On July 15, 2016, officer cadet Alper Kalın was about to leave his base in Ankara for a friend’s wedding when he was told to stay behind for a counterterrorism exercise.
A few hours later, an attempt by a rogue military faction to overthrow the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan would fail, and Kalın, then 24, would find himself facing life behind bars.
Ten years on, inside a flat in Ankara, his parents look through an album of photos from their last holiday with their son, who is now 34.
For Kalın, a trainee air force pilot who had been selected for F-16 training at Akıncı Airbase near Ankara, the past decade has been spent inside a cell measuring 12 square meters in a prison 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) away.
Officials say he was deeply involved in the plot to oust Erdoğan hatched at Akıncı, where the plotters gave orders to bomb parliament and the presidential palace that night.
“There were 60 F-16 pilot candidates and they divided them into four groups. Because they didn’t have the capacity to train all 60 at once, they staggered them,” his brother İlker Kalın, 35, told Agence France-Presse.
By a twist of ill fate, his brother was in the first group of 14 sent to Akıncı after basic training, the only ones of the 60 to be caught up in the chaos of the coup.
Telling the cadets they were to take part in a counterterrorism exercise, their superiors collected all their phones, leaving them completely unaware of the events that would unfold overnight, claiming some 250 lives and leaving another 2,000 wounded.
Cut off
Cut off from outside communication, they were the last to hear about the attempted coup, with Kalın’s parents desperately trying to reach him as they anxiously watched the drama play out on television.
He finally came home at around 7 a.m., his face “ashen, terrified,” recalled his mother, Kezban Kalın, 55.
Eleven days after the coup, Kalın was called back to Akıncı to testify.
His father, Ali — who had only recently retired from a career in the military — was not worried, thinking his son would remain at the base for only one night.
At this point in the story, his wife breaks down in tears: Her son was handcuffed on arrival and has never returned home.
After a four-year trial, Alper Kalın and 12 others in his training program were sentenced on November 26, 2020, to life in prison for attempting to “overthrow the constitutional order.”
Statements by their commanding officers that the young men knew nothing did not help.
“The air force was the most actively involved. That was very unfortunate for us because Akıncı Airbase was depicted as the command center of the coup,” İlker Kalın said.
“They punished everybody who was at the base at that moment, no matter their rank or what knowledge they had.”
1,000 push-ups a day
A total of 475 defendants stood trial in the Akıncı case, with 337 receiving life sentences, including 13 trainee officers.
“Hundreds of cadets went into the streets on orders from their commanders. They had absolutely no idea why,” Paris-based political scientist Ahmet İnsel told AFP.
At the end of 2023, Turkey’s Supreme Court of Appeals upheld Kalın’s aggravated life sentence, the harshest punishment under Turkish law. It involves strict restrictions, including confinement in an individual cell and only two visits a month from parents and siblings.
Kalın ended up in the southeastern, Kurdish-majority city of Diyarbakır, some 1,000 kilometers from Ankara by road.
“He’s not allowed to have more than five T-shirts or to wear blue or green” — the colors of the police and the army — his brother explained.
“But he does up to 1,000 push-ups a day and reads a lot.”
There are many political prisoners at the facility, which has one of Turkey’s best-stocked prison libraries.
With Turkey poised to mark 10 years since the coup, which allowed Erdoğan to dramatically tighten his grip on power, the family has no expectations.
“We want this government to change. For it to correct the injustices that have torn us apart. They decided my child’s fate; solving this problem is their responsibility,” said his mother, a housewife turned fierce defender of civil rights.
“We’re not just talking about my child here. There are hundreds and thousands of people.”
This article is republished from Turkish Minute.
