Watching the surreal videos of the police takeover of Turkish newspaper Zaman last week — inside the building police officers played cards behind the newspaper’s reception desk and devoured plates of baklava in the cafeteria as journalists looked on — I was reminded of the events of the past eight years that so definitively transformed Turkey’s media scene.
The change happened so gradually over the years that many missed the transformation. But journalism in Turkey has turned into a scene of feuds and long-held hostilities. The job description of a Turkish journalist now includes the ability to help lock up journalists from the opposite political camp.
Over the past eight years, a spate of legal cases have altered Turkey’s media environment beyond return. The most recent of these was the 2014 Selam Tevhid case, in which prosecutors intended to jail Turkey’s pro-government journalists who were accused of being foreign spies and aiding terrorist organisations.
But it was the OdaTV case of 2011 that had the greatest impact on journalism. The outcome silenced the popular and populist voice of secular nationalists and spread fear and paranoia to all media workers.
Earlier, in September 2008, after selling off his secular-nationalist broadcaster KanalTurk, Turkish journalist Tuncay Özkan was detained by Turkish police in relation to the Ergenekon investigation. He was detained in the Silivri Penitentiary, Europe’s largest penal facility where he would await the outcome of his trial for more than two years. One of Özkan‘s friends, Mustafa Balbay, the Ankara correspondent of Cumhuriyetnewspaper, was also imprisoned in the same trial.
To many observers, Özkan’s and Balbay’s ideas were old fashioned, parochial and too nationalistic, views that somehow defined the way they were treated in the public sphere. There was little international reaction when Özkan’s KanalTurk‘s staunchly secularist and republican editorial line was changed overnight. The same broadcaster now defended polar opposite views.
After five years in detention, Özkan was sentenced in April 2013 to life imprisonment for being part of Ergenekon, a “ultra-secularist organisation that plotted a coup”. Balbay was luckier: he received 34 years and 8 months. Again, there was little world reaction to this surreal turn of events, but, in Turkey, many progressive voices applauded the verdicts, seeing them as part of what they ominously called the country’s “normalisation”.
Throughout 2008, Turkey’s media sphere changed enormously through these trials that made the criminalisation of Turkey’s media part of the journalistic occupation. More than a dozen journalists were detained in the OdaTV trials, accused of being members of the “media arm” of the terrorist organisation Ergenekon, named after Turks’ founding myth. There were so many arrests that the prison’s sports hall needed to be transformed into a courtroom to accommodate all the defendants.
Many of Turkey’s progressives bought into the idea that what was happening was a good thing. Once “ultra-secularist coup plotters” would be placed behind bars, Turkey would finally achieve its long-awaited “liberal consensus”. Those who opposed the arrests were branded reactionaries who should have known better.
According to the newspapers, Turkey was cleaning its bowels: there were lone dissenting voices but the general reaction to the prison verdicts was that all the bad, radical people were finally getting what they had long deserved.
The normalisation discourse was built on the idea that Turkey needed a “liberal consensus” where the extreme elements of politics and the media needed to leave the public sphere to moderates of all political persuasions. Thanks to this, Turkey would be able to become “a model democracy” in the Middle East.
As the trials continued, and more than 40 Kurdish journalists were imprisoned because of their alleged ties to terrorist groups, Turkey was represented as its most liberal self in the international scene — what made it democratic, the argument ran, was the trials themselves. In fact, Turkey was being its most illiberal self, having the highest number of journalists in prison at the time. In 2012, just a year before the anti-government Gezi Park protests, the country was being held up as a paradigm. A Reporters Without Borders report from that year, read: “With a total of 72 media personnel currently detained, of whom at least 42 journalists and four media assistants are being held in connection with their media work, Turkey is now the world’s biggest prison for journalists – a sad paradox for a country that portrays itself a regional democratic model.”
Worryingly, the Ergenekon and OdaTV trials moulded a new type of journalist who took pleasure in the jailing of his colleagues. After journalist and IPI World Press Freedom Hero Nedim Sener and his colleague Ahmet Sik were detained in 2011, they were conveniently added to the list of coup plotters. When journalist and editor Soner Yalcin was arrested in February 2011 along with other OdaTv journalists, this was seen as a blow to Turkish nationalism, rather than journalism. In the fight with nationalism, the locking up of nationalist journalists was seen as a necessary evil.
By 2011, the process that had begun in 2008 reached new heights, when the character assassination of journalists became commonplace in the Turkish press. It was now acceptable to publish transcripts of phone conversations between journalists who might have been plotting a coup.
