Memory in the age of impunity

“Dear Peter. I have been waiting to write to you for a long time, but the latest news has made it clear that it is simply dangerous to remain silent.

My former colleagues are in prison. For many months my friends and I have found it difficult to get any attention from world media. Now something has happened that caught the attention of the biggest news agencies — but I wonder how long it will last. Is there any way to hold the attention? I feel like we’re all hostages here — and it’s scary. Now everything, any crime, has become possible here.”

I received this message from a friend in Belarus this summer, a couple of days after the nation’s dictator Alexander Lukashenko used a MiG fighter jet to ground an international commercial flight as it crossed “his” airspace and hauled off a Belarusian journalist and his girlfriend who had been living in supposed safety in Lithuania. A few days later the captured journalist, Roman Protasevich, appeared on state-run TV with visible marks of torture and confessed to treachery in scenes reminiscent of Stalinist show trials.

There was some outrage in what we like to call the international community; the words “hijacking” and even “terrorist act” were used. And then, as my friend feared, all was forgotten. Lukashenko faced mild consequences, such as a ban on the Belarus state airline flying into Europe. His message to anyone who dared to oppose him was more potent: I can do what I want to you, anywhere you might be.

I struggled to answer my friend’s plea. For a single event to be remembered it needs to be sustained by a bigger story that it flows into. Anyone who has played a memory game will know that you remember discrete things by putting them into a sequence where they take on significance as part of a larger whole. Likewise in media and politics, one scene only has power as part of a larger narrative.

But Lukashenko’s outrageous crimes haven’t clicked into a greater chain of meaning. And it’s not just Belarus. From Burma to Syria, Yemen to Sri Lanka, we have more evidence than ever of crimes against humanity — of torture, chemical attacks, barrel bombings, rape, repression, and arbitrary detention. But the evidence struggles to compel attention, let alone consequences. We have more opportunities to publish; we aren’t limited by geography; our audience is potentially global. Yet most revelations or investigations fail to resonate. Why?

A connected narrative breaks apart

The collapse of the Soviet Union should have spurred introspection and encouraged us to exclude no one from the greater story of human rights against political repression. And, for a moment in the 1990s, this seemed possible. As the wave of democratization overturned both pro-Soviet and pro-American dictatorships across the world; as the International Criminal Court was set up in The Hague in 1998; as humanitarian interventions were waged successfully from the western Balkans to East Africa, it seemed that justice would be meted out more equitably.

But then something different happened. Instead of letting more characters into the human rights story, the whole story collapsed. A situation where some victims got more attention than others was replaced by a situation where no victims got any sustained attention. The horrors of World War II had compelled the world to adopt the UN Declaration of Human Rights, at least in principle, and the post-Cold War catastrophes in Srebrenica and Rwanda had encouraged humanitarian interventions and created a momentum towards a “right to protect.”

In previous crimes against humanity, ignorance was always an excuse. From Auschwitz to Srebrenica to Rwanda, leaders could claim that they were either unaware of the facts, the facts were equivocal, or that events unfolded too quickly for them to act. But now we have access to omniscient media that often brings us abundant and instantaneous evidence — yet it means less than ever before. The tableau of crimes remains a mess of broken images.

This felt different in the Cold War. Then there seemed a connection between the arrest of one, single Soviet dissident and a larger geopolitical, institutional, moral, cultural, and historical struggle. Media, books, and movies of that time told the stories of discrete political prisoners and human rights abuses as part of a larger, joined-up tale in the great battle of freedom versus dictatorship, a battle for the soul of history. And the whole story made the public in democracies feel better about themselves, was part of an identity: we are on the side of freedom versus tyranny. There were institutions that supported this narrative and identity. Political prisoners would feel less vulnerable when information about their arrest was announced on the BBC or Radio Free Europe, taken up by Amnesty International, announced at the UN, raised by U.S. presidents in bilateral summits with Soviet leadership.

Together all these elements sustained attention. And when the West’s own sins were revealed, such as the CIA’s program of Cold War covert assassinations and coups in the 1970s, it meant there was an existing framework through which to capture the attention and outrage of the Western public.

There was what one might call a “grand narrative” that informed and enveloped everything from the behavior of states to literature and art to how people understood themselves. It was bound up with enlightenment ideals of “progress” and “liberation,” where facts and evidence were something to be respected, confirmed or refuted by rational argument or verifiable evidence. Even the Soviet regime was locked into a language and worldview where rights – the rights of colonized peoples and the economically oppressed primarily — could at least matter theoretically. They even signed human rights pledges, which allowed Soviet dissidents to demand the Kremlin’s leaders “obey their own laws.”

