Osman Kavala, sentenced to life imprisonment in Turkey, remains true to his humanism. In his absence he has now received the ifa prize.
“I believe that art can make the dream of a world community shaped by a truly universalistic humanism a reality.” The sentence with which Osman Kavala thanked the Allianz Forum in Berlin on Thursday evening from afar for the “Prize for the Dialogue of Cultures” that the Stuttgart Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (ifa) has been awarding since 2009 did not sound like a cry of despair from the dungeon .
The 65-year-old Turkish cultural patron is a phenomenon. The friendly intellectual has been in a high-security prison for alleged coup plans for five years. In April he was found without sufficient evidence sentenced to life imprisonmentThe government in Ankara ignored the release verdicts of the European Court of Human Rights and appeals from the Council of Europe. And yet the statements that the quiet man with the graying beard regularly makes are as gentle as they are visionary.
Was President Erdoğan doing himself a favor by having Kavala arrested in 2017? With his human size in the face of blatant injustice, Kavala grows with each passing day in prison to a Nelson Mandela of Turkey. The ifa prize is a gesture of solidarity, but Kavala also deserves it. With his Anadolu Kültür foundation, he initiated a dialogue between Turks, Kurds and Armenians that no Turkish government has ever succeeded in doing.
ifa President Ulrich Raulff did not fall into cheap rhetoric at the ceremony, but spoke plainly with the formula of Kavala as “hostage of an autocrat”, where officials like to flee into diplomatic vagaries. If the Kavala case is a kind of “litmus test of Turkey’s reputation in Europe”, as laudator Wolfgang Schäuble of the CDU said, it is also one of the “value-based foreign policy” of the traffic light coalition.
The artist Silvina Der Meguerditchian, one of Kavala’s companions, received a great deal of applause when, in a courageous speech, she called for the award to help “close the gap between real and moral politics”.
