WE HAVE DESERTIFIED

Our hearts are burning differently this summer. The fire that started in Ildır reached Çeşme. Gaziemir and Seferihisar were covered in ash. News of fires is coming from all over the country. 

Municipalities, which do not have the authority to purchase firefighting aircraft, are helpless. Firefighting crews cannot keep up.  

So far, 50 thousand of our people have been evacuated from their homes. 

While some are fighting to keep things alive, others do not stop trying to kill.  

A scream is rising from every corner of the country. It is not just our forests that are burning; our consciences are also drying up. A silent scream rising simultaneously from smoke-covered mountains, from courthouse halls buried in silence, from the roots of a burnt tree, and from the hearts of thousands of people who have been wronged.

Just like our soil, which gets scorched a little more every summer, we too are becoming barren from within. 

Forests burned right before our eyes, concrete structures built in their place, olive trees cut down, people silenced… 

There is neither a shadow left to breathe in, nor a medium left to make our voices heard! 

We have desertified.

If a country's deserts are not just in its soil, that desert swallows everything. 

We used to sit by a tree and dream. Now, there is no peace left even in the shade of a tree. 

People used to enter a courthouse with hope. Now, justice is as distant to us as graffiti on a wall. Expressing injustice is a crime, opposing it is a crime, writing about it is a crime! But staying silent also feels like a crime deep inside.

Our hearts are burning differently this summer. 

A country's conscience is burning, its deep-rooted values are turning to ash one by one. Its values are being scattered. Its justice is being destroyed. 

But there is one thing they have forgotten:

A seed sometimes resists even in barren soil.

And sometimes, a spark

becomes what starts everything!