In this contest of grand ideas, with each side proclaiming its ideals as superior, space was opened for dissidents to demand that the powers live up to the ideals; in the periphery, these ideals were invoked to demand support by liberation movements, colonized by one camp or the other.

The grand narratives, of course, had their problems. They often privileged victims of rival ideologies while leaving continent-sized blind spots. Priests murdered in Poland by the Communists would get more attention in Western media than priests killed by U.S. allies in El Salvador. The Red Army crushing rebellions in Budapest and Prague was covered with infinitely more intensity than the crushing of British anti-colonial rebellions in Kenya.

Yet, “the checks written out in 1945 to the most vulnerable people in the world —marked ‘international humanitarian law’ — are bouncing” says David Miliband, the former British foreign minister and present head of the International Rescue Committee. We have entered what he calls the Age of Impunity: “A time when militaries, militias, and mercenaries in conflicts around the world believe they can get away with anything, and because they can get away with anything, they do everything.”

The collapse came partly from within. The language of rights and freedoms was hollowed out by leaders who misused it, leaving husks empty of meaning. The Soviet regime shredded the language of economic justice and equality — so that even today the mere mention of the term “socialist” is anathema to many in the former Communist bloc. In the West the lofty language of freedom and tyranny was deployed in the service of unprovoked wars and was sullied by war’s inevitable consequences. In 2003, President George W Bush had deliberately connected the battles of the Cold War with his vision for the Middle East ahead of the U.S. invasion of Iraq promising that “democracy will succeed” and “freedom can be the future of every nation.” Instead, the invasion brought civil war and hundreds of thousands of deaths; it enhanced Iran’s power and turned Syria into the fulcrum of a new authoritarian axis. Among people in rich democracies, it engendered cynicism, souring them on their own self-identity. Words imbued with powerful meaning in East Berlin and Prague lost their purpose in Baghdad. Images did too.

Along with this rot from inside was the attack from outside. The great leitmotif of contemporary Russian and now Chinese propaganda is that the desire for freedom and the fight for rights leads not to prosperity but to misery and bloodshed. Russian propaganda channels like to splice shots of people-powered revolutions in Syria or Ukraine together with images of the ensuing conflicts in those countries, as if the war was the inevitable product of revolts, rather than the response by dictatorships to crush them. Unlike democracy — the not-so-subtle message goes — dictatorship is strong and stable.

From grand narrative to a cohesive story

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize was shared by two journalists: Maria Ressa, the editor of Rappler, in the Philippines, and Dmitry Muratov, the editor of Novaya Gazeta, from Russia. And if we look at their work closely, we see something interesting emerging.

Maria Ressa’s plight could have been utterly esoteric to the world. She is a journalist under attack from the Philippine government for criticizing the extrajudicial murders committed under President Rodrigo Duterte. Journalists are attacked every day across the world, and in the Philippines are regularly killed without drawing much attention overseas. Even the mass killings Maria (who serves on Coda Story’s board of directors) reported on, with thousands killed by pro-government gangs, rarely merit a global headline. Yet Maria’s story held attention. How?

When she dug into what was happening to her, Maria saw that there was something in the form of Duterte’s attacks, his use of troll armies and cyber militias to intimidate, besmirch, and break his opponents, that was both new and universal. He was not merely imposing censorship, he was overloading social media with noise, so the truth was blotted out, distorting reality. Maria made the issue not just about the Philippines but also about Facebook, the harms of social media, the lawlessness of digital disinformation. Her campaign, and the way she told her story, led not just to the Presidential Palace in Manila, but also to Silicon Valley, to every election distorted by online manipulation, to every conflict fueled through digital hate campaigns, to every woman or minority bullied or harassed on social media, to any parent worried about what’s happening to their kids online. Her story became vital for any lawmaker and civil servant thinking about how to regulate this new frontier. It updated how we think about freedom of expression in the digital dimension, forcing tech companies to at least admit that inauthentic coordinated campaigns were not legitimate speech but a form of censorship. One real person saying one unpleasant thing is fine. But when a handful of trolls pretend to be thousands of non-existent people saying the same thing, that is something different.

