ZAman Gazetesi’ne yapilan kayyim atamasinin ardindan calisanlar gazeteye polis kontrolunde girdi. 5 mart 2016/ Kursat Bayhan
Turkey has literally become a police state. That fact became crystal clear to me on the walk to my newspaper’s office on a supposedly regular Monday morning. This is the fourth day since the government’s confiscation of the Feza Media Group, which includes Today’s Zaman, Turkey’s best-selling English-language daily and where I have been working for almost three years.
On my way to work, I first ran into a foreign cameraman and reporter who were trying to cover the invasion down the street. After walking past hundreds of meters of police barricades surrounding my newspaper’s building and lined up across the road, I was welcomed by a young riot police officer holding a machine gun in front of the entrance. I nervously held up my cell phone to take a picture of him with my hands shaking. It was likely that I would face a reaction from him as several colleagues of mine had over the past few days. He turned around and noticed that I had taken his photograph. But the police were probably too tired of tear gassing, manhandling and harassing us since Friday, when they forcibly entered the building at close to midnight.
Dozens of police vehicles were stationed both outside and inside the office courtyard. And these vehicles had of course not arrived empty. Hundreds of police officers, most of them from the counterterrorism unit, had already filled the courtyard “to protect” the newspaper from its employees, and the general public, who might show up later in the day to stand with us in solidarity.
After I passed by all these “guards” and managed to enter the building, I came across other policemen wandering about all five floors, some having brunch at the downstairs café. Two or three officers on each floor were tasked with sitting in the hallway — and periodically giving us disturbing looks as we tried to do our jobs. Most of the computers in our office no longer had an Internet connection or even a connection to our internal network, something the court-appointed trustees claimed was “unintentional” and a problem they were working to sort out. It didn’t sound convincing because they had interfered significantly with the content of our publication the day before, which was the first issue since the takeover. Four columns and one op-ed were scrapped entirely.
We confronted a similar scene when we headed downstairs to the cafeteria for lunch; the entire cafeteria had been invaded by police officers.
Our courtyard was littered with cigarette butts and wrappers thrown away by the policemen, who apparently lacked all courtesy. Indeed, the trustees placed in charge of our daily seem no better. Later on, our managing editor held a meeting and announced that “the trustees do not want any pieces denouncing Turkey any more.” Indeed, this statement was in stark contrast with what we had been told by the trustees only a day earlier. “We are nobody’s men. There is nothing to be worried about. We will not be meddling in your work much. We just want an objective editorial line and there won’t be any praise — or criticism — of people who are being tried,” they had said. We had found it hard to believe, and it didn’t take more than 24 hours to see it for what it was.
In today’s Turkey, where made-up “terrorism” charges can be used to silence dissident media outlets — or any group, for that matter — through bought off courts, what bothers me most is the dishonesty of the authorities. In Third World countries, they are at least honest enough to declare that it was a “government takeover.” There is no beating around the bush; pretending that they are acting in line with the law or as though there is a legitimate court order to justify such a brazen move.