Where are all those Big Brothers now?

No, this piece is not only about the Big Brothers (Abi in Turkish) and Big Sisters (Abla) of the secret network of Fethullah Gülen, the U.S.-resident Islamist preacher who is accused of being behind the failed coup of July 15 in Turkey; it is also about the failing justice system in the country.

Writing this piece, I cannot help myself but mention some names that I know in person and feel sorry that they are in jail now. One of them is Kadri Gürsel, my dear friend and colleague for the last 30 years or so, who is also the president of the Turkish chapter of the International Press Institute (IPI) who is a columnist for daily Cumhuriyet and who was arrested on charges of spreading propaganda for terrorist organizations (ironically to help both the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and the Gülen network (FETÖ), which he has been standing against all through his career). Another colleague is Murat Sabuncu, the editor-in-chief of the left-Kemalist Cumhuriyet. The third is writer and linguist Necmiye Alpay, a socialist who never hesitated to criticize me and other colleagues whenever we made a mistake in the use of Turkish; now the prosecutor is asking for life in prison for her, together with novelist Aslı Erdoğan for making PKK propaganda. And then there's Selahattin Demirtaş, the co-chairman of the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), which focuses on the Kurdish issue. I neither share his political views, nor hesitated to criticize him and his party for failing to draw an unequivocal line between his party and the acts of terror of the PKK. On the other hand, I knew him as a young lawyer from Diyarbakır and we stood side by side for some time as defenders of human rights.

Demirtaş refused to testify before the court because he was refused the...