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Woman Journalist In Turkey Traumatized By Abuse And Torture At Police Station

May 12, 2017 By administrator

Journalist Büşra Erdal, as she was detained.

A veteran woman Turkish journalist who remained in nine month long pre-trial detention has been subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment at the police custody after she got re-arrested on trumped-up charges when the court decision to release her was not enforced by the government, resulting in a traumatic experience that her lawyer says she has been unable to cope with.

Hanım Büşra Erdal, a court reporter and a lawyer, was subjected to intrusive naked search at the police station and humiliated by the police officers when she was picked up from the prison cell where she was preparing to walk away after the judges ordered her release from nine-month pre-trial detention. Erdal whose indictment lacks merit for any evidence of violence and terror except her published articles in critical Zaman daily was ordered to be released on March 31 pending trial. Yet, the government intervened in her release amid outcry by pro-government circles including propagandist journalists who wanted her to remain in jail indefinitely. As a result, another arrest warrant was issued against her on the same day before she managed to make one step outside the walls of the prison.

As if crushing her hopes to be free is not enough, Erdal was taken to the police station and detained there for a day before she was placed into the prison again. Despite she did not present any risk of possessing a contraband or a weapon as she was directly transferred from her prison cell, police forced her to get naked in the detention, subjected her to intrusive search and humiliated her dignity for hours as part of an unlawful punishment that amounted a torture. Erdal was traumatized with this terrible experience according to her lawyer who gave a statement to that effect in the courtroom.

Ümit Kardaş, the lawyer of the journalist, told the court on April 27 hearing that “my client was subjected to the inhuman treatment. She won her freedom but put back to jail again. A month passed since her terrible ordeal in police station but she has not covered from that trauma yet.” While the lawyer is defending her in the courtroom, Erdal burst into tears. “You could say this was a torture and abuse,” Kardaş emphasized.

He said the naked search is allowed only if it the circumstances warrant such practice. “She is a journalist and was picked up from the prison. She was routinely going through checks and searches in the prison already. By forcibly removing her clothes in police detention, the government wanted to humiliate and abuse her,” Kardaş explained. He said the independence of the judges were also violated as they were dismissed right after the release decision. “The logic here is clear: these people won’t get released no matter what,” he alimented.

source: http://stockholmcf.org/woman-journalist-in-turkey-traumatized-by-abuse-and-torture-at-police-station/

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: journalism, Turkey

How journalism became a crime in Turkey

April 25, 2017 By administrator

By Ali Bayramoglu,

With the April 16 referendum, Turkey took its first step into a new era. It is a step toward institutionalizing a populist model of governance that will open new ground for violations and tensions in vital areas such as justice, freedom and the supremacy of law.

Since the botched coup in July 2016, Turkey has seen two distinct trends in this context. The first is the ongoing purge and punishment of the putschist group, that is, followers of US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, the accused mastermind of the coup. The second is the clampdown on the opposition and the media, which is carried out on the pretext of the coup attempt. Scores of government opponents have been arrested arbitrarily for alleged links to the putschists. Intellectuals and journalists who have nothing to do with the Gulenists and who have long stood up against military coups are now facing life sentences on incredible charges, including “subliminal” communication with the putschists via TV programs and articles.

The court case against the Cumhuriyet newspaper is one of the most glaring examples in this respect. It involves 19 defendants, including Al-Monitor columnist Kadri Gursel, who has been behind bars for five months, along with nine other colleagues from the Cumhuriyet. On April 18, the court accepted the prosecution’s indictment and scheduled the opening hearing for July 24.

As a deep-rooted press institution in Turkey, the Cumhuriyet has a distinct republican-secularist tradition. Amid growing alarm over Ankara’s authoritarian tilt, the paper became increasingly critical of the government in recent years, vigorously questioning and probing government policies. According to the charges leveled against the list of defendants, which includes Cumhuriyet executives, reporters and even a cartoonist, the paper’s critical editorial policy was the result and extension of its collaboration with putschists and Gulenist groups.

One would expect the indictment to offer tangible evidence and discuss concrete actions to back up such grave accusations. What the prosecutors have penned, however, is a superficial report based on a political interpretation of information from open sources. The indictment states that the Cumhuriyet adopted an anti-government editorial policy after the accused executives took office in 2013. It frames the paper’s criticism as a contribution to efforts to discredit and topple the government.

