Celtics’ Enes Kanter is like a man without a country. But he won’t stop fighting for Turkey
Enes Kanter is just trying to worship in peace, hoping to find a quiet corner in a Boston-area mosque for his weekly Friday prayer. He’s wearing a gray Celtics fleece, maybe just subtle enough for a seven-footer to blend in for a brief moment in mid-October. He’d hoped for a quick reprieve between morning practice and a slate of afternoon interviews about the situation in Turkey.
This time, as he leaves the mosque, a group of kids clamors to meet him. Among them is a young boy who asks Kanter where he’s from. The answer delights the boy, who exclaims, “Wow, I’m Turkish too!”
Last time, he had been met by another crowd leaving his mosque, including supporters of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, who has declared Kanter an enemy of the state. In September, a meeting of Turkish government ministers in New York included calls for Erdogan supporters to harass Kanter wherever he goes to pray. Kanter responded in a very 21st-century way, filming and posting the harassment to Twitter.
“It was pretty crazy, because this is America,” Kanter said at the time. “You should be safe to come to a mosque and pray peacefully. It was the first time it’s happened to me in America. I was just scared. How about if they do something?”
Kanter decided long ago that he wouldn’t shrink from the chance to respond to his enemies. That’s why he flew to Washington on an off day last week. With Erdogan in town for a meeting at the White House, this was the moment for Kanter to make his voice heard on Capitol Hill.
Not much gets done in one day on the Hill, let alone in one congressional session, but Kanter was there to help introduce several pieces of legislation. First was the Turkey Human Rights Promotion Act in the Senate, demanding the release of unfairly detained journalists and supporting organizations working to free prisoners of conscience.
“It is amazing. We are literally making a law in America,” Kanter tells The Athletic. “I mean, that’s huge. And I met with a lot of congressmen and senators and stuff. They all got my back and that gives me so much hope, you know?”
Few in Washington have had his back like Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), who held a congressional briefing when Kanter was in town so the Celtics center could tell his story. The previous week, they issued a joint statement when the PACT Act passed the House on Oct. 29 to sanction Erdogan’s inner circle and halt arms supplies to Turkey for use against Kurdish forces. If the bipartisan legislation, which is currently sitting in the Senate, makes it to a signature on the President’s desk remains to be seen. Kanter then helped introduce the TRAP Act to both chambers of Congress, which seeks to cease the practice of autocracies using INTERPOL red notices to target political adversaries in exile as Erdogan has done to Kanter.
“We did time this very specifically to coincide with Erdogan’s visit,” Moulton says. “The Celtics were going to let him miss a practice to come and thank God they won the game the night before because otherwise, I would’ve been in trouble.”
Trouble seems not to bother the 27-year-old Kanter, an unwaveringly vocal supporter of the exiled Turkish dissident Fetullah Gülen. Charged as a terrorist for his opposition to the Erdogan regime, Kanter, like Gülen, is a fugitive from Turkish law. He has faced protests and pushback in the Turkish press and online, and he knows there is a more existential threat lingering in the background. He has read the reports of the Turkish government working with intelligence agencies and criminal organizations around the world to kidnap and smuggle dissidents abroad, most notably when six Gülen supporters were abducted from Kosovo and emerged back in Turkey last year. Per NBC News, the White House, which supports Erdogan, formally requested federal law enforcement agencies examine legal methods to extradite Gülen in 2018.
Kanter has resisted hiring a security detail, but after consulting with the Celtics and the FBI, he acknowledges it is a prudent choice now. While he still feels generally safe in America and is applying for citizenship, which he expects to receive in 2021, those around him see a celebrity activist who is uniquely putting himself on the line.
“I certainly don’t know another story where someone’s taken a position like this and put his personal safety at risk,” says Moulton. “The last time that Erdogan was here, his thuggish bodyguards were beating people up. And so I mean that, that I’m concerned for his safety. I think with Erdogan, yes, he should be concerned about that. Absolutely.”
