Safiye Bayat: The woman who spearheaded the Bosporus Bridge resistance on the night of July 15

One such figure that has caught the attention of the country is Safiye Bayat, 34, who is seen in a video challenging a dozen soldiers, some of whom on tanks and some standing by. The CCTV camera has no sound. We see Bayat, dressed in a white overcoat, walking toward the military barricade taking big strides and raising her arm in admonishing gestures. Having come close enough to them she seems to take a bow and starts speaking. One of the soldiers walks away, upon which she walks even closer to them. Then we see a number of tanks fire toward the water. She does not budge. Then, one of the soldiers starts beating her, and even then she does not move away. After a couple of minutes, two men come to her aide and she leaves the soldiers, shouting with gestures that clearly show she has decided that they will not see sense.



The first question all of us watching this video inevitably asked was would I have done the same? And many of us have to confess, at least to ourselves, that we probably could not have. I found it hard to understand from where Bayat summoned the courage to go up to armed men and tanks and speak her mind. She is a woman who does not look unlike me, but who clearly has so much more courage than I do. As the news anchor who interviewed her a couple of days later pointed out, the only image I could compare it to was the image of Palestinian women challenging tanks of the Israeli occupation.

"I heard on the news that they had closed our Bosporus Bridge," she said in a television interview. Here was a woman with urban awareness, who identified as being an owner of the Bosporus Bridge and who would not countenance public property, her heritage, her freedom of movement being taken away by thugs. She talked of how she walked from her home to the Bosporus Bridge muttering to herself, asking why there were not more people on the streets. Bayat was one of the people who took to the streets of her own volition before President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan called on the public to do so. Hers is one of the stories that debunk the narrative that Turkish people are sheep who cannot act without the orders of their dear leader. She talked of how she approached the soldiers as far as she could, still trusting in the by now much violated universal code of soldiers not harming women. She, like other men and women we have seen in videos, then told the soldiers what they were doing was wrong. And she referenced Hussein, the grandson of Prophet Muhammad, who said: "It is important to go and stand in front of the oppressor and tell him: 'You're wrong.' And when I looked into their eyes I saw that darkness where there was no return." One disheartening thing was, she added, that none of them seemed to have second doubts, or asked if what they were doing was right.

Having walked up to the tanks and told the soldiers off, Bayat said she also took note of the guns they were holding, that they were something much heavier than Kalashnikovs, which, when she got back to the crowd, she informed her comrades. But she was also sure from the moment she looked into their eyes that whatever atrocity they were planning to commit, they would surrender when they had used up their ammunition. They started shooting on the crowd, and as Bayat tried to help a wounded woman to safety -the wounded woman later died - she was shot. Her description of the event at the end of the interview was: "I can't believe it. I can't believe how soldiers can shoot at innocent people," in disbelief that reflects not so much the naivete of the Turkish people, but the complete trust they have in the ,military, to which they send their husbands, sons, brothers and uncles regularly. And then Bayat voiced the statement that has been said by many trying to understand the coup attempt: "I can't call them soldiers. They can't be soldiers. They are murderers in soldiers' uniforms."

It is clear from Bayat's interview that she did not mean to be a hero and that she was doing what only came natural to her. She has no messages to give to the international media, she is only concerned with how the military treated the people they were supposed to be protecting and that such an act of treason must be stopped. The video of her has been shared widely on social media. She is likened to the legendary figure Nene Hatun, who fought against the Russians in the War of Independence, during which time the people of Turkey had to trust in themselves and sections of the army that were loyal to the nation. People tweet that she and other exemplary women like her, like the two who were photographed driving a truck of protesters to the democracy vigil, are the real generals of the Turkish military. Still, Bayat emphasizes being an ordinary woman, and she seems to think that you and I would do the same thing under the same circumstances.

One tweet said, concerning the general resistance to the coup attempt, that there seems to be groups of people who appear in times of crisis who do great acts of courage and then go back to their quiet, normal lives - the "deep nation," where you can find the likes of Bayat who are inspired by figures such as Prophet Muhammad, his son-in-law Ali and grandson Hussein in their fight to speak truth to power.

* Assistant Professor at Fatih Sultan Mehmet University