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Turkey: Over 400 Turkish opposition journalists fired

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f57246ca5b09e8_57246ca5b0a20.thumbOver 400 journalists have been fired from Turkish opposition Zaman newspaper and Cihan news agency, Reuters reports, citing one of the newspaper’s former reporters.

In early March, both outlets have been placed under receivership by the ruling of the Istanbul court. Turkish journalists union condemned the authorities’ actions against opposition media, describing the rulings as the new method of censorship.

“Zaman office in Ankara has been shutdown, everyone is fired. Altogether, more than 400 people including foreign correspondents were fired from Zaman and Cihan,” the reporter told RIA Novosti.

Private TV channels Kanalturk and Bugun TV, newspapers Bugun Gazetesi and Millet Gazetesi, radio station Kanaltürk Radyo, all part of the Koza-Ipek holding, were shut down earlier this year over alleged unprofitableness.

The holding alongside the Zaman newspaper and Cihan news agency are considered by Turkish authorities to be connected with opposition Islamic preacher Fethullah Gulen.

NETHERLANDS The apartment of a Dutch journalist arrested in Turkey burglarized

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Dutch journalistThe apartment in Amsterdam of Dutch journalist of Turkish Ebru Umar, detained several hours by police in Turkey during the weekend, was burglarized, she has on several Dutch media, calling the flight “d pure intimidation. “

“My neighbor called me this morning to tell me that my apartment was burglarized with much violence,” she told Dutch news agency ANP. She described the robbery as “pure intimidation and provocation.”

Metro daily, with whom she is working, she added, “the door was forced, my old computer was taken away.” The Amsterdam police were not immediately available to confirm the burglary.

Ebru Umar, known feminist and atheist, was arrested for insulting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in Saturday to Sunday night at her home in Kusadasi, a small resort in western Turkey.

Ms Umar, aged 45, was then released, but she confirmed on her Twitter account that she could not leave the country, and should represent the police in a few days.

Ebru Umar had recently written a very critical review of Turkey’s strong man in the Dutch newspaper Metro. In this article, it cited in particular in support of its accusations against Erdogan, an email sent by the Turkish Consulate General in Rotterdam to Turks living in this region asking them to report any insult expressed on social networks to against the head of the Turkish state.

This email was generated controversy. The consulate had subsequently spoken of a “misunderstanding”. The trial for insult to Erdogan have multiplied since his election to the State of the head in August 2014, a sign, according to critics, an authoritarian drift.

Nearly 2,000 legal proceedings have been launched in Turkey for both artists and journalists as individuals. Sanctions imposed for this offense is limited in most cases to prison sentences, but a woman was sentenced Jan. 20 to eleven months in prison for an obscene gesture against Erdogan during a demonstration on March 2014.

Tuesday, April 26, 2016,
Stéphane © armenews.com

Turkey: A Dutch journalist arrested for insulting Erdogan

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Dutch journalistAnkara, April 24, 2016 (AFP) – A Dutch journalist of Turkish origin, Ebru Umar, was detained for several hours by police after being arrested in the night from Saturday to Sunday at his home in Kusadasi (western Turkey) for insulting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, ‘she said on its Twitter account.

The journalist said she was “free but forbidden to leave the country” Turkish.

Ebru Umar, known feminist and atheist, said she had been taken from the bed Saturday night at her home in Kusadasi, a small resort in western Turkey.

“Two men knocked on my door and told me that I should go with them, because of two tweets,” she told Dutch broadcaster NOS. She spent the night at the police station “to discuss politics and the situation in Turkey,” she added.

Umar, aged 45, was then released, but she confirmed that she could leave the country, and should represent the police in a few days.

She said she should have left for the Netherlands on Sunday, but she could therefore leave the country immediately. Dutch Foreign Minister Bert Koenders said Sunday be “relieved” by his release.

He added that he had contacted his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu, to express his “regret” about the case.