And Maria’s research joined up countries that had never been put into the same sequence. No one has ever thought about Russia and the Philippines together. Their dissidents don’t meet. They were on different sides in the Cold War. But now these two capitals of online manipulation became part of one coherent story. Maria looked to investigations by Russian journalists to understand what was going on in her own country, began to see Russia and the Philippines as one frontline of digital authoritarianism.

And Russia was one of the birth places of another seemingly local issue that became a global narrative. When Russian activists and journalists first tried to tell the world, in the early Putin era, about how their regime was based on stealing money from state assets and laundering it in Western countries, most shrugged. Who cares? It might be bad for Russia, but it made London and New York richer, and the Kremlin weaker. It took a decade of slow, painful arguments and evidence-gathering to show that corruption in Russia and Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East was not just a local tragedy. It affected us too. It was also a way to infiltrate and undermine democracies, compromise our foreign policy, suborn politicians, fund far-right politics. It created an elite that used the influence and leverage to start wars and get away with it, because Western countries were now dependent on the corrupt investments. It was creating a world where the global rich were living with another set of rules, free of domestic justice anywhere, and that, in turn, was fueling the inequality and anger that undermined people’s faith in democratic institutions. And the enemy was not just in the Kremlin, but also among the middlemen and money launderers in respectable offices in New York and London.

It was a challenge to show that the tragedy of a hospital in northern Russia, pillaged by bureaucrats buying property in London, was also something that people in the Pentagon should care about. Today corruption (or to be more precise kleptocracy and money laundering) has become a central security agenda for the new U.S. administration. But it took years of work to unearth the links that lie buried beneath the noise of news and the narcissistic gaze of social media, and to make something seemingly tangential a story that runs through all our lives.

So that is the task: to unearth the interconnecting tendrils of issues, intertwining roots of problems that crisscross the world more intensely than ever, and whose larger significance is yet to be discovered. Before, the grand narrative of democracy used to pass over us, like a plane that you could board from a platform called “human rights.” Now we work with shovels. Prodding on a mound that seems just an anomaly in one corner of the garden, but upon excavating and pulling, its rhizomes lead us to the garden next door. This is a new mission for journalism. To work out why an issue in Manila is also about Silicon Valley and about Moscow and about you. To find the sudden intersection between countries no one ever thought about as part of a single map before. Because these new lines are there, they don’t need to be created — they need to be unearthed. And then one discrete event can have meaning for many, one newspaper article can resonate across borders. New publics, who never even thought of each other as having anything in common, can be brought together. And this new journalism needs to do more than just draw new lines and connect new audiences — it needs to dig out the contours of the discussion which offers the solution to the issues it unearths, offering its audiences a chance to transform from passive players to participants in the formulation of a future.

For though the old story of “waves of democratization,” of easily defined and relatable “declarations of human rights” has faded, people still risk their lives and livelihood to protest and fight for….well, for what? We have had, in recent years, seen more protests across the world as at any time for decades. From Hong Kong to Tbilisi, Sudan to Chile. And, of course, Belarus. Belarus which was always dismissed as happy with its degenerate dictator, satisfied with the compromise between stability and rule of a single man. And then suddenly, impossibly, the whole country rose up. Not just urban liberals but pensioners and factory workers.

But unlike in 1989, we don’t think of all these protests across the world together. Don’t see them as part of one inevitable, coherent History. The rights they demand are very different. The regimes they fight against don’t necessarily abide by old distinctions between democracies and dictatorships. And yet something still itches away at people. Some sort of underlying urge, a need that can’t be satisfied. What connects all these different movements? What will we find in our process of excavation? Maybe, lurking underneath is something coherent, all the tendrils leading to a whole, something alive, huge, all-remembering, global, terrible — preparing to give the epic troves of evidence, the terabytes of data recording crimes against humanity and abuse, a purpose, and a meaning.

An ode to Marmara

What lies below the sea snot spectacle

In 1996 I caught a jack mackerel. It was my first fish. My uncle showed me how to catch it. We were sailing on Marmara Sea. The small boat moved to and fro as our flasher rig disappeared into crystalline waters. The rig contained ten small hooks decorated with baits. Ismet, my uncle, is a Turkman from the sealess Iraqi city of Kerkuk. He was ecstatic to be fishing after sunset, instructing me to cherish the moment: ‘This is the life!’

