Media freedom has declined considerably during President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s tenure, and it hasn’t gone unnoticed.
A recent report by the EU criticises Erdogan for the country’s “significant backsliding” on freedom of expression. “Ongoing and new criminal cases against journalists, writers or social media users, intimidation of journalists and media outlets as well as the authorities’ actions curtailing freedom of media are of considerable concern,” the report states.
Index on Censorship is deeply concerned with the situation in Turkey and participated in an emergency press freedom mission organised by the International Press Institute with a broad coalition of international free expression and media freedom groups before the Turkish elections on 1 November.
Our Mapping Media Freedom project, which identifies threats, violations and limitations faced by members of the press throughout the European Union, candidate states and neighbouring countries, has recorded 164 verified incidents in Turkey since May 2014. The country has consistently come top of our list for media violations.
The days leading up to and following the election were marred by further crackdowns on press freedoms. Here are just five examples from the last two weeks.
1. Magazine editors arrested over front cover
The Turkish government arrested two journalists on 3 November over claims they promoted an uprising against the state. Editor-in-chief Cevher Guven and news editor Murat Capan of the left-leaning political weekly Nokta, known for its criticism of the government, face charges after the magazine’s latest issue suggested that the aftermath of the election would spell the beginning of unrest in Turkey.
Nokta’s cover featured a doctored selfie of a smiling Erdogan, with the coffin of a soldier – a reference to comments by the president that families of soldiers killed by Kurdish rebels could be happy that their loved ones died as martyrs. The cover hints that the post-election period would signal “the start of Turkey’s civil war”. Nokta has been removed from the shelves and access to its website blocked. Many see the move as further proof of Erdogan’s determination to root out opposition media.
Journalists in Turkey don’t just face threats from the authorities, but from Islamist extremists operating the country as well. On 30 October, Mapping Media Freedom reported that Syrian citizen-journalist Ibrahim Abd al-Qader had been murdered in the city of Sanliurfa at the home of fellow Syrian Fares Hammadi. Both were activists in Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently (RBSS), a group of activists using social media to document atrocities committed by Islamic State in Raqqa, Syria, which, since January 2014, has been the capital of the militant group.
Both men had been shot in the head and beheaded. ISIS took to social media to boast about the murder, posting a picture of the friends with the caption: “A selfie before being slaughtered silently.” Several suspects were arrested, but are the Turkish authorities really doing enough to protect the rights of journalists?
3. Police storm offices of independent media group
Just a few days ahead of the election, at around 4.45am on 28 October, police with chainsaws smashed through the front doors of Koza İpek Holding and took broadcasters Bugün and Kanaltürk off the air. The incident was captured on live television. After interrupting the broadcasts, riot police arrived and issued a public service announcement on air. Bügun and Kanaltürk then continued to broadcast for several hours, going against the police order.
Police then evacuated the editorial offices and attacked journalists. Bugün reporter Kamil Maman was assaulted, taken to a hospital for examination and then arrested.
Koza İpek is linked to Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish preacher living in exile in the US. Tensions between Gulen and Erdogan, a former ally, have worsened over recent years.
4. 71 journalists lose their jobs
Seized Bugün’s reporter carries his belongings in shoeboxes after he was fired, alluding to 17-25 Dec. graft ops. pic.twitter.com/5S4olzePPG
Since the police raid, 71 journalists have been dismissed from İpek Media by a new group of trustees. The media group was unlawfully seized in a government-led police operation in late October which assigned new trustees to the board. Two of the media workers dismissed — Bugün daily news desk editor Bülent Ceyhan and reporter Kamil Maman — say they were forced to go on compulsory leave for several days and are now denied access to the building.
According to the Today’s Zaman, an English-language daily based in Turkey: “Despite the fact that the trustees had no authority to fire any worker, the editors-in-chief and general managers of the TV channels were told they were sacked. […] Some of the decisions to fire staff were made on a public holiday, an act which is against the law.”
5. Police attempt to arrest journalist during protest
On 6 November, a reporter for the independent Turkish press agency Bianet, Beyza Kural, was covering a public protest when police attempted to detain and handcuff her in Beyazit, Istanbul. Students had gathered in front of Istanbul University to protest Erdogan’s control over education.
Police officers tried to seize the memory card from Kural’s camera and shouted, “from now on nothing will be like before, we will teach you” — allegedly referring to the election results and Erdogan’s renewed authority. Police officers also assaulted students while firing rubber bullets and teargas to disperse the demonstration. Kural only escaped arrest due to the intervention of fellow journalists and protesters.
Mapping Media Freedom
Click on the bubbles to view reports or double-click to zoom in on specific regions. The full site can be accessed at https://mappingmediafreedom.org/
Another week, another social media ban in Turkey. I email a friend. to ask what are people making of this latest gross violation of free speech. “Nothing much,” comes the reply. “Lots of jokes though.”
Such is life these days in Erdoganistan, where every day brings a new censorship story, greeted now with what my Turkish friend calls “the humour of desperation”.