“A country that is a candidate for accession to the European Union should continue to promote freedom of the press and freedom of expression,” he insisted.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte also telephoned his counterpart Ahmet Davuoglu to express concern.

The Turkish authorities interviewed by AFP did not wish to comment.

Ebru Umar had recently written a very critical review of Turkey’s strong man in the Dutch newspaper Metro.

In this article, it cited in particular in support of its accusations against Erdogan, an email sent by the Turkish Consulate General in Rotterdam to Turks living in this region asking them to report any insult expressed on social networks to against the head of the Turkish state. This email was generated controversy. The consulate had subsequently spoken of a “misunderstanding”.

Rutte said he was “surprised” by this approach “strange”, demanding explanations from Ankara.

The trial for insult to Erdogan have multiplied since his election to the State of the head in August 2014, a sign, according to critics, an authoritarian drift.

Nearly 2,000 legal proceedings have been launched in Turkey for both artists and journalists as individuals.

Sanctions imposed for this offense is limited in most cases to prison sentences, but a woman was sentenced Jan. 20 to eleven months in prison for an obscene gesture against Erdogan during a demonstration on March 2014.

Monday, April 25, 2016,
Stéphane © armenews.com

German journalist refused entry to Turkey

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schwenck.thumbVolker Schwenck, a TV journalist for public broadcaster ARD, was detained on Tuesday after arriving in Turkey and appears set to be expelled from the country.
Authorities have yet to give Schwenck any reason for refusing his travel into the country, The Local reports, citing ARD’s tagesschau website.

“My travel into Turkey has been refused. There’s a black mark against my name. I’m a journalist. Problem?” the Cairo bureau chief and Middle East expert wrote on Twitter early on Tuesday.

Schwenck had been planning a trip to the Turkish-Syrian border, where he hoped to speak with refugees fleeing the war in Syria.

Turkey’s frontier with its war-torn neighbour have increasingly come into focus in recent days as NGO Human Rights Watch reported that border troops were using live rounds to scare refugees away.

Amnesty International has also accused Turkey of illegally expelling Syrian asylum seekers across the border, forcing them to return to their war-torn country.

“Our colleagues in Ankara and Istanbul are in contact with the responsible Turkish authorities and the person affected,” the German Foreign Ministry tweeted on Tuesday afternoon.

Grasping Straws: New Accusation May ‘Acquit’ Turkey’s Cumhuriyet Journalist

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1037339217New allegations against Turkey’s Cumhuriyet journalists in a controversial secret trial could only further unravel the case, one of the defendants, Can Dundar, told Sputnik Turkiye.

Journalist Can Dundar, who is on trial in Turkey for “espionage,” told Sputnik that the case against him is starting to collapse, as prosecutors are beginning to grasp for leads that could lead to his acquittal.

Can Dundar, the chief editor of the newspaper Cumhuriyet and Ankara bureau chief Erdem Gul were put on trial for releasing footage of the Turkish intelligence agency MIT smuggling arms into Syria. After Dundar said that he got the footage on a thumb drive from a “left-wing legislator friend,” a Turkish pro-government newspaper proposed that the man is Enis Berberoglu, head of the Republican People’s Party (CHP).

“I think they have tried everything. We have been called both agents and supporters of the Gulen movement. They’ve searched our apartments. They said that I was interviewed on air on a Kurdish TV channel. They are trying to use any clue to find anything that could put us behind bars. It is strange that this time they began to spin the story with speculations about Enis Berberoglu. After all, in fact, that can provide us with an acquittal,” Dundar told Sputnik Turkiye.

Fethullah Gulen is a Turkish preacher living in exile in the United States, who initially sided with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but broke with him after the 2013 corruption scandal.

Dundar added that he would not disclose his source out of journalistic principle, although the source told him that he could be named and brought as a witness.

“Is it not they who were accused of releasing information on the corruption scandal. I am a journalist, whose business is it, where I get the information? My source is not related to Gulenists,” Dundar told Sputnik Turkiye.