We returned triumphantly to our summer house’s wooden pier. Just before dinnertime, I carried buckets into the kitchen. Crickets began chirping as neighbouring houses sank into silence. Uncle Ismet started grilling mackerels. Seated around a small table, family members washed them down with rakı, Turkey’s national drink. Uncle Ismet offered a sip. I took a few, proceeding to mix the smoky drink with cold beer, which turned out to be a rookie mistake. Listening to Nirvana’s In Utero on our porch, my head started spinning.

These same waters once flowed into the heart of a civilization, inspiring poetry, paraded in paintings, feeding a cornucopian culinary culture. They are, for the most part, the reason why we live here. Marmara calms us in moments of anxiety. Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul’s greatest chronicler, wrote: ‘There’s not a problem that a walk by the Bosphorus can’t fix.’ When the meditation app Headspace reminds me, ‘just above the clouds, remember the blue sky is always there,’ I think of Marmara as a similarly reliable layer.

Marine mucilage, popularly known as sea snot, photographed on Marmara on 1 July 2021. Image by Furkan via Wikimedia Commons.

The memory from my youth remains vivid, and yet, a quarter of a century later, I realize that dining on freshly caught fish is becoming history. This May a thick layer of marine mucilage, popularly known as sea snot, started to take over Marmara. The gelatinous organic substance turned opaque this inland sea which connects the Aegean to the Black Sea, a visual sign announcing its marine life’s death. The superficial international media hype rattled locals for its treatment of mucilage primarily as a spectacle. I first saw it in June this year, on my way to a ferry: a mirage, as if land began to extend into the sea. All that was liquid had turned solid. It also resembled the skin of a terminally ill patient.

Soon afterward, fish started dying in lakes and rivers surrounding Marmara. In Lake Küçükçekmece, a lagoon that lies on Marmara’s European shore, waves swept hundreds of dead fish ashore. Around the Bosphorus Strait, athletes struggled to row on the thickening surface. Mucilage invaded propellers of outboard motors; fishers showed nets covered with that slimy substance to cameras. The fishing season, they said, was over. Professional divers observed that most fish had fled to deeper waters. The visibility undersea fell to less than half a meter. Marine life near Marmara’s surface had gone extinct.

Nowadays, this cloud-coloured substance is eating up my source of calm, and Marmara is struggling for breath before our eyes. Like a caught fish, it’s asphyxiating. Experts predict the worst, warning that a rotten egg smell may soon take over the city. For those living and breathing in Istanbul, Marmara’s death is a personal matter, and finding the perpetrators is a moral duty.

Byzantine abundance

In classical antiquity, this ancient Greek city, Byzantium, owed its wealth to fish and was known by its moniker, ‘tuna’s motherland.’ Two things drove most profit to Byzantium: fees collected from ships crossing the Bosphorus, and fishing.

Directly opposite Byzantium stood their great rival Chalcedon (Kadıköy today). Two towns competed fiercely to catch more fish, but the stream of Bosphorus gave Byzantium an advantage, turning mackerel routes from Chalcedon to Byzantium’s way. According to legend, fish would swim near a shining bright white rock on the Bosphorus before changing direction, approaching Istanbul’s Golden Horn, and ending up in Byzantine hands. To celebrate their abundance, Byzantine fishers sacrificed a tonne of tuna to Poseidon, asking the gods to help them with their next hunt.

In Politics, Aristotle lists Byzantium’s fishermen while discussing classes in public life. In spring, they would pick a hill overlooking Marmara, climb a tree and monitor fish movements. Having identified a large group, they would yell at the top of their lungs to notify fishers who awaited to trap their prey with nets.

In Fish and Fishery in Ancient Era Istanbul (2010), ancient history scholar Oğuz Tekin notes how Derkos, a Marmara lagoon, abounded with fish in Byzantine times. The best fishing spaces on Marmara were Baltalimanı, Tarabya, the Golden Horn, and the Prince’s Islands. Fishers used harpoons to hunt dolphins, and fishing was such a big part of life that Byzantium issued bronze coinage, in the name of Sabina, wife of the emperor Hadrian (who ruled between 128 and 137 CE), featuring on its reverse a pair of tuna.

Even Istanbul’s neighborhoods received their names from fish: Dionysios Ostredoes was named after oysters. Today the neighborhood is named Tophane and is home to Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence which features the replica of a fish eaten by one of the eponymous novel’s characters.

