One Of Your NASA Coworkers Is Still In a Turkish Jail Cell
Over A Single Dollar Bill, A NASA Scientist Remains Trapped In A Turkish Prison, Houston Press
“Standing on the street, Serkan realizes they are going to arrest him. Glancing at Mustafa, Serkan hugs Kubra and asks her to take the boy inside. Two hours later the police come back. This time they walk into Serkan’s brother’s room, open the drawer of a bureau, pull out a small wooden keepsake box and produce a single American dollar bill. The dollar means that Serkan is part of the Gülenists, a movement classified as a terrorist organization in Turkey that is being blamed for a failed attempt to oust Erdogan, the police claim. But Serkan is an American citizen. He is certain this means he can get help from the U.S. government.”
NASA Employee Imprisoned By Turkey For No Reason, earlier post
He’s been in solitary for 10 months. He could eventually crack and admit to anything. I wonder if a petition to the State Dept. signed by the entire NASA workforce would get things un-stuck. Any senior leader there wanna step up?
Stories like this one — American citizens entangled with foreign police — crop up from time to time. And every time, the US State Department basically does — nothing.
Diplomats live in an odd world where “Island Time” rules.
From what little I know about such cases in the past, the State Department does exactly what you’d want it to do: press as hard as they think the foreign government will tolerate without breaking off negotiations, and doing it all out of the public eye, for fear of the same reaction. The only time I’ve seen anything succeed faster is when someone in the captive’s family knows someone who knows someone high in the ranks of the foreign government.
The model for people without such special pull is maddeningly slow, but almost always produces a release eventually, though at what cost in pain and suffering on the captive’s and captive’s family’s part presumably varies from case to case.
As the article points out, this is a special case: Dr. Golge has dual citizenship, and evidently Turkey and the US have agreed at some point in the past to let the nation where the dual citizen is handle any legal issues without intervention by the other. A good argument against naturalized US citizens keeping their citizenship in dictatorships as well.
What if someone with dual citizenship can’t give it up? A colleague from Budapest (a dual US/Hungarian citizen) once told me he can’t give up his Hungarian citizenship. According to him, that would require an formal act of government to make it official. I have no idea what the mechanism for giving up Turkish citizenship might be.
Me neither, though my advice to you is probably hateful if you still have relatives there: don’t visit your country of origin if they have a poor human rights track record. Guess that depends on how much influence Jobbik gains?
Fortunately, I don’t have this problem, although I know a few people who do. I live in my country of origin, and the United States’ human rights record isn’t too bad. Certainly not by the standards we’re talking about.
No, the State Department does not do exactly what you’d want it to do. Turkey is a client state of the US. If the US really wanted it resolved, Turkey would comply, end of story. This is continuing because Turkey knows the US government could care less.
Re-reading my comment from yesterday, I realized I’d made a possibly incorrect supposition, extrapolating a general position from a few apocryphal (at best) stories. I don’t know which side of this to believe.
Except that it sucks.
I’m sure he knows. I’m sure he cares. I suspect that the State Department has said that they will handle this. Other than ask what is going on through channels I doubt there is much he can do. If you care, call, write or e-mail your representative and senators. They can put more pressure on than Lightfoot. Start a petition on whitehouse.gov for the President to address this. If you care, don’t wait for others to do this..