The latest ban on social media came, perhaps, with slightly more justification than previous attempts. Pictures of a state prosecutor, Mehmet Selim Kiraz, were circulated by the hard-left Revolutionary People’s Liberation Front (DHKP-C), which had taken him hostage. Hours after the pictures were released, Kiraz was dead. A court ordered that the picture of the dead man in perhaps his final moments be removed from certain sites, but the image proliferated. Hence the blocking of social media on Monday.
It was a case, as Kaya Genc wrote, of “burning the quilt to get rid of the flea”.
This is not unusual in Turkey. Last spring, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed to put a stop to social media after leaked wiretap recordings circulated on Twitter. Back in 2007, the whole of YouTube was blocked because of a video that insulted Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. That ban lasted three years, and even then-president Abdullah Gul raised his objections. During his presidency, in fact. Gul was never the most reliable friend of the authorities when it came to online censorship. Even during the 2014 ban, he tweeted “”The shutdown of an entire social platform is unacceptable. Besides, as I have said many times before, it is technically impossible to close down communication technologies like Twitter entirely. I hope this measure will not last long.”
In 2008, in one of my personal favourite incidents of online censorship, Richard Dawkins’ website was blocked because of a dispute with ridiculous, but powerful Turkish creationist Harun Yahya.
One has to admire Turks’ sanguinity in the face of such idiocy. It is not as if the web and social media are marginal in Turkish everyday life. As with any other country where half-decent smartphones are available, Turkish billboards and TV adverts are festooned with the familiar logos urging us to like, share, follow and the rest.
But Erdogan and the authorities appear convinced that the web is something that can be harnessed and controlled and without any detrimental effect.
Not that the Turkish president is alone in this belief. During the 2011 London riots, David Cameron famously suggested shutting down social media, to the delirious whooping of the likes of Iran’s Press TV and China’s Xinhua news agency: “Look,” they gleefully pointed out. “The British go on about free speech, and at the first sign of trouble, they want to shut down the internet.” It was rumoured that the Foreign Office had to intervene to point out how bad Cameron was making its diplomats’ human rights lectures look.
But there is a special kind of madness at play in Turkey’s multiple bans, a particular persistence. Ban it! Ban it again! Harder!
The Turkish state at times seems too much like a cranky uncle to be taken seriously, staring confusedly at the Face-book and worrying that somehow it’s a scam because they once heard about an email scam on the radio and now the computer is plotting against them.
But the problem is that Turkey isn’t your confused uncle. Turkey is a hugely important country. The attitude toward web censorship tells us a lot about Erdogan’s regime: it’s erratic, volatile, prone to paranoia, and increasingly suspicious of new things and the outside world. The president is prone to talking about his and Turkeys enemies, internal and external. The recent moves against the Gulen movement (including its newspaper Zaman) and refreshed hostility towards the PKK suggest Erdogan is up for a fight. Last month, he lumped the two movements together declaring that they were “engaged in a systematic campaign to attack Turkey’s resources and interests for years.” – sounding for all the world like Stanley Kubrick’s Brigadier General Jack D Ripper obsessing over plots to taint our precious bodily fluids.
Invoking the age-old Turkish paranoia of hidden power bases, Erdogan said: “We see that there are some groups who turn their backs on this people […] Two different structures that use similar resources have been attacking Turkey’s gains for the past 12 years. One uses arms while the other uses sneaky ways to infiltrate the state and exploit people’s emotions. Their aim is to stop Turkey from reaching its goals.”
Endless obsession over threats does not make for healthy government, let alone democracy. Some suggest that in his outspokeness and utter partiality, Erdogan is already overstepping the mark and creating a defacto US-style presidency – a stated aim.
Men with enemies lists are best avoided, and probably shouldn’t be allowed to be in charge of anything. Erdogan has all the appearance of being one of those men, and he’s been quite clear that the internet is on the list, saying after the 2013 Gezi protests that “Social media is the worst menace to society.”
This attitude is not a rational, but paranoia never is. For all that Turks can laugh at the president and the system, deep down they must worry.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (Photo: Philip Janek / Demotix)
What’s wrong with Turkey? Or, more to the point what is wrong with Turkey’s president that makes him so determined to fight, like a two a.m. drunk vowing to take on all comers?
In the past week alone, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his allies have launched attacks on his former ally Fethullah Gülen and his followers, novelists Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak, and even supporters of Istanbul soccer club Besiktas. It would be foolish to attempt to rank these attacks in terms of importance or urgency, but the attack on the Gülenites is the most interesting.
The Gülen movement was almost unknown to anyone outside Turkey and the Turkish diaspora until 2008, when Fethullah Gülen topped an online poll run jointly by Prospect and Foreign Policy magazines. The poll was almost certainly hijacked by members of the movement, which its leader modestly claims doesn’t really exist (“[S]ome people may regard my views well and show respect to me, and I hope they have not deceived themselves in doing so,” Gülen conceded in an interview with Foreign Policy. “Some people think that I am a leader of a movement. Some think that there is a central organization responsible for all the institutions they wrongly think affiliated with me. They ignore the zeal of many to serve humanity and to gain God’s good pleasure in doing so.”)