Marmara is an inland sea connecting the Aegean and the Black Sea. It was known as Propontis in antiquity. Hilmi Şahenk’s photo shows an aerial view of Tarabya, an Istanbul neighbourhood on the European side, from 2014. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Marmara contains two streams: one from the Black Sea to the Aegean, and from Marmara to the Black Sea. These streams flow on different levels: the Black Sea moves between 30 to 40 centimetres above Marmara. The Italian natural scientist Luigi Ferdinando Marsili was the first to spot this difference in 1681. Because of it, Marsili noticed, Marmara was two seas.

The Black Sea’s marine creatures, who tolerate significant changes in sea temperatures and salt levels, lived in its upper stream; their neighbours in the bottom were Mediterranean sea animals with much-diminished adaptation skills. These streams featured a unique migration pattern. In the winter, tuna and mackerel would travel from the greater Mediterranean, the Aegean, and Marmara to Pontos Euxeinos (the Black Sea). As winter neared, they would pass the Bosphorus and head to Marmara. In the autumn, as cold northern winds blew to disrupt the Black Sea, the first mackerels would arrive at the Bosphorus, only to return to the Black Sea in early spring. In 2004, during excavations on the Byzantine port of Theodosius (current day Yenikapı), archaeologists found bones of tuna, mackerel, and dolphins – remnants and reminders of a culture built on fish migration.

The fish of Turkey

In 1915, Karekin Deveciyan, the Director of Istanbul’s Fishery Office, published Fish and Fishing in Turkey, one of the first scientific studies on the subject. Deveciyan was an Armenian born in Harput, an ancient Ottoman town, and served numerous offices related to fishery in Ottoman bureaucracy.

But Deveciyan’s passion was for books. He translated fiction by Alexandre Dumas père before turning his fishery expertise into a comprehensive book. Devoting years to classifying and documenting Marmara’s fish, he used government funds to publish a tome whose expanded edition, Peche et Pecheries en Turquie, appeared in 1926.

‘I’ve counted each thorn and bone of every fish species in Marmara,’ Deveciyan wrote in that book’s introduction, specifying that fishermen had been consulted.

This Armenian expert of Marmara lived in an era of abundance. In Derkos, fishers caught over 100 thousand kilograms of fish each year in the 1920s. In his book, Deveciyan identified 124 fish species of commercial importance from Marmara and listed 42 dalyans (fishing weirs) on Istanbul’s waters. He also found 59 volis, net-casting places used by Marmara’s fishers.

Writing from his refuge in France, the exiled Ottoman Sultan Abdulmejid II praised Fish and Fishing in Turkey in a 1923 letter to its author. The last caliph was not much of a monarch, but he was a skilled landscape painter whose views of Bosphorus are delightful: Çamlıca’dan Adalara Bakış offers a view of Marmara lined by Istanbul’s Princes Islands; in Yolcu Gemisi Marmara’s waves wash gloomily against a city ferry.

Until Abdulmejid’s death in exile in 1944, Marmara retained its glamour. When Deveciyan died in 1964, it was still abounding with fish. ‘The Bosphorus’s biodiversity remained rich until the 1970s,’ writes Asaf Ertan, a former fisherman whose family roots go back to an Ottoman sailor named Ömer Ağa, who assisted Ottoman Sultan Bayezid I to build a fortress at the entrance of the Göksu river in 1389. In his memoir, Fishing on the Bosphorus (2010), Ertan writes evocatively about seals taking refuge in boat sheds of dilapidated Bosphorus mansions, fishers tying nets to their window railings, a harmonious existence of city and sea.

Fishing on the Bosphorus in 2021. Photo by Haluk Cömertel, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

But fish species significantly reduced after the 1980s as Marmara’s pollution began. By the late 1970s, the 127 fish species Deveciyan listed in 1915 had shrunken to sixty. That number would keep falling dramatically to twenty species by 2010. To understand what transpired in those thirty years, I called Levent Artüz, a leading Turkish hydrobiologist whose grandfather, Cemal Artüz founded the Turkish Biology Foundation.

Cemal’s son İlham Artüz also devoted his life to studying Marmara, launching the MAREM project (‘Changing Oceanographic Conditions of the Sea Of Marmara’) in 1954 with fishing biologist Olav Aasen. This makes Levent Artüz a third-generation scholar of Marmara. He took over MAREM after his dad’s death and began giving his college lectures on oceanography and sea pollution. ‘I was born into the Bosphorus,’ Artüz tells me, ‘I’ve spent my teenage years diving, sailing, trying almost all of the water sports. My childhood was populated by sea scholars, thanks to my dad.’

