When I joined protests against the looming Iraq invasion in 2002, my American friends thought I was being exceptionally brave because I was only here on a student visa. I laughed. I also laughed when my fellow protesters angrily chanted, “This is what a police state looks like!” at the police cars idling across the street while officers ambled around.
You have no idea what an actual police state looks like, I told my friends. In my home country, Turkey, thousands were disappeared in the two decades following the 1980 military coup.
This word does not fit the English language. Disappeared? As a transitive verb? It’s part of a language of terror familiar to many around the world. “Desaparecidos,” in Spanish. In Turkey, the distraught relatives of “kaybedilenler” hold vigils on Saturdays. In Argentina, the Madres de Plaza de Mayo on Thursdays. In Sri Lanka. Bangladesh. Chile. Belarus. Egypt. Myanmar. El Salvador. Long list.
When I told my friends back in Turkey about the things Americans did and said, they guffawed, assuming I was making the whole thing up. Come on, tell us what’s actually happening. The police just sitting back and allowing people to organize protests and publish fiery op-eds? To people in Turkey, it was inconceivable. When I stuck to my story, they accused me, only half in jest, of being a paid propagandist for the C.I.A.
But I had been converted. A true believer. I had become free speech-pilled, as the kids say, after 9/11 as I watched in astonishment how many spoke out, not just in dissent but sometimes in shocking, incendiary sentiments. It didn’t always make them popular, but they didn’t face government retribution at the magnitude I was bracing for.
I knew the government violated some civil rights, of course, especially when it came to Arab Americans and occasionally protesters. A 2002 report said hundreds were targeted on the pretext of visa violations. As a Middle Easterner, I expected governments to break rules and violate rights, but this wasn’t at the scale or of the nature that would effectively terrorize dissenters into silence. That’s the logic behind those that do the disappearing: the impunity, the uncertainty, the endless agony. The terror that descends like a suffocating layer of tar on everyone.
But America was different. The odds were hugely in one’s favor against government retribution for speech or protest. The First Amendment wasn’t just for show. Americans meant it. I kept protesting. We lost. The war happened. I graduated.
Now, little more than two decades later, Americans are beginning to understand that disappeared can refer to an act of force. Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts graduate student from Turkey here on a visa, believed in the American ideal of free speech, signing an opinion article in a student newspaper in support of a resolution passed by her university’s student government.
Then, about a year later there’s a video. She is walking down the street, chatting on her phone with her mom on her way to break her Ramadan fast. Twelve hours of hunger and thirst. Sixty-four days of the new administration.
There on the street, a group of people suddenly surround her. No uniforms. Hoodies and masks. One of them snatches her phone. She screams. She says she wants to call the police. She still believes they couldn’t be the police. Not in the United States. They grab her. We’d learn that for a long time, she thought they were kidnappers about to kill her. Her lawyer and her family couldn’t find her till much later.
The video ends right as they stuff her into an unmarked black S.U.V., and disappear her.
