Frederike Geerdink: Muslims systematically framed negatively in Dutch newspapers

30 Jan 19 | Media Freedom, media freedom featured, News and features

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”104907″ img_size=”full”][vc_column_text]In just a few days,  Dutch historian Tayfun Balcik, programme coordinator at The Hague Peace Project, a non-governmental organisation, will count articles by or about Muslims in four mainstream Dutch media for the last time. Since 1 November, he has counted and registered on a daily basis, building a database showing how often the word ‘terrorism’ is used in combination with ‘Muslim’, and how Muslim women are represented.

“One group is systematically framed negatively in Dutch media, and that’s problematic”, Balcik said.

The idea to analyse the reporting about Muslims quantitatively and qualitatively, emerged last year. Balcik, who has always been a very critical news consumer, explained: “I am a Muslim myself and have many Muslims in my social network. They all say that Dutch media are so negative about them, but this was left in a vacuum since there were no data. So I decided to register, neutrally and systematically. Now at least we know what we are talking about.”

Balcik cooperated with the The Hague Peace Project, online platform ‘Nieuw Wij’ (New Us) and website ‘Republiek Allochtonië’ (Republic Allochthonia). The project was funded by the Democracy and Media Foundation.

By far the most written about subject in the four papers he surveyed – centrist De Volkskrant, liberal NRC Handelsblad, right-centrist Algemeen Dagblad and conservative-populist De Telegraaf – when it comes to Muslims, is terrorism. Or, to be more precise: when any of these papers write about terrorism, it is usually about terrorism committed by Muslims. In De Telegraaf no less than 99% of terrorism-related reporting is about Muslims, according to Balcik.

In De Telegraaf “terrorism is being equated with Muslims, also but to a bit lesser extent in Algemeen Dagblad. NRC and Volkskrant are also more prone to use the word ‘terrorism’ when it comes to Muslim violence, but they use it also for violence by the extreme right or by the (Kurdish) PKK.”

Balcik said that terrorism is never used when it comes to state violence, with one exception: Iran. He added: “You could also describe actions of the Turkish state, the United States or Israel as terrorist. This needs to be discussed.”

Balcik also looked at the representation of Muslim women. He found that they were mainly portrayed as being “unfree”. In November Balcik counted 55 De Volkskrant articles in which Muslim women played a role. In 28 of those, the reader is left with the image of a “suppressed Muslima”. The burqa ban (a form of which was introduced in the Netherlands in summer 2018), gender inequality in Islam, discomfort about the headscarf, and female genital mutilation were the subjects most often written about. “And Muslim women themselves are hardly ever quoted,” Balcik added.

Volkskrant editor-in-chief Philippe Remarque dismissed Balcik’s work as “of not much value”. He told Index on Censorship: “It is logical that the words ‘Muslim’ and ‘terror’ are often combined in our reporting because these events are in the news. It doesn’t say anything about our attitude towards Muslims. Had Balcik tallied the words ‘sexual abuse’ and ‘Catholic church’ in the last couple of years, he would sure have found a correlation as well. Would he conclude that we report negatively and one-sidedly about Catholics?”

Remarque also criticised Balcik’s assertion about the paper’s coverage of Muslim women: “We try to offer a diversity of perspectives. We have a series of interviews in which Dutch people from different backgrounds talk about their experiences with discrimination. We also have a Muslim columnist, Ibtihal Jadib, who recently wrote about how she wants to convey her religion to her children. Apparently, Balcik judges her columns as negative about Muslims. I find that narrow-minded.”

Confronted with Remarque’s criticism, Balcik said: “Interesting comment from a newsmaker. As if there is no editorial line in which news is prioritised and what is called ‘terrorism’ and what isn’t. ‘News’ isn’t objective but is always a selective representation of events.” He continued: “When I would analyse the reporting about Christians or Catholics, I would tally all reporting about that group, including about Christian political parties, Christmas, Easter, churches, etcetera. Would ‘sexual abuse’ then top the topics list?”

Balcik doubted whether Remarque understood what his tally encompassed, and said: “Also, he doesn’t seem to understand how politicised and troubled the words ‘Muslim’ and ‘Islam’ have become in the Netherlands. But if he really wants a comparison, and if he has a budget, I can make the same tally and analysis about Christians and Jews in De Volkskrant. We can then sit together and compare the outcomes.”