Dramatic decay

Artüz points to October 1989 as the starting point of Marmara’s troubles: the month Marmara began to turn into a cesspool of feces. ‘Before that, Marmara was a healthy sea,’ he said. ‘47 fish species lived in Marmara, and the only problem was surface pollution around industrial cities. Because Marmara was crystal clear, people considered the occasional rubbish on its surface a problem.’

Cranes over Marmara. A 2018 photo by Mostafa Meraji via Wikimedia Commons.

The real problem was the swift industrialization around the Golden Horn as factories on its shores pumped toxic waste into its waters. I recall how, over the 1980s, we used to roll up our car windows to avoid the area’s awful odor: a mixture of shit and rotten eggs. The local government invented a project to cleanse Golden Horn which paved the way for our current mucilage crisis. Istanbul’s blue-eyed mayor, Bedrettin Dalan, promised to ‘turn the Golden Horn’s shade to my eye colour.’ A World Bank-funded project was set to become the world’s largest wastewater treatment facility. Located in Istanbul’s Baltalimanı, it would process all the home waste from Istanbul’s Asian side.

Instead, authorities opted for a technique known as deep-sea wastewater discharge. It repurposed the stream leading to the Black Sea as a conveyer belt, which they hoped would push the Golden Horn’s dirt into the Black Sea. A component of the ‘Istanbul canalization project,’ the technique continued under the right-wing Dalan’s social democrat successor Nurettin Sözen, who rose to power in 1989. (When Recep Tayyip Erdoğan became Istanbul’s mayor in 1994, he sustained the project which remains in place to this day.)

By late 1989, weeks after the system first launched, booming comb jelly populations created island-sized red patches on Marmara. Fish deaths were first seen between Üsküdar, Kartal, and the Prince’s Islands. Three years later, Marmara’s colour turned to an extreme shade of green. In September 1995, sea walnuts invaded Marmara and anglers couldn’t fish for two years. Scientists found poison in Marmara’s white sand mussels, once a bringer of profit. Marine organisms called phytoplankton caused the poisoning (they’re also the cause of the mucilage crisis). By 2000, white sand mussel fishing was banned in Marmara. In 2010 the number of Marmara’s fish species fell to five. Sea urchins took over many of Istanbul’s coasts; in 2012, invader species like pufferfish, reigned in its waters. Artüz thinks there is no turning back from this. ‘We lost Marmara in 1989 beyond repair.’

Marine mucilage surrounding boats in a mariona on the Marmara, photographed on 8 June 2021 by Hilmi Hacaloğlu. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

A crisis foretold

For Bülent Şık, one of Turkey’s most outspoken public health experts, Marmara was the stuff of dreams. He first saw it in 1977, at the age of ten. It was June, the schools just closed, and he was excited to be passing for the first time the Bosphorus Bridge, which opened in 1973. ‘My heart pounded like crazy.’ Şık’s family spent the summer there, and he relished swimming in the Küçükçekmece lagoon.

Şık spent more than half of his professional career working for the government. As a food safety advisor to the Ministry of Agriculture, he toiled at laboratories, analyzed toxic chemicals, reported on water pollution, and acted as a whistleblower when he shared his knowledge about toxic chemicals in Marmara in a series of articles for the opposition newspaper Cumhuriyet in 2018.

Şık had gleaned that information between 2010 and 2015 while, alongside his academic work at Akdeniz University’s Food Safety and Agricultural Research Center, he worked for the government’s Public Environmental Health project, documenting instances of water and food pollution in Kocaeli, Edirne, Kırklareli, and Tekirdağ to ponder whether the toxic chemicals of these Marmara towns had a tie with the rise in cancer cases in the area. ‘We found that the Ergene brook carried grade-four heavy polluted water quality,’ he tells me. ‘We also identified pollution brought by Ergene’s waters to Marmara.’

Instead of changing its policies after Şık’s exposure, the government began pumping all the polluted waters of Ergene tributary to Marmara from December 2020. ‘Having read the literature on this I can easily say that the technique that begins with Dalan, continues with Sözen and peaks with Erdoğan, is against the scientific theory of deep discharge,’ Şık says. Instead of cleaning the water, he adds, ‘all the dirt is collected, merged with home and agricultural waste – and pumped somewhere between thirty to fifty meters under the sea surface. This is the same thing as sweeping the dirt under the carpet at home.’