In short, the indictment criminalizes a critical publication simply by associating it with a criminal group (one the state now considers a terrorist organization), oblivious to all the discrepancies that emerge in drawing such a link. Take, for instance, Gursel, who has been both a columnist and editorial consultant for the paper. A key feature of Gursel’s writings has been his equal criticism of the ruling Justice and Development Party and the Gulenists, compounded by an emphasis on their alliance that collapsed acrimoniously before the putsch. To accuse Gursel and his like-minded colleagues at the secularist, Kemalist and left-leaning Cumhuriyet of being Gulenist collaborators can be seen only as a farce of authoritarianism.

Apart from headlines and news reports, the “evidence” in the indictment includes Twitter posts by the defendants and certain telephone numbers with which they have had contact.

Some time ago, Turkey’s intelligence service found out that Gulenists used an app called ByLock to communicate with each other. Since the coup attempt, individuals who had downloaded the app to their mobile phones or computers have been accused of belonging to the Gulenist network. The ByLock issue appears in the Cumhuriyet indictment, too, but in an extremely arbitrary fashion. Calls and text messages from ByLock users, who could well be readers, are presented as evidence of the defendants’ association with Gulenists, no matter that some of those calls and messages may have never been answered or noticed. In Gursel’s case, the backbone of the charges rests on this bizarre link drawn by the prosecution.

When Utku Cakirozer, Cumhuriyet’s former editor-in-chief and now a lawmaker for Turkey’s main opposition party, visited Gursel earlier in April, the imprisoned journalist relayed the following message through him: “The claim that I’ve been in contact with ByLock users is aimed at a character assassination. They claim I have been in contact with as many as 92 ByLock users. Did I speak to those people on the phone? How many times? Who called whom? The indictment says nothing on these issues. It is with such an ambiguity that charges are being leveled. I can have some guesses, though, on how this data was obtained. It was probably the spring of 2014, when the first wave of arrests [of Gulenists began after a corruption scandal implicating government officials], and I received hundreds of text messages from people, who, I suppose, were Gulenists. They were trying to galvanize the media against the arrests. The messages — sent to me because I was an active journalist appearing on television programs — were probably interpreted as a connection. Yet I never contacted those people. I did not even reply to them. A second probability is that some ByLock users among my Twitter followers, who numbered about 350,000 at the time of my arrest, might have retweeted my tweets and this, too, might have been shown as a connection.”

The state of affairs in the Cumhuriyet case illustrates the new low the Turkish judiciary has hit and how dire its politicization has become. Today’s prosecutors do not even bother to fabricate evidence, as some of their colleagues have done in the past. Instead, dissidence and oppositional politics are considered crimes themselves. This comes as another manifestation of the grave impasse that democracy and the freedom of press face in Turkey today.

Ali Bayramoglu is an academic and political commentator in Turkey. He has produced several publications on minority rights, on the Kurdish issue and on religious and conservative movements in Turkey. Since 1994, he has continuously contributed as a columnist to a variety of newspapers. His most well-known books include  The Islamic Movement in Turkey (2001), The Military in Turkey (2004), The Religious and Secular in the Democratization Process (2005), and The Process of Resolution: From Politics to Arms (2015).

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Crime, Erdogan, journalism, Turkey

Surveillance of journalists and court orders puts Canada’s press freedom at risk

February 3, 2017 By administrator

By Alexandra Ellerbeck/CPJ Americas Research Associate

On February 6, VICE News reporter Ben Makuch is due to appear in court to appeal an order requesting that he hand over details of his communication with a source. The hearing comes ahead of a day of action being planned in Canada for February 25, when press freedom and privacy activists are due to lobby the government over issues including surveillance powers and an anti-terrorism bill.
As well as the legal action against Makuch, news outlets reported in 2016 that police had issued warrants to spy on at least eight journalists, checked phone records to see if officers had been in contact with journalists, and seized a journalist’s laptop. Authorities also called for increased police surveillance powers and criticized encryption for hampering police work.

Source: https://www.cpj.org/blog/2017/02/surveillance-of-journalists-and-court-orders-puts-.php

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Canada, journalism

Journalism and freedom of press at epic proportion in Turkey

November 15, 2016 By administrator

turkey-no-freedom-of-pressToday, Deutsche Welle is publishing this text from the Turkish newspaper “Cumhuriyet,” together with 40 other German print and online media providers. It is an expression of solidarity on Writers in Prison Day.

Cumhuriyet’ forever:

“I am an old employee of ‘Cumhuriyet.’ I’ve brought flowers to boost moral,” he said. He quietly passed out carnations and disappeared.