Although Turkey’s Supreme Court ruled that Dundar be freed, the case against him was still pursued. It was originally put on hold and ordered to proceed behind closed doors on March 25.

The Cumhuriyet newspaper’s website was also blocked by a Turkish court order, after it released information about the indictment of a Turkish businessman with links to Bilal Erdogan, son of the Turkish President. The businessman was jailed in the United States on a case linked to the 2013 Turkish corruption scandal.

Read more: sputniknews.com

Imprisoned Turkish Journalists Do Not Regret ‘Defending the Truth’

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1030842687Speaking freely in Turkey gets you the same punishment as if you murdered five people, according to detained Turkish journalists.

Two reporters sent to pre-trial detention with no indictment remain in custody as freedom of the press in Turkey deteriorates.

“We were kept in total isolation for 40 days. We were all alone in our prison cells. This punishment is the same a murderer of five people gets,” Can Dundar, a prominent Turkish journalist and current detainee, writes in a letter to BBC.

In November, Dundar, chief editor of the Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet, published evidence that Ankara was allied with Islamist militants in Syria. He was quickly arrested, along with colleague Erdem Gul, the newspaper’s Ankara bureau chief, on charges of espionage and “disclosure of state secrets.”

According to reports published by Cumhuriyet, Islamist fighters in Syria have been provided with ammunition and arms by a Turkish intelligence group.

The newspaper published a video of a truck belonging to the Turkish secret services which allegedly transported arms to jihadists in Syria. The government claimed that the vehicles in the footage were providing assistance to Turkmen, a minority group based in Syria.

The president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has stated that publishing the video is an act of espionage. The Turkish president called the reports by the paper a “betrayal” and promised that Dundar “will pay a high price.”

“For the first time in history, a Turkish president personally filed a criminal complaint against a news story not particularly about him,”  Dundar wrote from Silivri prison. “It was Erdogan’s decision to interfere in the civil war in Syria. That’s why he saw those uncovering this as his personal nemesis.”

Families of the detainees can visit their relatives once per month, and believe them safer in prison than free in the city.

“It’s ironic but we somehow felt relieved when Can was arrested,” says Mr Dundar’s wife Dilek on the way to Silivri prison.”Some pro-government columnists were saying he could get killed. Every day when he left home for work, I would look up and down the street to see if there was something wrong. We were relieved that at least he didn’t get killed,” she says.

The imprisoned journalists claim they have no regrets and that they have “defended the truth,” in revealing Turkey-Islamist fighter cooperation.

“I am a journalist. My job is not to defend the interests of the state, but to defend the truth, the interests of the people and the public,” Dundar said. “Iran-Contra, Watergate… these are all examples of news stories when the state was caught red-handed. In all these cases, the people who committed the crimes paid a price, not the ones who uncovered them.”

The EU and several NGOs have repeatedly criticized growing repression against media and the political opposition in Turkey. Reporters Without Borders ranks Turkey in 149th place for freedom of expression.

An Armenian journalist of Syrian TV, Erato Krikorian, candidate for the parliamentary elections in Syria

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arton123294-480x233An Armenian journalist working for state television Syria, Erato Krikorian who lives in the capital Damascus is a candidate in the parliamentary elections in Syria to be held on 13 April. In an interview with Armenian newspaper site “Arévélk” Erato Krikorian told the reasons for his commitment to be an MP and his chances of victory. “In these tragic and difficult times facing the country, I have decided to support at all costs the Syrian homeland” she told “Arévélk”. She is an independent candidate and has large chances of being elected MP. It also commissioned a twenty members of the Armenian community of Syria will be candidates for the parliamentary elections, five of Damascus and Aleppo fifteen.

Krikor Amirzayan

Polish-Jewish journalist: By forgetting about genocides, we open doors to them

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defaultThe forgotten crimes of the past can revive in the present, Polish journalist of Jewish descent, Konstanty Gebert , also known as David Warszawski, told Armenian News – NEWS.am correspondent.

