The Criminalization of Physicians and the Delegitimization of Violence in Turkey

Abstract

In June 2013, protests that erupted in Gezi Park in Istanbul, Turkey were met with state violence, mobilizing hundreds of native physicians to deliver emergency medical care. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in makeshift clinics during these protests, interviews with Gezi physicians and analyses of recent laws restricting emergency care provision, in this article I explore the criminalization of clinical practice through legal and coercive means of the government and the delegitimization of state violence through clinical and expert witnessing practices of physicians. As I show, material, legal, and discursive articulations of the idiom of medical neutrality revolve around the tension between medical praxis as neutrality and medical praxis as political participation. I offer a reconsideration of medical humanitarian and human rights regimes in terms of their consequences for inciting, documenting and restricting state violence.

The Doctor as Parent, Partner, Provider… or Comrade? Distribution of Power in Past and Present Models of the Doctor–Patient Relationship

“…The idea and phenomenon of (infra-) political solidarity between doctors and patients that transcends the traditional therapeutic alliance between them has actually gained some traction in recent years. However, this kind of solidarity has almost exclusively been observed in times of intensified political conflict: On Tahrir Square in Cairo during the Arab Spring in 2011, doctors in makeshift tent facilities and protestors forged a deep form of alliance in and through the common adversary, repression and horror they faced [26]; In 2013, the infirmaries in Gezi Park in Istanbul "acted as new networks of solidarity and comradeship among doctors and protestors" [11]; Another recent but less militant example of the same phenomenon was observed in the battle against…”

“…The idea and phenomenon of (infra-)political solidarity between doctors and patients that transcends the traditional therapeutic alliance between them has actually gained some traction in recent years. However, this kind of solidarity has almost exclusively been observed in times of intensified political conflict: On Tahrir Square in Cairo during the Arab Spring in 2011, doctors in makeshift tent facilities and protestors forged a deep form of alliance in and through the common adversary, repression and horror they faced [ 26 ]; In 2013, the infirmaries in Gezi Park in Istanbul “acted as new networks of solidarity and comradeship among doctors and protestors” [ 11 ]; Another recent but less militant example of the same phenomenon was observed in the battle against privatization and market-based administrative ideologies of the British NHS, and the political attacks on the working conditions of junior doctors which culminated in a series of labor strikes in 2016 in the UK. Ranajit Pushkar observed that the “moral and practical logic” of NHS activists and doctors aligned the duties and interests of health care workers and health care users, effectively making possible the formation of a “new” type of “solidarity” between them, based on the recognition of their “mutuality of interests” [ 47 ].…”

Ethical Vulnerability in Anthropological Research and Activism

“…In this face-toface interaction, the "ethical emerges and is realised" (Casey 2006, 75). This recognition produces an ethical quagmire for Can and her colleagues that is Janus faced: one must come face-to-face with the state in order to come face-to-face with a "radical Other," the impatient patient and diligent doctors, often working against formidable odds (Can 2016).…”

Vulnerable Truths: Research in the Climate of Political Control

“…In this face‐to‐face interaction, the “ethical emerges and is realised” (Casey 2006, 75). This recognition produces an ethical quagmire for Can and her colleagues that is Janus faced: one must come face‐to‐face with the state in order to come face‐to‐face with a “radical Other,” the impatient patient and diligent doctors, often working against formidable odds (Can 2016).…”