A more troubling development was the rise of a new genre: more and more journalists devoted all their work to making incriminating accusations against their colleagues. The success of a journalist’s work was now defined by the outcome of trials he had supported with his columns: if he managed to get his colleagues convicted through defaming their character, he was promoted.
No political group was able to resist the attraction of this new, adrenaline-ridden form of journalism and, most alarmingly, readers who followed those developments, started taking joy in this spectacle, a development that would surely fascinate Michel Foucault. Journalism became meta: newspaper front pages tallied which journalists were locked up and which were freed. There was fresh material every other month: the political identities of imprisoned journalists changed but the end result was the same.
It is now clear how Turkey’s fake “liberal consensus” failed spectacularly. However unpalatable progressives found them, Turkey’s secularist-nationalists, socialists and communists defended their right to exist in a society where they constitute a historical phenomenon alongside Turkey’s conservatives. Their imprisonment in the name of normalisation was unacceptable and immoral.
Instead of a liberal consensus, what Turkey needs is a proper dissensus: the coexistence of these different political camps.
Turkey Uncensored is an Index on Censorship project to publish a series of articles from censored Turkish writers, artists and translators.
His acclaimed Studio Abazon was fire-bombed in September 2015 in retaliation for his role in the ending of the 27-year tenure of former President Blaise Compaoré. Smockey has no doubt the attack was an attempt on his life in revenge for his activism. Thankfully the rapper was in hiding at the time and was unharmed.
Index on Censorship has named Smockey as the inaugural recipient of the Music in Exile Fund Fellowship. As the beneficiary, he will perform live in London, as well as receive training and opportunities to connect with other free speech heroes around the world. Smockey is committed to getting his studio up and running again and creating more music. Here’s just a snippet of his work as a musician and producer.
Smockey – Votez Pour Moi
Votez Pour Moi (Vote for Me) was released at the time of the 2005 presidential elections in Burkina Faso. It is about the dire state of democracy in the country. “This song is very ironic and satirical,” says Smockey. “In it, I play the role of a dictator making many promises he doesn’t intend to keep.” Dictators aren’t known for their sense of humour, but so out of touch was Compaoré’s government that they actually used Votez Pour Moi in their political campaign, playing on the TV every day.
“They didn’t listen to the lyrics and so didn’t realise it was a joke at their expense. Being in power for 30 years, they could only think of themselves,” Smockey told Index on Censorship.
Smockey – A Qui Profite le Crime
The title of this track translates as: who benefits from the crime? It is about the assassination of Thomas Sankara, the revolutionary president of Burkina Faso from 1983 until his assassination in 1987. Smockey is a self-proclaimed Sankarist, a left-wing ideology in the tradition of Sankara, who was murdered during a coup d’état organised by Compaoré.
The opening lines of the song, translated from their original French, are as follows: “So everything was planned from the beginning / For the country, but the finish is death we were served; routine investigation / Who benefits? Who benefits from the cime? / Who knows? / We were misled.”
Smockey – Tomber la Lame
Tombre la Lame (Falling Blade) is a song about female genital mutilation, a practice still common in Burkina Faso. “It happens as a result of local traditions and customs, and also religion, namely Islam,” explained Smockey. “It’s a very bad practice; women get hurt and go on to have complications later in life, such as when giving birth.” FGM is a major problem in West Africa in general, and Smockey wants to “convince people that they have to stop it”. Sankara was committed to women’s rights during his brief time in power and outlawed FGM, among other things. “When Sankara was killed, progress on this front was stopped in its tracks, so we have to continue the fight,” said Smockey.
Smockey – A Balles Reelles
In 2008, students in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, faced severe hardship following the sudden eviction from their halls of residence, the closure of essential facilities and the cancellation of welfare payments without notice. Authorities took the action following confrontations between students and police on 22 June 2008.
Balles Reelles, which translates as “real bullets”, is a song criticising the authorities for their harsh treatment of young people. At a press conference, Smockey and his collaborator on the track, the reggae artist Sams’K Le Jah, also criticised the passivity of the students’ parents in the face of the harsh treatment of their children. “Parents are silent when the university is closed and some students have become vulnerable,” Le Jah said.
Les Ambassadeurs de la Liberté d’Expression – Le Droit de Vivre
Les Ambassadeurs de la Liberté d’Expression, or the Ambassadors for Freedom of Expression, is a collaborative project effort including Smockey and other musicians from west Africa who are committed to strengthening freedom of expression in the region. Le Droit de Vivre (The Right to Live) was recorded at Studio Abazon before it was bombed. It is a song against extremism and injustice.