The movement, known to some as “Hizmet”, is seen as bearing great power in Turkey. In a country well used to conspiracy theories about secret organisations — such as the perceived ultra-nationalist, ultra-secular Ergenekon — it is unsurprising that the Gülenists attract suspicion. Their cultishness does little to allay that sentiment.
Among the many weapons at the disposal of the movement are its newspapers, the Turkish Zaman and English-language Today’s Zaman. It was journalists from Zaman, among others perceived as Gülenites, who were arrested over the weekend, as reported by Index.
The move by Erdoğan against Gülenists is widely seen as part of Erdoğan’s defence against allegations of corruption within his party — allegations he believes are led by Gülenists within the police and other agencies.
With their journalists arrested, the Gülenists now find themselves facing the kind of censorship they themselves espoused not so long ago.
In 2011, journalist Ahmet Sik was working on a book called Army of the Imam, which was sought to expose the Gülenists’ connections with the police. The manuscript was seized by authorities. When Andrew Finkel, then a columnist with Today’s Zaman (and occasional Index contributor), submitted an article suggesting that the Gülen movement should not support such censorship, he was sacked by the paper. (The column subsequently appeared in rival English-language newspaper Hurriyet Daily News)
It’s tempting amid all this to wish for a plague on all their houses. But as one Turkey watcher pointed out to me, it’s inevitable that some innocents will get caught in the crossfire between the former allies in Erdoğan’s Islamist AK party and the Gülen movement.
Meanwhile, in keeping with the paranoid style of Turkish politics, pro-Erdoğan newspaper Takvim identified an external enemy in the shape of an “international literature lobby”.
The agents of that lobby, which is clearly anti-Turkish rather than pro-free speech, were identified as Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak. It is, in its own way, true that Shafak and Pamuk are part of the international literature lobby: London-based Shafak can often be seen at English PEN events, and Pamuk has long been identified as a literary and free speech hero around the world. But it is an enormous stretch to imagine that the novelists of the world are gathering in smoke-filled rooms plotting the overthrow of the Turkish state, rather than just hoping that Turkish people should be allowed write and read books in peace. Takvim went as far as to imagine that the authors were paid agents of the “literature lobby”, which is to make the terrible mistake of imagining there’s money in free speech. No matter: paranoia excels at inventing its own truths.
Amidst all this, less glamorous than Pamuk and Shafak, less powerful than Gülen and Erdoğan, fans of Besiktas football club too face persecution. The “Çarşı” group are claimed to have attempted a coup against the government after playing a prominent role in the Gezi park protests. Supporters of the tough working class Istanbul club, known as the Black Eagles, have a reputation for anti-authoritarianism and political activism. According to Euronews’ Bora Bayraktar: “While the court’s verdict is uncertain, what is known is that the Çarşı fans – often proud to be ahead of their rivals – have become the first football supporters’ group to be accused of an attempted coup.”
A source in Istanbul tells Index that when asked how he answered to the charge of fomenting a coup, one accused supporter replied: “If we’re that strong we would make Beşiktaş the champions!”, a prospect as unlikely for the underdog club as a dull but functioning liberal democracy seems for Turkey.
On Sunday, December 14, at least 27 people were detained by Turkish police, including journalists, producers and directors of TV shows and police officers. Arrest warrants were issued for at least 31.
The offices of the newspaper Zaman and of the television network Samanyolu TV were raided by police. A warrant for the arrest of Zaman editor in chief Ekrem Dumanlı was at first incomplete, prompting police to return later on Sunday to arrest Dumanlı. Hidayet Karaca, manager of Samanyolu TV, was also detained, as well as Samanyolu producer Salih Asan and director Engin Koç, who were arrested in the city Eskişehir. Warrants were also issued for Makbule Çam Alemdağ, a writer for a Samanyolu show, and Nuh Gönültaş, a columnist for the newspaper Bugün. Bianet has published a list of those detained yesterday.
A large group of protesters gathered outside of Zaman’s Istanbul offices, holding signs that read “Free press cannot be silenced”.
Zaman and Samanyolu TV have been singled out by Turkish President Erdogan for being part of what Erdogan calls a “parallel structure” affiliated with exiled cleric Fethullah Gülen. Erdogan has accused Gülen of being at the centre of plots to topple the government.
The prosecutor in charge of Sunday’s operation said that those detained are being charged with involvement in a terrorist organisation, while some are accused of fraud and slander.
The raids were announced by the Twitter user “Fuat Avni” (a pseudonym) on December 13. Fuat Avni tweeted a list of 47 people for whom there would be arrest warrants.
On Monday Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan attacked the European Union for criticising the arrests that targeted opposition media outlets, telling the EU to “mind its own business.”
“The European Union cannot interfere in steps taken … within the rule of law against elements that threaten our national security,” Erdogan said in a televised speech. “They should mind their own business,” he added, in his first comments after Sunday’s raids.
EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini and enlargement commissioner Johannes Hahn on Sunday condemned police raids as going “against the European values” and said they were “incompatible with the freedom of media, which is a core principle of democracy.”