But despite extradition threats, INTERPOL red notices, and a basketball camp canceled under pressure from the Turkish consulate, Kanter’s answer is always to keep moving forward.
“I was talking to one of the people yesterday, a very high-level person (in the U.S. government) and they said Erdogan asked one of the big senators and (Donald) Trump to extradite me back to Turkey,” Kanter says. “I don’t know what the response was. I don’t even have a parking ticket in the U.S., so there are rules and laws, checks and balances in America.”
Even with the knowledge that his life and freedom are truly on the line, he doesn’t stop. He can’t stop. It’s something rooted deep in his heritage, a proud exercise of the values he learned growing up in Turkey that shaped the man he is today.
The mission is deeper than a policy protest against a president he calls a dictator. Kanter was molded from a young age on the teachings of Gülen, a former imam who inspired a wide- spread movement in his name that prioritizes faith-based moral principles within a secular political system. Although the movement has spread across the globe, it has concentrated in his native Turkey with hundreds of schools, hospitals and other civil services operating under Gülen’s principles of tolerance in a civil society. Kanter eventually met Gülen when he came to the NBA and formed a mentorship, visiting Gülen on a regular basis at his home in Pennsylvania.
“He follows the Sufi tradition and he was the one that taught me all this,” Kanter says. “He told me it doesn’t matter where you’re from, what your background is, color is. Treat everybody the same, leave all your differences on the table and try to find what we have in common. And we have a lot of problems in this century and we can solve it with education.
“So that’s why more than mosques and this and that, we talk about schools. Because if you educate people, they’re going to start asking questions. They’re not going to just blindly want to follow a leader.”
Gülen and his movement initially allied with Erdogan as the President rose to power over the past two decades. But eventually, Erdogan and Gülen’s relation fractured, with Gülen exiling himself to the U.S. and Erdogan accusing the movement of being a terrorist organization.
“I went to Gülen schools since I was in the second grade,” says Kanter, who grew up in the lake-side city of Van before moving to the capital of Ankara as a teenager. “So when Erdogan comes out and says these people are bad people, I’m like, I went to their schools since like nine, 10 years old. You’re lying.”
Now, Gülen is wanted as an alleged terrorist leader by Turkey and Pakistan, who have demanded his extradition by multiple U.S. presidential administrations. In 2016, when a coup attempt in Turkey failed, Erdogan labeled Gülen the mastermind, began arresting everyone in civil service involved with the movement and shut down all of the Gülen schools.
“Now, Turkey is the largest country in the world that put the most journalists in jail in one country,“ says Kanter. “And there are a few thousand judges, a lot of police, a lot of teachers are in jail and this guy is still going out there and saying we need to build more jails instead of building more schools, more hospitals. You’re saying we need to build more jails and people are like, what’s wrong with this guy?”
Kanter just shakes his head and laughs in disbelief when recounting the sequence of events leading up to the current situation.
“I was literally watching (Gülen) when the coup is happening, I’m in the same room with him,” Kanter says. “All he did was sit on his chair, pray for his country, and later on Erdogan came out and blamed the Gülen moment and I’m like, ‘I was with that guy, same night!
There’s no way he was involved because I was with him!’”
The Erdogan administration responded by arresting over 80,000 citizens and removing over 130,000 people from civil service, according to U.S. Senate data, alleging they were infiltrating the Turkish economy and government to act as traitors on behalf of Gülen. While Kanter had already criticized Erdogan publicly, this was a turning point for him. The man who was his mentor, whom he visited on a monthly basis for guidance, was being vilified and he felt he had to speak up. Kanter is the only one of four current Turkish NBA players — with Milwaukee’s Ersan Ilyasova, Cleveland’s Cedi Osman and Philadelphia’s Furkan Korkmaz — to publicly oppose Erdogan.
“It was just sad because he came out and Erdogan said it’s God’s gift, so now he can use his power to just control the army, military, police, judges,” says Kanter. “You can put whoever criticizes him in jail. And if you don’t have anything to do with this about the situation, but if you just work in the Gülen hospitals or schools, if you were a teacher or a doctor or this or that, they will still put you in jail because you work for this movement’s hospitals and schools.”