Still, the system has remained in place for thirty-two years. It’s applied in places like Tekirdağ, Bursa, and Kocaeli: summer houses, marine resorts, all the residential areas around Marmara practice deep-sea wastewater discharge and pump their waste into this fabled and once pristine sea. ‘If this continues until September, we’ll definitely lose the Black Sea,’ says Artüz, ‘we’ll also be putting the Aegean at great risk.’

Worryingly, Şık warns that one fatal consequence of our mucilage crisis is a potential cholera outbreak. (A previous cholera outbreak in 1970 killed around fifty people.) ‘The mucilage layer creates an environment ideal for the E. coli bacteria whose levels increased by a thousand times in these areas since we started seeing mucilage,’ Şık notes. ‘Such public health crises are inevitable when an ecosystem collapses.’

After mucilage became evident in May with the rise in sea temperatures, people’s first question was whether they would be able to swim or go fishing. ‘How can we clean this ugly thing?’ they asked, as the sea snot ruined their glorious selfies. It was as if pollution was not of our making but of Marmara, a sea that we cared for only when we needed to. To fix the problem, Turkey’s Environmental Ministry had been collecting mucilage to cleanse the surface – a hopeless task – since early summer. It also organized a large conference on mucilage and issued an action plan with twenty-two articles.

These are, at best, palliative solutions. ‘What’s the use?’ asks Artüz. ‘Marmara had already been in this state five years ago. Nothing was done to protect it until the sea ran out of oxygen. What do you do if your house is on fire? You first shut down the gas and electricity. Then you call the fire brigade. Instead, the government is organizing workshops. Someone has to shut down the gas and electricity from their valves first. Otherwise, this fire will get bigger.’

Sunset over sea snot in a Marmara marina. As phytoplantkon thickens in the polluted sea, the water turns slimey and is no longer habitable for fish. Photo taken on 19 May 2021 by Hilmi Hacaloğlu. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

The final assault

We ponder nature through poetry and music and treat it as a beautiful object to appreciate. But in fact, nature is ruthless. It follows its own path and when we disrupt it, it may morph into alarming novel forms. The best we can do, at this point, is perhaps to remember Marmara’s history. ‘We’ve slowly killed this culture; not much is left,’ says Artüz.

Istanbul is a city of global importance. But it still lacks a natural history museum where kids can visit and get to know the species of the Bosphorus. Do we know about the flower Istanbulensis or many of the other Marmara-specific sea species named after this city? Do we know about butterflies who exclusively live here? We don’t. And as long as we don’t, this culture will continue to vanish.

Thirty percent of the Turkish population, some 24 million people, live in the Marmara region and some may claim that this pollution is inevitable. But the more and more unhinged construction projects of the ruling Islamists counter that argument: their ‘Canal Istanbul’ will create an artificial sea-level waterway to connect the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara, delivering the final blow to tuna’s motherland. ‘Whatever we can do we should do it now,’ says Şık.

The first step must be to halt Canal Istanbul. Those who insist on building it are also aware of what it will do to Marmara’s pollution. If you spend 40 minutes reading a report you get the full picture. This is not about ignorance.

Instead, he proclaims, this is about government-linked tycoons putting their economic interests before public health. ‘They see each element of our seas and lagoons as gates to profit.’

Scholars like Şık and Artüz were ignored for years. After his reports on water pollution, the government attempted to lock Şık up: he was sentenced to 15 months in prison in 2019, but was acquitted earlier this year. And when Artüz wrote a book titled The Recent History of the Pollution of Marmara Sea four years ago, Turkish publishers ignored him. Nowadays, he has their ear. ‘Five of the leading publishers approached me to get the manuscript,’ he laughs. ‘There may be many books like mine, which didn’t see the light of day.’ And yet the mucilage, he notes, concerns the death of not only healthy waters but a whole culture.

Over the past half decade, the word Boğaziçi itself began to vanish from Istanbul’s culture. As the culture of martyrdom replaced the calm of Bosphorus, the Bosphorus Bridge’s official name was changed to ‘The Martyrs Bridge’. Bosphorus University, the country’s highest ranking higher education institute, is under assault by the government who want to tame it through loyal placeholders.

But still, despite the heated rhetoric and severe pollution, despite the plans for further and more severe destruction of Marmara, this fluid culture keeps on flowing. Hopefully, it will outlive those whose ignorance and ill will Marmara is suffering – and lovers of this sea shall never forgive them.