Other artists in the project include Didier Awadi of Senegal, Sissao, Alif Naaba from Burkina Faso, and Marechal Zongo, Josey and Soum Bill from Côte d’Ivoire, among others.
“Not everyone is lucky enough to have a microphone in front of them, so if you have the chance to talk, you have to say something important,” Smockey said of the project. “Art doesn’t just have to be beautiful – it can be beautiful and useful at the same time.”
Index on Censorship has teamed up with the producers of an award-winning documentary about Mali’s musicians, They Will Have To Kill Us First, to create the Music in Exile Fund to support musicians facing censorship globally. You can donate here, or give £10 by texting “BAND61 £10” to 70070.
Prague, Czech Republic. 4th February 2013 — Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan gestures during a press conference
The seizure of Turkey’s biggest opposition newspaper is the latest move against press freedom in the country. Since the election of Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in 2014, the increasingly autocratic politician has waged an ongoing war with voices critical of his government.
Editors and journalists have been targeted against a backdrop of regional conflict and a reignited battle with the country’s Kurdish minority. According to Turkey’s justice minister as many as 1,845 cases have been opened against people accused of insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan since he came to office in 2014. Journalists, celebrities and even children have faced charges.
Condemnation of the move against Zaman has been swift.
“With this move, Turkey has hit a new low for media freedom,” said Index on Censorship CEO Jodie Ginsberg. “We now need the international community to help pull it back from the brink by encouraging governments to speak out publicly against these actions instead of turning a blind eye to President Erdogan’s creeping authoritarianism.”
Writers, journalists and artists all told Index of their concerns about Turkey’s future.
Journalist Fredericke Geerdink, who was arrested and deported from Turkey for reporting on the conflict with the Kurds, said “it’s no surprise at all that Zaman was taken over by the government. After all, the government’s papers hinted on it weeks ago already. It was not a matter of if, but when and how Zaman would be silenced, and the affiliated Cihan news agency with it. But let’s not pretend that this is the day democracy in Turkey was carried to its grave. The press in Turkey has never been free. President Erdogan is only taking the poor press freedom situation in Turkey to new, extreme levels by using existing structures in the state system. The end of his reign, which will inevitably come, will not be enough to save the media in Turkey. Both the laws restricting press freedom and the ownership structures in the media should be tackled. For this, it is crucial that journalists in Turkey stand together, despite the polarization in society that hinders solidarity among journalists as well.”
Historian and author Tom Holland said, “that the rich and argumentative journalistic culture of Turkey should come to this. The free airing of opinions is a mark, not of Turkish weakness, but of Turkish strength”.
Neil Mackay, novelist and editor of the Sunday Herald in Scotland said “the actions of the Turkish government are a chilling attack on freedom of speech which all journalists and writers across the globe should oppose. No country which aspires to democracy can operate without a truly free press. I call on the Turkish government to overturn their decision immediately, and allow the newspaper Zaman, and its staff and editors, to report events freely and without government control.”
Cardiff University professor of journalism Richard Sambrook said “independence of media from government control is internationally recognised as essential for a mature, healthy democracy – and is also essential for economic and social development. I’d urge the Turkish authorities to reconsider this regressive move”.
Deputy managing editor London Evening Standard Will Gore said the “move by Turkish authorities to place the Zaman newspaper group under the management of trustees is a deeply worrying development in the government’s ongoing crackdown on media freedom in Turkey. Not only does it imperil free speech but strikes at the heart of one of the fundamental tenets of democracy. Journalists around the world should raise their voices in protest”.
Artist and writer Molly Crabapple said: “The Turkish government’s takeover of Zaman is only one of their recent, frightening moves to curtail the already highly restricted freedoms of journalists working in Turkey. These include the trial of Cumhurriyat editors, the arrests of journalists working for the Kurdish leftist news site Jiyan, the three-month long detention of VICE News producer Mohammed Rasool, the detention of Syrian photojournalist Rami Jarrah, expulsions of foreign journalists, and the near complete press blackout in Eastern Turkey. Writers and journalists must call on the Turkish government to respect freedom of speech and press.”
Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley called the move “unconstitutional, troubling and part of a pattern of making life harder for the opposition. Nobody would deny that Turkey faces serious security challenges. But a free press is essential to democracy, and the world needs a democratic Turkey now more than ever”.
the problem with zaman: columnist says today’ll be in turkey’s history as the day turkey crossed into open facism. https://t.co/V5cH7fsyB6
The European Federation of Journalists said: “The European Union cannot remain silent to the political seizure of Zaman newspaper, Today’s Zaman daily and Cihan news agency. The appointment of trustees by the judicial system was actually foreseen to save dying private companies and cannot be used to silence critical media outlets or to attack social rights of media workers”.