Mr Warszawski regularly publishes articles about the position of modern Turkey (including the Armenian Cause) in leading Polish newspapers (including Gazeta Wyborcza).

Warszawski visited Turkey as early as in his childhood. He has kind acquaintances among Turks and Turkish Armenians, and overall he has very warm memories about Turkey.

According to him, the Armenians’ slaughter in the Ottoman Empire over a century ago was one of the first genocides of the 20th century. The Turkish government still doesn’t want to acknowledge it, deeply insulting the memory of the victims and harming the interests of the Turkish nation itself. The protection of the historical lie is considered as protection of the honor of nation and state, but actually everything is the other way round: the conscience of modern Turks doesn’t ache from the Turks’ crime in 1915. But defending these crimes, they lose respect from outside and encourage national hysteria, which impedes solving the other problems of the Turkish society, starting from the Kurdish issue, the journalist said.

“But the memory on the Armenian Genocide is not only a Turkish-Armenian problem. This is the issue of the entire humanity, since knowing how the society got to the genocide and what its repercussions were will help prevent new crimes. The absence of the public attention to the Armenian Genocide untied the hands of Nazi Germany in deciding on the Genocide of the Jews, during which the significant part of my family died. That’s why I feel pain and anger about the fact that Israel, which grew in flames of Shoah, still refuses to acknowledge the slaughter of Armenians as Genocide.

I understand certain motives of the Turkish authorities: it’s clear that they don’t want the Ottoman Empire to be compared with the Third Reich. I also understand certain motives of the Israeli authorities: they still count on good relations with a strong Middle East neighbor. I also understand what the international community thinks: how long can they deal with the history of the killed, regardless of whether they are herero, Armenians, Jews, Roma, Tutsi or others, annihilated or persecuted nations. People of good will think that we can no longer deal with the past.

But if we stop, the foreign past can become our present.  The memory about the victims stems from not only fundamental moral duty – although this is enough – but also own well-realized interest. By forgetting a crime, we open doors to it,” David Warszawski said.

AZERBAIJAN American journalist Thomas Goltz caught in a lie in Baku Service

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arton122757-480x360American journalist Thomas Goltz, one of the most active links of the Azeri propaganda machine has not failed to manifest while the Azeri authorities marked with extensive media coverage the 24th anniversary of what official rhetoric Baku refers as the ‘Aghdam events “and more directly as” genocide “allegedly committed Armenians on February 26, 1992 Azerbaijani inhabitants of the town of Khojaly

Erdoğan says he ‘does not respect, will not obey’ top court ruling on arrested journalists

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erd.thumbTurkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has criticized the recent Constitutional Court ruling that paved the way for the release of two arrested journalists, saying he “does not accept or respect” the decision and vowing not to “obey” it, the Hurriyet Daily News reports. 

“This incident has nothing to do with freedom of expression, it is a case of spying,” Erdoğan said on Feb. 28 regarding the top court’s ruling on Cumhuriyet editor-in-chief Can Dündar and Ankara bureau chief Erdem Gül.

Dündar and Gül were released early on Feb. 26 after 92 days in jail on terrorism charges, hours after the country’s top court’s ruled that their arrest had violated their rights.

The Constitutional Court ruled on Feb. 25 that their pre-trial detention had violated the fundamental rights of Dündar and Gül. Following the decision, Istanbul 14th Court of Serious Crimes ordered their release but subjected them to an overseas travel ban.

“The media cannot have limitless freedom … These stories have included all kinds of attacks against this country’s president,” Erdoğan also said.

Dündar and Gül stand accused of “espionage threatening state security” and “supporting an armed terrorist organization” over stories published in Cumhuriyet about National Intelligence Agency (MİT) trucks allegedly sending weapons to unknown groups in Syria.

The two men were arrested by an Istanbul court on Nov. 26 last year, triggering reactions from press organizations, NGOs and many Western countries.

The indictment, which was completed on Jan. 27, demands the penalty of life in prison, penal servitude for life.