north-east Syria were launched in violation of international law;

there are reports of torture and enforced disappearances.

Is that still the way to dictatorship or has it been the goal for a long time?

Turkish propaganda in Germany

The thing about autocracies and dictatorships is that they don't even stop at being dictatorships in their dominions.

Everything has to be exported.

Turkish propaganda, for example, which has also been available on the TRT German platform for two years.

Also this year on April 24th, the commemoration day of the genocide of the Armenians or, as TRT writes, the "1915 events", there is again some historical revisionism to be read.

At the same time, the “Genocide Remembrance” initiative was again denied permission to erect its memorial on the Hohenzollern Bridge in Cologne.

Instead, the 200-kilo memorial was carted away every year for the commemoration event, until a court ruled at the end of April 2022 that the memorial could remain for the time being.

We let Erdogan get away with some things.

Despite all the scandals, DITIB can do as it pleases here.

The EGM app, which you can use to denounce your work colleagues or neighbors to the Turkish security forces, conveniently from Sindelfingen and Kassel, is still freely accessible here in the app store.

And on the international stage, Erdogan seems to have regained his respect since the war in Ukraine.

What autocrats and dictatorships do is one thing, what we let them get away with as free democratic societies is another.