It is difficult to accept and understand the Ankara’s incompetence over the fires and floods that raged the country within the past couple of weeks, Turkey’s Nobel Prize winning novelist Orhan Pamuk said.
The anger of the Turkish public towards he government and politicians in power, which failed to prevent this disaster, remaining inadequate and promising only to heal the wounds, is justified, Pamuk old Bianet news site in an interview for his latest novel Nights of Plague on Monday.
“On the other hand, I do not expect any political benefit for the government to acquire from the disasters,” Pamuk said.
“Where are you,” seems to be a very valid question in regard to the absence of the planes to combat the fires, according to Pamuk.
“Why didn’t the planes arrive on time,” he asked, adding that there were similar forest fires albeit to a lesser extent last year, and hence everyone was once again questioning why the fire fighting planes were not working.
“It is wrong, even strange, to think that the angry crowds would be placated by throwing tea out the bus doors during such a disaster,” Pamuk said.
While watching the interviews with the villagers affected by the fires on several news coverages, he felt a sense of guilt and anger like everyone else, Pamuk said.
“I felt a desperation,” he said.
The one who writes against the official opinion, is rowing heroically against the stream, Pamuk also said, while commenting on his novels.
“In countries, especially in modern, national bourgeois states, official history is injected into everyone’s head. Every country has a national education. Official history is an attempt to put official ideology in your head not as just an opinion, but as a single opinion. And most nation-states succeed in this,” according to the Nobel laureate.
Ahval