Balcik’s aim with the project is to open a dialogue. When the tally is done, he is going to make his final analysis and write a report that discusses how the media portrays “terrorism” and “Muslim women”, in addition to the themes of “them and us rhetoric” and “criminality”. The report will then be debated at an event in an Amsterdam cultural centre, with, Balcik hopes, the participation of the editors-in-chief of the four papers. He also wants to raise the issue of the lack of diversity in the newsrooms of the four scrutinised papers.

For Elske Schouten, deputy editor-in-chief of NRC Handelsblad, this is an important point. In an email to Index on Censorship, she referred to a survey that the paper did last year, which found that Dutch print and television newsrooms had become slightly less white between 2015 and 2018: from 96.8% white in 2015, to 94.6% white by the end of 2018. This contrasts with the Netherlands as a whole, which has a non-western migration background population of 13%.

“We absolutely want to do better and we are working on that,” Schouten said. “I think it is hard for Balcik to count this. You don’t always know who is Muslim or not, or who is white or not. Take me: my name is super-Dutch but I am definitely not white.”

Asked about the value of Balcik’s research, she said: “We find diversity very important and all sorts of tallies are welcomed. However, we don’t necessarily focus on religious diversity but try to pay attention to different migration backgrounds, gender, sexual orientation or people in urban agglomerations and the periphery.”

Balcik remarked that Muslims hardly play a role on the cultural pages of the four papers, but Schouten said: “I am sure that on our cultural, economics and sports pages, people of a variety of religious paths play a role. We only make their religion explicit when it is relevant, which is usually not the case.” She paged through the last Cultural Supplement of NRC and determined that in two of the six big articles a “maybe Muslim” is the protagonist.

Balcik agrees that the religion or cultural background of the protagonist or other actors in a story isn’t always relevant, but pointed out: “When people with a migration background or Muslims contribute positively, they are ‘mayor (of Rotterdam) Ahmed Aboutaleb’, or ‘documentary maker Sinan Can’, but when the news is negative, it’s about a ‘Muslim terrorist’ or ‘Moroccan mafia’. We need to have a dialogue about this.”

Balcik would be the last to put the four papers on an equal footing when he analysed the results of his research. He said: “De Telegraaf and Algemeen Dagblad are rather extreme, while Volkskrant and especially NRC report much more meticulously.” De Telegraaf did not respond to questions from Index on Censorship.

The editor-in-chief of Algemeen Dagblad was on a holiday. His deputy, Frank Poorthuis, did not want to talk in his boss’s name, but e-mailed: “In all honesty, and between us, I, as an elderly white man, get a little bit tired of these questions because they are biased.”[/vc_column_text][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1548844915301-f4fe48ce-a0d7-7″ taxonomies=”11227, 8996″][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Dutch journalist Frederike Geerdink on her recent deportation from Turkey

08 Oct 15 | Europe and Central Asia, Mapping Media Freedom, mobile, News and features, Turkey

Turkey

The top of Frederike Geerdink’s blog, Kurdish Matters, still reads: ‘The only foreign journalist based in Diyarbakir’. The Dutch reporter was the only foreign journalist in Turkish Kurdistan until 9 September 2015 when she was deported from the country she lived and worked for nine years.

“There I went in a military convoy, first from Yüksekova to Hakkari, then from Hakkari to Van,” Geerdink wrote a few days later. “As the soldiers were playing loud, rousing nationalist music, I realised that I had turned into a PKK target, being transported on a dark mountainous Kurdistan road in a military vehicle with windows too small to see the starry sky.”

From Van, she’d fly to Istanbul where she’d be forced on a plane back to her The Netherlands. A couple of days earlier she had been arrested while traveling with and reporting on the activities of a group of Kurdish activists who call themselves the Human Shield Group. She was accused of illegally entering a restricted zone and engaging “in an act that helped a terrorist organisation”.

After nine years in Turkey, three of which were in Kurdistan, Geerdink had lost her second home. “I left my heart in Kurdistan,” she posted on Facebook after she’d landed at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport. “I don’t know when, but I will return.”

In the same week when Geerdink was deported, the English version of her book, The Boys are Dead, about the Roboski massacre and the Kurdish question in Turkey, was launched.  “A coincidence,” she told Index on Censorship. “I don’t think the Turkish government had planned to help me promote my book.”

A few weeks after her ordeal, she was living a nomadic life in The Netherlands, moving from place to place, staying with friends or family, not really feeling at home anywhere. “I don’t want to be here,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong, everyone is really kind, but I don’t belong here anymore. I want to be there.”