Meanwhile, the headquarters of the newspaper “Cumhuriyet” in the Istanbul district of Şişli is buzzing like a beehive. It’s November 2, 2016, the third day after 13 of our journalists and managers were arrested. We employees are trying to stay calm and relaxed. Our job is to publish a newspaper. We have no alternative but to do what we were trained to do. “Cumhuriyet” is a newspaper and journalists work here.

What happened?

Everything began on the morning of October 31, 2016, when our editor-in-chief Murat Sabuncu called. At 7:00 a.m. he rang and said, “They are taking me away.” They arrested Sabuncu. At the same time, our journalists and managers Aydın Engin, Hikmet Çetinkaya Hakan Kara, Güray Öz, Bülent Utku, Mustafa Kemal Güngör, Bülent Yener, and Günseli Özaltay were taken out of their homes.

Without hesitation, Kadri Gürsel, Musa Kart and Önder Çelik went of their own accord to the police station where they were, of course, arrested.

In addition, the apartment of Orhan Erinç, the chairman of the Cumhuriyet Foundation, was searched. Last Friday, our publisher Akın Atalay, who had been in Germany on business, was arrested when he landed in Turkey.

A 93-year-old newspaper

We employees gathered together immediately in our building. We realized right away that the operation against “Cumhuriyet” hadn’t really surprised anyone. Like everyone from the opposition, they wanted to keep “Cumhuriyet” quiet – even though “Cumhuriyet” was just providing news and wasn’t part of the opposition. But the political climate has grown harsher under the state of emergency.

Accusations against ‘Cumhuriyet’

The reason our friends were arrested was that they were accused of being members of the Gülen organization and the PKK and of having committed crimes in their names. In reality, “Cumhuriyet” is one of the few newspapers that regularly warned of the danger of the Gülen organization infiltrating the police and the justice system, and of taking control of the republic and turning Turkey into an Islamic state.

Furthermore, “Cumhuriyet” is one of the few newspapers that has defended the rights of the Kurds, constantly criticized the PKK, and rejected every form of terror. But now this whole past is being nullified and “Cumhuriyet” is being blamed for everything.

Indicted public prosecutor

But the truth always tends to come to light. There was once again a journalist who discovered that the public prosecutor who was investigating “Cumhuriyet” had been charged in a Gülen case himself.

The fact that a public prosecutor who was charged with being a member of the Gülen organization was leading the investigation should have caused the case against “Cumhuriyet” to fall apart. But the Minister of Justice spoke of a “mishap.” The ministry didn’t even consider relieving the public prosecutor of his duties.

We just want one thing

We are working with the aim of doing good journalism, and thanks to the strength our supporters give us every day by coming to our newspaper. We just want one thing: press freedom.

We have to be a voice for those who don’t have one. We have to report and write down the facts. Our work is difficult; the pressure is enormous; the threats are serious. But nothing will stop us.

The message from our editor-in-chief Murat Sabuncu, which he sent from prison and which filled our eyes with tears, is the maxim of everyone who works at “Cumhuriyet”:

“We will only bow to our people and our readers.”

Translated by Timur Tinç, Deniz Yücel and Kate Müser.

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: freedom of press, journalism, Turkey

Pope says journalism based on fear-mongering, gossip is form of ‘terrorism’

September 23, 2016 By administrator

pope-journalismJournalism based on gossip or rumors is a form of “terrorism” and media that stereotype entire populations or foment fear of migrants are acting destructively, Pope Francis said on Thursday, Reuters  reports.

According to the source, Francis, who made his comments in an address to leaders of Italy’s national journalists’ guild, said reporters had to go the extra mile to seek the truth, particularly in an age of round-the-clock news coverage.

Spreading rumors is an example of “terrorism, of how you can kill a person with your tongue”, he said. “This is even more true for journalists because their voice can reach everyone and this is a very powerful weapon.”

Francis, who has often strongly defended the rights of refugees and migrants, said journalism should not be used as a “weapon of destruction against persons and even entire peoples”.

“Neither should it foment fear before events like forced migration from war or from hunger,” he added.

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: journalism, Pope, terrorism

Armenia: 100 lives joins a great institution of journalism for a price of reportage

March 11, 2016 By administrator

arton123119-480x410The Award for Integrity in Journalism honors those who reveal the crimes against humanity

(9 March 2016) – YEREVAN, ARMENIA – 100 LIVES and the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) announced the creation of a price distinction between courageous journalists that attract worldwide attention on humanitarian crises.

