Seda Başay-Yıldız – Against institutional racism

6 May 2023 marked the 10th anniversary of the start of the NSU trial. Many questions are still unanswered. The relatives of the victims have lost much, if not all, trust in the justice system, like the parents of lawyer Seda Başay-Yıldız. Some are pinning their hopes on civil society. But the judiciary cannot be relieved of its responsibility. We have to face up to institutional racism.

At some point, however, the time will come when racism must be confronted,
where you can no longer „ignore“ everything.
– Seda Başay-Yıldız

Frankfurt lawyer Seda Başay-Yıldız grew up in the small Hessian town of Marburg. Her parents came to Germany as „guest workers“. She went to grammar school in Marburg and learnt early on that if you want to get ahead, you can’t be rebellious. Especially not in the face of racist, xenophobic and sexist comments. Her early experiences included the atmosphere of violence and fear of pogroms:

The arson attacks of 22 to 25 August 1992 in Rostock-Lichtenhagen on a home for asylum seekers and a hostel for Vietnamese people, where onlookers applauded and the police intervened far too late; the arson attack on 23 November in Mölln. Three members of the Arslan family – Bahide Arslan (51), Yeliz Arslan (10) and Ayse Yilmaz (14) die; on 23 May 1993, the arson attack in Solingen in which five people die, Gürsün Ince (28), Hatice Genç (18), Gülüstan Öztürk (12), Hülya Genç (9) and Saime Genç (4).

At some point, says Seda Başay-Yıldız – she was already a lawyer – the moment came when she could no longer ignore anything. The protective mechanism she had developed as a child changed and she wanted to face up to the hostility. One trigger was the self-disclosure of the NSU („National Socialist Underground“). Nine migrants and a police officer were murdered by right-wing terrorists between 2000 and 2007: Enver Simsek (38), Abdurrahim Özüdogru (49), Süleyman Tasköprü (31), Habil Kiliç (38), Mehmet Turgut (25), Ismail Yasar (50), Theodores Boulgarides (41), Mehmet Kubasik, (39), Halit Yozgat (21), Michèle Kiesewetter (22). Seda Başay-Yıldız becomes a lawyer for the joint plaintiff in the NSU trial and only really becomes aware of the criminalisation of the victims when she inspects the files of the investigating authorities.

The structural racism, which the lawyer then began to address, continued, and further series of murders followed, in Munich in 2018 and Hanau in 2020. In between, in 2019, Walter Lübcke was murdered in Kassel. Only then do the authorities speak of a „caesura“ for the first time. By this time, Seda Başay-Yıldız had already experienced that she and her young daughter, and later her parents, had received death threats by fax and that their personal details had been accessed and published at the 1st police station in Frankfurt. She files a complaint about the threatening letters – but even then they continue, signed NSU 2.0…

6 May 2023 marked the 10th anniversary of the start of the NSU trial. Many questions are still unanswered. The relatives of the victims have lost much if not all trust in the justice system. Like the parents of Seda Başay-Yıldız many years ago. Some are pinning their hopes on civil society, but the judiciary cannot and must not be released from its responsibility because we have to confront institutional racism.

Photo: By Henning Schlottmann (photographer): Abdulkerim Şimşek, the son of Enver Şimşek, and lawyer Seda Başay-Yıldız on the day of the verdict in the NSU trial on 11 July 2018 in Munich, detail (portrait format), Copyright CC BY-SA 4.0