The Overcoat

This is not the story of the overcoat of the impoverished government clerk in 19th century Russian writer Nikolai Gogol's masterpiece "The Overcoat."

This is the story of the overcoat of a Turkish journalist in prison.

That journalist is Kadri Gürsel, a long-time friend and colleague, and also the head of the Turkish chapter of the International Press Institute (IPI), of which I am also a member.

Dec. 17 marks Kadri's 43rd day in Silivri Prison, west of Istanbul, together with nine other colleagues from the center-left daily Cumhuriyet. He is one of 146 journalists, writers, editors and publishers currently in jail in Turkey, as revealed by the Turkey Journalists' Association and shared by the IPI. The government denies these figures on the grounds that they are not held because of what they wrote or said, but rather on suspicion of "assisting terrorism."

Kadri, like his Cumhuriyet colleagues, is accused of assisting not one but two outlawed organizations - and two ideologically opposed groups at that. 

With the kind of imagination that would make Gogol envious, Kadri is accused of helping both the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and the Fethullahist Terror Organization (FETÖ). The PKK has waged a campaign of terror in Turkey for the past three decades, while FETÖ is the secret network of the U.S.-based Islamist preacher Fethullah Gülen, accused of masterminding the defeated coup attempt on July 15.

The jailed Kadri recently asked his wife, Nazire Kalan Gürsel, to bring him an overcoat in order to keep him warm in prison, as the weather got colder.

As Hürriyet Daily News columnist and editor Barçın Yinanç quoted on her Facebook page, Nazire tried to take her husband a coat. The coat was rejected...