By ORHAN KEMAL CENGİZ
o.cengiz@todayszaman.com

Our prime minister is an emotional person and he does not hide his tears in public. We have seen him crying many times, even for people who lost their lives in different countries. He shed tears live on television on August 22 over an Egyptian father’s letter to his daughter, who was killed by security forces in Cairo.
However, we have not seen him crying for youngsters and children killed by security forces in Turkey.

Berkin Elvan is the latest victim of the police violence during the Gezi protests. He was only 14 years old when one morning, he left home to buy a loaf of bread for his family for breakfast. Rather than seeing him return, his family was only to receive a devastating message. He was hit in the head by a gas canister fired by the police and after 269 days in a coma, passed away on Tuesday. When he died, he weighed only 15 kilograms.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has not uttered one single word after his death. No condolences have been offered to his family, no words of passion or sorrow. Instead, when the funeral ceremony took place in İstanbul, he was speaking in Mardin and listing numbers, one after the other. He was explaining how much investment his government has made, how many tunnels and bridges they have built. I listened his speech and watch the funeral ceremony at the same time. Not a single word did he utter in remembrance of Berkin Elvan, the eighth victim of the Gezi protests. Neither has Erdoğan said a single word about the first seven victims.

Instead, he described how Gezi protesters had beaten a headscarved woman and how they had drunk alcohol in a mosque — both of which, it afterwards emerged, were not true. He has played an extremely dangerous game. Instead of soothing angry feelings, instead of becoming a unifying figure, as befits a prime minister, he has preferred to pit certain sections of society against others. By this, Erdoğan has managed to unite conservative elements in society behind him at the expense of creating a hugely divided society.

I do not know the details, but another youngster has died following Berkin’s funeral while opposition groups fought each other. How can we be a nation if we cannot unite even to share the pain of a family whose 15-year-old son was killed by a canister fired by a police officer? How can we have peace in a society if we cannot share these basic values?

Yesterday, I saw terrible examples of denial of the pain of the family. I saw tweets from parliamentary deputies from the ruling party, looking for a conspiracy, even on the day of the death of the young victim. One said Berkin might have been unplugged (from his life support unit) so as to coincide with the 19th anniversary of the 1995 Gazi Quarter riots, in which several people died in a clash between Alevis and Sunnis.

I cannot find the words to describe this level of denial, distortion and lack of conscience. I think this is an untreatable condition and makes us miserably hopeless. I only wish for a quick recovery from this absence of conscience, the effects of which are being felt all over the country.