Enes Kanter: ‘Activism is the rent I pay for living on this planet’

Outspoken Boston Celtics center Enes Kanter penned an op-ed in the Boston Globe on the situation in his native Turkey.

“Activism is the rent I pay for living on this planet.‬”

So began a recent Op-ed article by outspoken Boston Celtics big man Enes Kanter, known for his biting, constant criticism of Turkish autocratic president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, among several other human rights-related causes.

The Turkish center has had a fraught relationship with his ancestral home, his relationship with an Islamic cleric deemed an enemy of the state after a failed coup at the center of Erdogan’s animosity toward the Celtics center and his family.

“Who,” asked Kanter, “would have thought that I would spend my 20s fighting for my father and thousands of people incarcerated unjustly in my home country of Turkey?”

“With my father being arrested and dragged through courts in Turkey for many years, and my family being intimidated and harassed, it was a fight borne of necessity — a worthy fight. He spent seven years in and out of Turkish courts and jails, finally being cleared last month when terrorist charges were dropped.”

Kanter’s family has been a popular target for Erdogan’s regime, harassing and blacklisting the rest of the big man’s family to the point it was necessary for them to publicly disown him to get the harassment to stop.

“There is nothing more genuine in human rights struggles than when a family member is standing up. You can’t politicize it and you can’t dismiss it as a show,” added Kanter. “It is much louder and effective.”

“I am not delusional about the consequences we may face in Turkey when we speak up … But we have got to start from somewhere. Staying silent only increases the appetite of the authoritarian government.”

Turkey hasn’t always been this way — in fact, before the coup attempt, it was regarded as one of the most democratic and stable democracies of the Islamic world, which Kanter explained.

“I was born to a Turkish family in Switzerland,” he began.

“When we moved back to Turkey, I always considered it a European country, a quickly modernizing regional economic powerhouse with strong ties to the [E.U.] through trade and to the [U.S.] through NATO. Whatever is happening in my home country now would be unthinkable just over a decade ago. To see thousands of innocent people imprisoned just for their political opponents … journalists locked up just for exposing the truth … Kurdish people targeted, harassed, and tortured simply for their ethnicities … It’s nearly unimaginable.”

The massive transformation of the country is a strong signal that we should never take our freedoms and rights for granted,” Kanter added.

Admonishing us to hurry in adding our voices to the fray before anti-democratic culture takes root, the Zurich native tied Erdogan’s rise to the rise of such authoritarian around the world in recent years.

“It is a troubling trend and a grim reminder that sustained vigilance is a must for every society.”

To read the article in full, click here.

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