Turkey has one of the world’s worst records on media freedom. Index’s Mapping Media Freedom project has so far recorded 160 reports of violations against journalists in the country since May 2014. Reporters Without Borders has ranked Turkey 154th out of 180 countries on press freedom, and according to Freedom House, Turkey’s status declined from Partly Free to Not Free in 2013.

Reporting on the position of Kurds in Turkey is exceptionally difficult. Prominent journalists have been fired over their coverage of negotiations between the Turkish government and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Kurdish and Turkish journalists are often targeted by the police and courts, although it is rare for a foreign journalist to be singled out.

Back in January 2015, Geerdink was arrested by the Turkish authorities for the first time. Her house was searched, she was briefly detained and faced up to five years in prison for ‘terrorist propaganda’. Her detention was condemned worldwide and she was acquitted of the charges in April. Her deportation just a few months later came as a big shock.

Now that even foreign journalists are being targeted, Geerdink said, shows just how bad things are for the position of Kurds in Turkey. “I was the only journalist based there and now there’s one less witness on the ground. And the fewer the witnesses, the more the state has a free hand.”

She added that her treatment should be a warning to others. “They are saying: ‘watch where you go or we’ll kick you out’.” On the other hand, she thinks her deportation brings a lot of negative publicity onto the Turkish government and how they treat journalists, which can be used to put more pressure on the authorities.

In September, two UK-based reporters for VICE were arrested while reporting in Diyarbakir. Although they were released, their Iraqi colleague remains in jail. Seven local journalists are currently detained in the country, many of whom are Kurds. Being a foreigner, Geerdink said the spotlight is on her, but there are many Kurds in prison who nobody knows about, and they deserve the same amount of publicity. “For them it is a matter of life and death.”

Geerdink hopes to return to Turkish Kurdistan as soon as she’s allowed back in. Her lawyers are working hard to appeal the verdict on her deportation. Meanwhile, she is focussing on Syrian Kurdistan, Iraqi Kurdistan and Kurds in Europe.

“I will still be Kurdistan correspondent no matter where I am based.”

 

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French genocide denial law is an insult to memory of Hrant Dink

19 Jan 12 | Uncategorized

With grim symmetry, French politicians are preparing to debate a law criminalising denial of the Armenian genocide just five years after the murder of Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink.

Dink, editor of Agos was passionately opposed to laws restricting discussion of what happened to thousands of Armenians in 1915. In Turkey, it was illegal for him to describe the events as genocide. In France, they hoped to make it illegal to say it was not. When this law was first mooted in 2006, Dink commented:

“When this bill appeared first, we were fast to declare as a group that it would lead to bad results…As you know, I have been tried in Turkey for saying the Armenian genocide exists, and I have talked about how wrong this is. But at the same time, I cannot accept that in France you could possibly now be tried for denying the Armenian genocide. If this bill becomes law, I will be among the first to head for France and break the law. Then we can watch both the Turkish Republic and the French government race against eachother to condemn me. We can watch to see which will throw me into jail first…I really think that France, if it makes this bill law, will be hurting not only the EU, but Armenians across the world. It will also damage the normalising of relations between Armenia and Turkey. What the peoples of these two countries need is dialogue, and all these laws do is harm such dialogue.”

Genocide denial is not a simple issue of differing versions of history; it is a calculated insult, a degeneration of a people’s memory and history. Ultimately, it is calculated to exterminate a people by other means. As novelist Howard Jacobson put it in a  magazine in 2009, addressing attempts to downplay or deny the Jewish Holocaust:

“[O]ne day, if they have their way, whoever they are, these people, there will be no Holocaust either. No Holocaust. No Israel. No Jews.”

A similar impulse is at play with the use of  Turkey’s Article 301, which outlaws “insulting Turkishness”. The law is used against Kurds and Armenians, because in the Kemalist vision that shaped the country, there are no Kurds or Armenians. There are only Turks, united in a single vision and a single story.

This impulse is unexceptional, particularly in 20th century nationalism. As empire disintegrated, projecting a single vision became important. In this way, Turkish “genocide denial” may be different from Holocaust denial, driven by fierce nationalism alone, rather than the combination of nationalism, classic and modern anti-Semitism and paranoid conspiracism which drove the Holocaust. But both are driven by distrust of the other, and by seeing diversity and cosmopolitanism as stumbling blocks on the path to perfection.

But while the two may differ, there is no difference in the free speech argument on laws covering them. Proscribing speech —whether it confirms or denys historical truths — is an offence to history, a barrier to dialogue and an insult to memory.