ICFJ Award for Integrity in Journalism, in partnership with the Aurora Prize will be awarded at a ceremony under the auspices of 100 LIVES, April 24, in Yerevan, Armenia. 100 LIVES is an organization that celebrates those who rescued Armenians during the genocide of 1915. In recognition, this organization supports people and organizations that keep this heritage alive.

100 LIVES will also present its first Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity to honor the heroes who today extend the spirit of responsibility and compassion. ICFJ contact 100 LIVES and George Clooney, vice president of the Aurora Awards, to announce the name (or the) winner (e) of this journalism awards in Yerevan.

“I can not stress enough the impact that journalism has on the awareness and the alleviation of human suffering,” says Ruben Vardanyan, co-founder of 100 LIVES. “During the Armenian Genocide, commitment and constant coverage by journalists from around the world helped to inspire other people to act and intervene. Today we see that this commitment continues even as Syria, Sudan and other war zones around the world. “

In the same spirit, the Award for Integrity in Journalism ICFJ will be given to (on) a journalist who has highlighted serious humanitarian problems in difficult access environments. By covering the plight of endangered communities, the winner must demonstrate exceptional courage coupled with an unwavering commitment to integrity, freedom and justice. His work must in turn inspire others to take action to intervene.

“ICFJ is honored to work with 100 LIVES to highlight the essential role played by journalists testifying persecution in sensitive locations around the world,” said Joyce Barnathan, president of ICFJ. “We are pleased to distinguish such a relevant way for journalists.”

About 100 100 LIVES LIVES is a new international initiative rooted in the events of the 1915 genocide, in which one and a half million Armenians were killed. Those who were able to escape, including the need for the courageous and heroic actions of individuals and institutions. A century later, 100 LIVES proposes to show his gratitude, share remarkable stories of survivors and their saviors, and celebrate the strength of humanism. For more information, please visit www.100LIVES.com. regarding the Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity Award winners will be honored for the exceptional impact their actions have had in the protection of human life and progress of humanitarian causes. On behalf of the survivors of the Armenian Genocide and in gratitude to their rescuers, the Aurora Award winner will be honored each year with a price of 100,000 US dollars, with the unique opportunity to extend the gift of the cycle by offering a organization that inspired its action for a grant of 1 million US dollars. The Aurora Awards Selection Committee includes Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, Oscar Arias, Shirin Ebadi and Leymah Gbowee; the former President of the Republic of Ireland Mary Robinson; activist Human Rights Hina Jilani; former Australian Foreign Minister and Executive Chairman of the International Crisis Group Gareth Evans, president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York Vartan Gregorian; and the Oscar-winning actor and humanitarian activist George Clooney. The Aurora Prize will be awarded every year on April 24 in Yerevan, Armenia. For more information, please visit www.100LIVES.com/Prize. Concerning the International Center for Journalists the International Center for journalists (ICFJ) is at the forefront of the information revolution with programs providing journalists and encouraging citizens to use new technologies and the most appropriate methods. Networks of journalists and ICFJ’s media companies are revolutionizing the field. We believe that a better journalism leads to the improvement of our lives For more information, visit or contact www.icfj.org Maite Fernandez, Director of Communications, at 202-349-7636 or mfernandez@icfj.org.

Friday, March 11, 2016,
Ara © armenews.com

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: 100-LIVES, Armenia, journalism

Journalism under police surveillance in Erdoğan’s ‘new Turkey’

March 8, 2016 By administrator

ZAman Gazetesi'ne yapilan kayyim atamasinin ardindan calisanlar gazeteye polis kontrolunde girdi. 5 mart 2016/ Kursat Bayhan

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.

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Erdogan, journalism, Turkey

Journalism in Turkey: journalist Baransu is in jail, EMRE USLU in exile, Taraf is under intense pressure.

August 9, 2015 By administrator

e-uslu-bEMRE USLU
e.uslu@todayszaman.comEMRE USLU

Sümeyye assassination lie: Why I am a target; what was the goal say USLU.

