The Screams of Rumeysa Ozturk
The kidnapping of a Turkish graduate student off a street in Massachusetts was horrific. It also fits into a dark subtext of American history.
When Rumeysa Ozturk - a Turkish student enrolled on a valid F-1 visa in a PhD programme at Tufts University in Massachusetts - stepped out of her house in Somerville to join friends for an iftar dinner this past Tuesday, she could not imagine the terror that awaited her.
The 30 year-old was swarmed by half a dozen plainclothes officers - several of them masked - who restrained her before showing her their badges. Ozturk’s scream as they did so - one of panic and stark terror - will be unlikely to be forgotten by anyone who has heard it. Many of my Iranian friends commented to me that they heard in it the wail of the women snatched of the street by the basij, the paramilitary militia that supports the ossifying theocracy there, or that nation’s so-called “morality police,” both of whom regularly disappear and assault anyone falling afoul of the government’s policies.
It was only a full day later that Ozturk’s attorney, Mahsa Khanbabai, was informed that her client - who Khanbabai says has had no criminal charges filed against her - had been spirited away to an ICE detention center in Louisiana. This is the same location to which Mahmoud Khalil, a student activist and lead negotiator for the pro-Palestinian encampment during the 2024 Columbia University protests, was taken to after being seized by ICE agents in New York City earlier this month. Khalil was due to graduate from Columbia’s Master’s programme in May, and his attorney said ICE agents first claimed they were acting on State Department orders to revoke Khalil’s student visa and that she had to inform them that Khalil was in the United States as a permanent resident with a green card and married to a U.S. citizen. He was handcuffed and taken away in an unmarked car. Like Ozturk, Khalil has no criminal charges pending against him.
Ozturk’s apparent crime was co-authoring an opinion piece in the Tufts Daily, the school newspaper, which called for, among other things, the university to “divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel.” The article thoughtfully and calmly appeals to precedents in international law and the university’s own history of principled civil disobedience before going on to quote the American author James Baldwin and concluding “the president [of Tufts] should trust in the [student] Senate’s rigorous and democratic process and the resolutions that it has achieved. We urge President Kumar and the Tufts administration to meaningfully engage with and actualize the resolutions passed by the Senate.”
There is nothing in the editorial that can be remotely construed as a call to violence or a statement of support in favour of Hamas, the terrorist-political-military entity whose hideous 7 October 2023 attack on Israel presaged this latest round of Israel's ghastly collective punishment against the people of Gaza.
Providing no evidence to back up their claim, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security - currently led by failed South Dakota governor and animal abuser Kristi Noem - claimed that Ozturk had “engaged in activities in support of Hamas” while “glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans.” This is par for the course for an administration as habitually dishonest as it is hateful to such a degree that it reminds me of nothing so much as the one described in Robert Bly’s famous anti-war poem “The Teeth Mother Naked At Last”:
First the President lies about the date the Appalachian Mountains rose. Then he lies about the population of Chicago, then he lies about the weight of the adult eagle, then about the acreage of the Everglades
He lies about the number of fish taken every year in the Arctic, he has private information about which city is the capital of Wyoming, he lies about the birthplace of Attila the Hun…And the Attorney General lies about the time the sun sets.
The Trump administration's assault on foreign students is of a piece with its racial-ethnic campaign against the non-white population of the United States in general. The latter is an endeavour in which it has openly defied court orders, including one halting its expulsion of hundreds of mostly Venezuelan immigrants to a prison in El Salvador, the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), where Human Rights Watch has said prisoners “are denied communication with their relatives and lawyers” and where some prisoners “are held in solitary confinement cells, which are completely dark.” [The administration may have also broken the law in its flight to Louisiana with Ozturk.]
Among those migrants deported was Venezuelan football player Jerce Reyes Barrios, who protested against Nicolás Maduro’s dictatorship and was jailed and tortured by the regime, but who Trump and his acolytes claimed was a member of the Venezuelan criminal organization Tren de Aragua because he had a tattoo in tribute to the Spanish team Real Madrid. The families of two other men deported to CECOT told the Miami Herald that their loved ones had no gang affiliation and had never been charged with a crime in the U.S. or elsewhere. Once offloaded from the transport plane, prisoners have been beaten and insulted by the security forces of El Salvador’s authoritarian president, Nayib Bukele (who I met and interviewed in 2018), including one young man who Time reported said “I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a barber” before beginning “to whimper, folding his hands in prayer.” Time goes on to write of how “he was slapped…asked for his mother, then buried his face in his chained hands and cried as he was slapped again.” As ProPublica reported, U.S. citizens have also been caught up in the dragnet.