Among those was Kanter’s father, Mehmet, a professor of genetics at Istanbul University who was jailed briefly after the coup and was eventually indicted in 2018 as an alleged member of a terrorist organization because of his affiliation with the Gülen movement. Kanter cites reports from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for evidence that prisoners are being tortured and raped, pointing to his own father as an example of someone who was abused in jail.
“There are lots of reports are saying that people are getting tortured in jail,” he says. “My dad went to jail for seven days and my brother told me when he came back home he wasn’t the same. He was just watching the wall. He was not the same.”
So Kanter cannot stop protesting. His persistence may be the one thing keeping his father out of jail, safe from the hell from which he was lucky enough to walk away. His father is under judicial watch, meaning he cannot leave the country and must report to the police on a weekly basis. Kanter cannot communicate directly with him, so they receive periodic updates on his parents’ well-being from Kanter’s brother, a professional basketball player in Spain who is able to safely maintain contact with the family.
“We believe that since we keep doing media, they don’t want to prosecute him until it kind of dies out and then they’re going to prosecute him,” says Kanter’s manager, Hank Fetic. “They kept postponing, postponing, postponing, and then the government, they sent us a list of evidence against him. And it’s things like liking Enes’ Twitter posts, sharing his Facebook comments. These things are used in Turkey as evidence against you to be part of the Gülen movement.”
As Kanter saw first-hand last week, the standard of law erodes on the dangerous road from democracy to autocracy.
This trip to Washington was just one large part of a bigger plan. Kanter has also launched the “You Are My Hope” petition to bring awareness to the Erdogan regime’s widespread abuses, with the goal of collecting one million signatures and bringing the petition to the White House and UN. All of this came as Erdogan made his return to the White House in the face of protests from both sides of the aisle. For Moulton, it was important for Kanter to be there helping turn the wheels of Congress as Erdogan arrived.
“It was to show that Erdogan might call Enes a terrorist, but he’s getting a hearing in the United States Congress because we know he’s a hero,” says Moulton.
Kanter is just grateful that after feeling like a man with no home country the past few years, he is being embraced by both American society and government.
“I mean, you see all these senators, congressmen, very important people got your back,” he says. “I mean, it’s huge.”
Kanter is a man without a family in the states, a man who can’t go home. If he did, he knows he would be arrested. While he has a remarkable group of friends and allies here, he misses his family back in Turkey. Because he can’t be in contact with them, Kanter continues to use every free day to further his campaign. He can recognize his situation will not change as long as Erdogan is in power, so he must keep denouncing him to help push public sentiment against the Turkish president.
“I just had someone on the Hill come up to me at lunch while I was in the cafeteria,” says Moulton. “And he says, ‘’Thank you so much for bringing Enes here and sharing such a powerful story. I don’t know how he gets out and plays basketball every night with this burden on his shoulders.’”
He does it anyway, starting at center for Portland’s Western Conference Finals run last season before joining the Celtics this year as one of their key rotation bigs. He continues to be a lively personality on and off the court, frequently cracking jokes with teammates and the media.
But a casual conversation with Kanter begs the question: how can someone facing such pressure and pain put out so much positivity? He is always in good spirits, genuinely connecting with and remembering those around him. He even hosted 50 free basketball camps for kids this summer, and continues to spread his message to anyone who will listen.
Kanter insists that while playing a hand in shaping legislation is a major step forward, the fight doesn’t end until the Erdogan regime is over. As he becomes more vocal and empowered, he feels the heat from those who oppose him. Paradoxically, the more Erdogan calls him a terrorist or his administration supports those threatening him, Kanter feels his goal inching closer.
“That just shows how much he is scared,” Kanter says.
His fear of failure outweighs his fear of the consequences he may face. Kanter feels a responsibility not only to his family, but everyone wrongly imprisoned in Turkey.
Even when he was scared, he never stopped pushing forward. Now Kanter has the momentum to do what he has always wanted: make a difference.