The news about an assassination plot to kill President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s daughter Sümeyye turned out to have no substance. It was very obvious from the very beginning that the news was simply a fabrication. A legal investigation is still under way regarding the issue. All the other allegations printed by the pool media — a term referring to the pro-government media — and all the investigations launched by project judges and prosecutors appointed by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) are likewise just fabrications.
The real motivation behind the cases launched against me and slander suggesting my involvement in an alleged assassination plot against Sümeyye Erdoğan is because I exposed some operations by the National Intelligence Organization (MİT), some of which could be considered illegal. I, the Taraf newspaper and journalist Mehmet Baransu, who have dared to write about these issues since 2012, were already a target. Now, Baransu is in jail, I am in exile and Taraf is under intense pressure. I think we have been targeted because we wrote about the following issues in which we think MİT is involved and are for the benefits of the AKP rather than the interests of the country.
1) The information that the intelligence that led to the killing of 34 civilians near Uludere by Turkish warplanes came from MİT. 2) The fact that Turkey will turn into an intelligence state. 3) The fact that the settlement process launched with the terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) to resolve the Kurdish issue was a deception aimed at keeping Kurds busy until the general election. 4) The fact that an alleged assassination plot to kill Sümeyye Erdoğan — that was allegedly cancelled when it was exposed — was actually fake. 5) The trucks that were sent to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and al-Qaeda. 6) The weird relationship established with Iran, some elements of which were exposed in the Dec. 17 and 25 corruption dossier in 2013.
The government put pressure on Taraf, jailed Baransu by finding other excuses for his imprisonment and launched slanderous accusations and conspired against me for writing about these issues, which everyone is talking about to some extent today because we brought them to the nation’s agenda.
One of the conspiracies leveled against me was a claim of my involvement in an assassination plot to kill Sümeyye Erdoğan. The reason why this claim was brought forward was this: At that time, the government was trying to obtain a Red Notice about me, which would enable to it request my extradition from the United States because all the other allegations against me were full of nonsense and politically motivated, so it was impossible for them to ask for my extradition from the United States according to the laws of this country. In order to ask my extradition from the United States, the launch of a case against me because I had expressed my political views was not sufficient. For such a move, the only thing needed was my involvement in a criminal activity like an assassination plot against someone.
That’s why they made up the claim about my involvement in an assassination plot against Erdoğan’s daughter. If those who were involved in forging documents to prove their claims had done their jobs better, the government would have asked my extradition after issuing a Red Notice based on those news reports.
As a matter of fact, as if he had no other work to do, the Turkish ambassador to Washington once told US officials — based on news reports in the pro-government Turkish media — that “Emre Uslu and members of the Gülen movement [a faith-based movement inspired by Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen] even get involved in assassination plots against Erdoğan’s children. Don’t give any support to them.” This may seem unbelievable to you, but I have confirmation of the accuracy of these statements from many US senators, members of congress and State Department officials. Other journalists have also written about it. That conspiracy was published in the pro-government media to provide grounds for the lies to be told by Turkish embassy officials in the US and other Western countries.

Why Umut Oran and me?

The reason is the famous phone conversation between Erdoğan and his son Bilal in which Erdoğan asks Bilal to “zero” the money in his house, following the public revelations of a corruption scandal on Dec. 17, 2013. When those recordings were revealed, Erdoğan said they were fabricated and a montage. I, on the other hand, argued that it was pretty easy to prove if the tapes were fake or otherwise without requiring reports or voice analysis. I simply said: “In those records, Erdoğan told Bilal that he sent Sümeyye to İstanbul. If this tape is fake, then publish the records to see if Sümeyye traveled from Ankara to İstanbul. If she traveled at the time mentioned in the tape, then the records are authentic. If not, then the tape is fake.” I wrote columns and made comments where I raised this argument to put an end to the debate.
That is the reason why they invented a plot involving me and Oran. If the documents they manufactured had not turned out to be fake, they would have said: “Emre Uslu already called for the publication of Sümeyye Erdoğan’s travel records and Oran released them. They were following Sümeyye as part of their assassination plot.”
They resorted to such a conspiracy in order to cover up the US dollars they shamelessly zeroed. However, facts have a habit of coming to light sooner or later. Today is such a time.

Source: ZAMAN

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: jail, journalism, Turkey

Turkey, True journalism fights for survival under AKP gov’t

October 18, 2014 By administrator

194868_newsdetailVeteran Turkish journalists who have lost their jobs for basically trying to perform their profession have said they did not experience as much government pressure and intervention during the turbulent coup times of the past as they have under the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government today. Report by Today Zaman

As it stood, Turkey is not a country with a brilliant record on freedom of the press but developments in the country, particularly starting with the Gezi Park protests of 2013 and continuing with a graft probe on Dec. 17 in which senior government members were implicated, have culminated in heavy government scrutiny over the media.