Like many, seeing the distressing images of Rumeysa Ozturk’s kidnapping, I first reached for examples of foreign tyranny to compare them to. In addition to the basij. I thought of the so-called cagoulards (masked ones) that Haitian dictator François Duvalier used to terrorize and disappear opposition activists and silence dissent before he created the Tonton Macoute militia. I thought of the Servicio Bolivariano de Inteligencia Nacional (SEBIN), the intelligence agency at the service of the dictatorship in Venezuela that has a long history of seizing and disappearing those who fall afoul of the government. I thought of the mukhabarat (the Arabic term used for intelligence services) in dictatorships like that of Abdel Fattah El-Sisi in Egypt and the Assad family tyranny in Syria. I thought of the pro-government forces in Nicaragua that roam the streets to terrorize and kill.
But we must acknowledge as well that the lawless Trump administration is also tapping into a history of state-sanctioned violence that has run like a dolorous minor chord through the history of the United States, and whose victims were often murdered in obscurity and with official complicity by the “legitimate” representatives of the state and its power.
In the Reconstruction-era South following the years Civil War, members of the Ku Klux Klan in states like Mississippi and Alabama campaigned and engaged in other political activism in their full cultish regalia, an unmistakable sign of intimidation to African-American voters as they simultaneous targeted, isolated, often kidnapped and eventually killed their targets to assert their control over the political domain.
In November 1898, the city of Wilmington, North Carolina witnessed a white supremacist coup d'état when Alfred Moore Waddell, a former Confederate cavalry lieutenant and sitting U.S. representative, led 500 armed white men through the streets as they attacked and looted the offices of an African-American newspaper and chased down and shot black residents, accompanied by a white supremacist militia known as the Red Shirts and members of the Klan. [The book Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and its Legacy, is an essential volume for understanding this episode.
In May 1964 - only nine years before I was born - college student Charles Eddie Moore and millworker Henry Hezekiah Dee were kidnapped, beaten unconscious and drowned alive in Franklin County, Mississippi by Klan members who skirted on state murder charges because they were in direct collusion with local law enforcement. In June of that same year, Civil Rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were kidnapped and murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan - a number of whom were active-duty police officers - in Neshoba County, Mississippi.
In Baltimore, where I write these words, a decade ago, 25 year-old Freddie Gray was chased by police through the streets of West Baltimore and arrested for possessing what police claimed was an illegal switchblade know but which the state's attorney for Baltimore City said was a spring-assisted knife that was legal under Maryland law. Police then threw him in the back of a transport van - face-down on the floor with feet shackled and his hands tied behind his back - and, according to the medical examiner who examined his body, effectively murdered him, leading her to declare the death a homicide.
[Disgracefully, after three of the six officers indicted in Gray's death were acquitted, prosecutors would drop all charges against the remaining officers, despite stating publicly that they continued to believe Gray's death was a homicide.]
So, indeed, we cannot confer a legitimacy on the representatives of the state that they don’t deserve when they are acting in a clearly lawless manner. And, in an aside, I hope come enterprising journalist with more technical know-how than I possess can identify the agents who kidnapped Ozturk and question them about their behavior in service of this current policy.
To be clear, I am not arguing that the Trump administration is not particularly horrific in its vocal coordinating state terrorism and kidnapping - without due process - from the highest levels of government. They are. Nor am I arguing what happened to Rumeysa Ozturk is not heart-wrenching and horrific. It was. I am only saying that Trump and his cult of brutes and thieves are tapping into a very dark subtext of American history that often took place only among the most marginalized but has now re-erupted with renewed vigour everywhere from lonely Texas highway to apartment buildings in Manhattan. And, as with generations before, it is our responsibility to oppose it and cut it out by the roots.
Yesterday, many thousands of protesters voiced their outrage in Somerville. It was a heartening display, but I wonder if it will be enough. We are now a nation where armed representatives of an authoritarian government that has shown itself hostile to the very concept of representative democracy roam the streets, masked, looking for their next targets to disappear into the maw of their gulag.
We are at a point where we have to prepare ourselves to physically intervene to block our neighbors like Rumeysa Ozturk from being kidnapped and disappeared, to put our bodies between them and the totalitarian machine that is being built. Because today, they are practicing on the easy targets of vulnerable foreigners, but tomorrow it could - and will - be any one of us.