Prominent journalists such as Nazlı Ilıcak, Yavuz Baydar, Mehmet Altan and many others were sacked either because they criticized the government, they called on the government to shed light on the graft allegations, they published content which the government did not like or because they did not criticize the faith-based Hizmet movement against which the government has launched a battle since last year.

The government accuses Hizmet of masterminding the graft investigation and claims that Hizmet’s followers have established a “parallel structure” or “parallel state” within the state, an allegation Hizmet strongly denies. The AK Party government, which has launched a crackdown on Hizmet-affiliated institutions and organizations, also called for a boycott of the group’s media outlets. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who was the prime minister until his election to the top state post in August, has repeatedly called on people not to buy the group’s papers.

Other journalists like pro-government Sabah daily’s Yasemin Taşkın lost their jobs for other reasons. Taşkın was sacked because her husband, an Italian, conducted an interview with Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen, who inspired the Hizmet movement, for an Italian daily.

Recordings of phone conversations between Erdoğan and some media figures which were posted online following the graft investigation clearly show how Erdoğan resorts to either carrots or sticks to make journalists toe the line. Critical journalists were sacked from their jobs or faced criminal cases and media bosses were intimidated by tax fines upon Erdoğan’s direct orders while others who praised the government’s every act were being commended and reportedly received huge salaries.

Concerns over the deterioration of freedom of the press in Turkey have been raised by various international organizations such as the Human Rights Watch (HRW), Reporters Without Borders (RSF), US-based watchdog Freedom House and the EU. Freedom House downgraded Turkey from “Partly Free” to “Not Free” in its “Freedom of the Press 2014” report in May.

In its annual progress report released early this month, the EU also highlighted its worries about freedom of the press in Turkey, noting that pressure on the press in Turkey leads to widespread self-censorship, reflecting a restrictive approach to freedom of expression. The government has so far opted to shrug off the reports of these organizations, with former Foreign Minister and current Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu even saying that if journalists can safely return to their homes, this is because of freedom of the press in Turkey.

President of Turkish Journalists Syndicate Uğur Güç: It has never been revealed this clearly before

 

We are living in an era when people in the opposition are actually losing their jobs. We’ve experienced this in the past, but once Gezi occurred, the whole situation became even worse. We have all sorts of examples before us; people who have been fired for the tweets they made, people forced out of jobs because of opposition expressed over Twitter.

The goal driving all this is ultimately to get journalists under control, allowing the government to control the media. It’s never been this clear and out in the open before. In the wake of the 1990s, journalists would be given encouragement, and some media bosses would even change their publication policies accordingly. But the media world, even then, never experienced pressure so extreme as it does today. The point at which we have arrived is one where either the prime minister passes on the message of what he wants, or actually makes the phone call himself and has someone fired. Not only this, but once a journalist has been fired, there’s a record on that person, and he or she can no longer find work anywhere else either.

Mehmet Altan: Even including the Sept. 12 regime, there’s never been this much pressure

 

This whole period began with AK Party İstanbul bureau head Aziz Babuşcu saying, “We’ve parted paths with the liberals.” There has never been this much pressure on the media, not even during the Sept. 12 regime. Some 51 percent of Turkish people are not regularly connected to the internet. They learn of events and the news only from the television and sometimes the newspapers. And so, when the media is turned into a one-sided affair, what you are really controlling is the democratic right to obtain information. And so, when you have such a large faction of people without access to the internet, you can create the conditions you wish. You can bring about the substructure for a sort of fascism by destroying freedom of thought and expression. And when you prevent people from being properly informed, what you are really doing is damaging the essence of democracy.

During the Feb. 28 process, the pious and the conservatives of this country suffered much from this same sort of pressure we see today. But now a different group of people have taken over the helm, and an even worse tableau is being displayed for us to see. And of course, there is the whole situation with the pooled media. Gathering money in a fund to buy media — newspapers in particular — is a constitutional crime. Even during the times of the Sept. 12 regime, there were no newspapers that were forced into bankruptcy. But now we are seeing newspapers being directly taken over by those in power. This whole process began three years ago and we see it continuing today.

Nazlı Ilıcak: I lost my job because people were afraid I would ask, ‘How will our ministers account for what they have done?’

 
I began to criticize the government more and more intensely after 2011. I guess we could look at the Gezi events as a real cornerstone in all of this. I was regularly getting warnings from the heads of the newspaper… But when the whole Dec. 17 bribery and corruption situation emerged, everything changed. In fact, on the very first day, I said, “Hey, Tayyip Erdoğan is not involved with these guys.” When I heard the names of the four government ministers implicated in all of this, I thought to myself, “Tayyip Erdoğan will come out now and talk about the independence of justice, saying, ‘You see? You said that the justice system was tied to us, but look at how our ministers are accounting for what they have done’.” This is how I guessed he would behave. But one day later, publicly, the prime minister said, “The parallel state set a trap for us.” Of course, right at that moment I realized that he was trying to hide something, and I wrote a column about this, criticizing it. That column never made its way into the paper, and right after that, I got a call from the newspaper’s editorial board, basically saying “We can no longer work with you.” I have no idea whether a phone call from on high was made to the newspaper about my no longer working there, but the owner of the newspaper was the older brother of the prime minister’s son-in-law. There was probably not even any need for a phone call; these people have telepathic means of communication!

Murat Aksoy lost his job when he criticized the AK Party on his TV program

 
“I said that the AK Party needed to investigate all the corruption, and they terminated my job,” says Murat Aksoy, who worked on CNN Türk’s “5N1K” program, and who lost his job for openly expressed criticism of the AK Party. Here is how Aksoy describes his parting of the ways with the newspaper he worked for, the Yeni Şafak daily. “Prior to Gezi, I wrote about the negative reactions I got from conservatives about AK Party projects involving youth. I wrote about the missed opportunities right before Gezi; I wrote about how the AK Party was not successfully representing the majority of society. When Gezi happened, these criticisms hit a peak. In a post-Dec. 17 column, I wrote something like, “All these steps are being taken so that the AK Party can protect itself.” And this is the summation of what I said on a television program after the Dec. 25 operation, the second one of its kind. I said something like: “This is a state crisis. What the AK Party needs to do is follow up on this.” The next day, I wrote a column, but was told they wouldn’t be using it. Then I went on a break, and when I returned, I was told I no longer had a job there.”
 

Husband’s interview with Gülen causes Rome correspondent for Sabah newspaper to lose her job

 
The Rome correspondent for the Sabah newspaper, Yasemin Taşkın, wound up losing her job because of an interview with Fethullah Gülen that her husband did for an Italian newspaper. Taşkın said, “They punished my husband through me.” She goes on: “There was no problem between the newspaper and me. My husband is also a journalist. He is both a Vatican expert as well as a Turkey expert. Like any foreign correspondent would, my husband tried to get an interview with one of the important names in all the events taking place here. And in doing so, he definitely never thought any harm would come to my career or me. At least, ordinarily, no one would expect such a thing. So he went ahead and did the interview, and the day it came out, our foreign news head sent me an email, embarrassed, saying that the newspaper’s editorial board had decided to bring an end to our working relationship. In the email, our foreign news head was careful to stress that he did not know the reason behind this decision, and that no one had told him anything. But whoever had called him had mentioned the interview that my husband had done with Gülen as the reason. It was said, “It would have been better if Marco had not done that interview.”

Professor Özsoy: Never has there been such disgrace in the history of the Turkish press

 
After the Dec. 17 corruption investigation operation, I spoke with the newspaper’s general publications director. He said to me, “You are one of my most widely read writers; if there is a problem, we’ll stand behind you.” But then, on Dec. 30, I was one of the first journalists to lose his job. It is, of course, not difficult to guess that the will behind this was something above and beyond the actual directors of my newspaper. There was nothing in particular that pointed to this at the time, but a person can guess. I even made some jokes at the time about whether it was the prime minister or his aide Yalçın Akdoğan who had made the call with the orders. These days, simply not criticizing the Gülen group [the Hizmet movement] is enough to get you thrown out of a job. Unfortunately, this era of shamefulness has truly begun.”

Süleyman Yaşar fired for not writing what they wanted

 

Economist Süleyman Yaşar, who refused to write negative things about certain people and organizations which he was ordered to by those directing the Sabah newspaper, also lost his job. Yaşar had been known as the journalist who kept former Prime Minister Erdoğan from signing off on an agreement with the IMF. In the wake of the Dec. 17 operation, the Sabah newspaper asked Yaşar to write negative stories about certain names and organizations in Turkey. As an academic writer, Yaşar made it clear to the newspaper’s directorship that he would only write stories based on hard facts, underscoring that he was, first and foremost, an economist. Before the March elections this year, he was told by those in charge of Sabah: “The parallel structure wants to bring down the country’s economy. This needs to be shown in numbers so that readers can see this.” Recalling the situation, Yaşar says: “I am an economist and they were simply trying to give me material. But what I do is to analyze real data. I cannot write stories that aim to undermine others.”
 

Yavuz Baydar: We are experiencing a situation never seen before in Turkish press history

 
In the Turkey of 2014, court cases and prison sentences have been replaced by the trend of firings from jobs in a sort of sly turn of events that leads to no one taking the blame, with the ball being thrown by the ruling party to media bosses, and then tossed back again to Ankara. It has spread throughout the system and whatever editorial independence is even left is slowly draining away. To put it another way, the very DNA of our media is being destroyed before our very eyes. And fear is the main reason behind the growing pattern of auto-censorship and editorial dependence we see everywhere.
 

Derya Sazak: They told me to throw out Can Dündar. When I refused, they said I would then have to go

 
It all began with the “İmralı journals.” That day, I received a phone call from the [former] prime minister’s head political consultant, Yalçın Akdoğan. Speaking sharply, he said: “You are sabotaging our peace process, how is this possible? You will have to account for your actions.” His words were nothing if not full of threats. I told him that, to the contrary, the process was being normalized but he kept on insisting, “No, this is sabotage.” The next day, Milliyet owner Erdoğan Demirören was really panicked. He made me feel the full weight of the pressure on Milliyet from the government. In fact, he told me, “Do you know, I cried for the first time in my life.”

Before March 30, I had no idea that that the crying episode was directly related to a telephone call that had taken place between him and former Prime Minister Erdoğan. That phone call, which was broadcasted from a recording, was made by Demirören to the prime minister to soften him a little. How embarrassing in the name of journalism though! Just think: your newspaper signs off on such big success, with headlines that make it into all the big news sources, the Internet and on TV and radio. And in the middle of such journalistic success, the owner of your paper calls the ruling party head to apologize, saying: “Just give me half an hour. I’ll find out who’s responsible for all this, fire them and then get back to you on this.”

And the prime minister mentions my name directly in connection with what he asserts is “dishonorable journalism,” then asking Demirören, “How do you even employ people like this?!” In short, he says, “Fire these folks.” The story that brought everything to an end for me was the İmralı journals. It was the beginning of the end for me.

In the wake of Gezi, they told me to fire Can Dündar. I didn’t agree, and so they told me I would be fired. We had already lost writer Hasan Cemal because of the İmralı story and I didn’t want to pave the way for a second blow to the paper, so I agreed to leave. The bosses in charge of the paper were quite relieved to hear this, telling me, “Well, the government was forcing us to make you go anyway.” They told me this quite openly.

 

The prime minister makes his target clear, Hasan Cemal loses his job

 

After the big news story about the İmralı minutes, Milliyet newspaper journalist Hasan Cemal wrote a column celebrating the reporter who had broken this important story. Later, on March 2, Cemal addressed his words to those critical of the decision to publish the İmralı minutes. He wrote: “Turning out a newspaper is one thing, and directing a country is another thing entirely. No one should get these jobs confused. No one should try to intervene in other people’s jobs.”

In a speech made that same day in Balıkesir, Prime Minister Erdoğan made sharp and direct reference to Cemal’s column, making it clear how displeased he was with this kind of journalism. It was later revealed that following this speech by the prime minister, the owner of the Milliyet newspaper, Erdoğan Demirören, had called the then-editorial director of the paper, Derya Sazak, to relay this displeasure from Ankara. The next column to be penned by Hasan Cemal was never even published by Milliyet.

Can Dündar fired for writing columns that might ‘disturb’ the prime minister

 

Can Dündar is yet another journalist to lose his job as a result of ruffled political feathers. He was first warned about “writing too sharply” by his paper’s owners. Then he was forced to take a break from his work. After some series pieces on the Gezi protests and Egypt, Milliyet owner Erdoğan Demirören called him to tell him he had lost his job. Dündar notes, “I actually miss the sort of censorship from theSept. 12 era.” He goes on to say: “It was said to me, ‘We do not wish to see stories that will displease the prime minister in this paper. Everything displeases them, and after they are displeased, they go after us’.” Speaking at the Turkish-German Literature Festival in the German city of Essen, Dündar said: “If you are known, as a writer, as being someone who writes things that upset the prime minister, it then becomes more difficult to find work in other places, because of the fear that you will do the same thing again. In the meantime, those who write obediently are given great privileges, those who don’t find themselves in all sorts of trouble.”

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: AKP, journalism, Turkey

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