Amnesty International accused the Erdogan government of “steamrolling over human rights” and warned that “s free and independent media, together with the rule of law and independent judiciary, are the cornerstones of internationally guaranteed freedoms which are the right of everyone in Turkey”.
The seizure of Zaman, a news organisation aligned with the Gulen movement, is the latest move in a campaign of pressure against the newspaper. On 14 December 2014, police arrested senior journalists and media executives associated with the Gulen movement on terrorism-related changes. Among the arrestees was Ekrem Dumanli, editor-in-chief of Zaman. When the police raided the paper’s offices they were greeted by protesters tipped off in advance. Dumali surrendered to the police later that day. He and other detainees were ordered released on 19 December for lack of evidence.
At the time, the US State Department cautioned Turkey not to violate its “own democratic foundations” while drawing attention to raids against media outlets “openly critical of the current Turkish government.” EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini and EU Enlargement Commissioner Johannes Hahn said that the arrests went “against European values” and “are incompatible with the freedom of media, which is a core principle of democracy”.
Dündar, the editor-in-chief of the Turkish daily Cumhuriyet, and his Ankara bureau chief, Gül, had been held since the evening of 26 November. They are charged with spying and terrorism because last May they published evidence of arms deliveries by the Turkish intelligence services to Islamist groups in Syria. They are currently awaiting trial.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Turkey had 14 journalists in jail at the end of 2015. There have been 17 journalists arrested or detained in the country in 2016, according to verified incidents reported to Index’s project Mapping Media Freedom.
Freedom of expression campaigners Index on Censorship and the producers of award-winning documentary They Will Have To Kill Us First are pleased to announce the Burkinabe rapper and producer Serge Martin Bambara (aka Smockey) as the recipient of the inaugural Music in Exile Fund Fellowship.
An icon of democracy in Burkina Faso, Smockey is an artist, music producer and political activist who fuses hip-hop with traditional local sounds and satire. His acclaimed Studio Abazon was fire-bombed in late 2015 in retaliation for his role in the ending of the 27-year tenure of former President Blaise Compaoré.
As winner, Smockey will perform live in London as well as participate in the Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Awards fellowship week in April 2016 – an intensive week of coaching and networking for global champions against censorship. With high level training in advocacy, fundraising and digital security, Index supports these activists to stand up to the pressure of censorship and continue their battle for free expression around the world.
“Serge Bambara’s overtly political music has not only made him an extremely popular figure in his own country, Burkina Faso, but also a target for entrenched interests. Throughout his career he has used his talents to battle corruption and demand a democratic future for Burkina Faso. Proof of the power of art and music, we are delighted to have him as the inaugural Music in Exile fellow,” said Jodie Ginsberg, CEO, Index on Censorship.
“Not everyone is lucky enough to have a microphone in front of them, so if you have the chance to talk, you have to say something important and try and change humanity,” Serge Bambara said. Smockey’s work tackles tough political and social subjects. His song Votez pour moi lampoons the lack of democracy in Burkina Faso, A qui profite le crime calls out government corruption and Tomber la lame tackles female genital mutilation.
In September 2015, Smockey’s studio was bombed during a military coup by forces loyal to the former president – an act designed to intimidate him and Burkina’s youth. After seven days of international pressure, the junta returned power to the provisional government but Studio Abazon, a former hub for young and aspiring musicians in Burkina Faso, was damaged beyond repair.
Index on Censorship stands behind Smockey and hopes that the inaugural Music in Exile Fellowship can help him continue to encourage and enthuse young Burkinabes with his music.
Donations to the Music in Exile Fund can be made HERE.
A full profile about Smockey and his music can be read HERE.
For more information please contact: David Heinemann on 0207 260 2660 or [email protected]
The Music in Exile Fund was launched in October 2015 by freedom of expression campaigners Index on Censorship and the producers of award-winning documentary They Will Have To Kill Us First to help support musicians facing censorship in their home countries.
The fund contributes to Index on Censorship’s year-long Freedom of Expression Awards Fellowship programme, helping musicians to build international profile and to create, perform and share their work in a safe environment.
The fund operates under the banner of Index’s Freedom of Expression Awards, which take place in April. This year there will be a specific music category. The funds raised will support a musician or group through a year-long mentorship scheme helping them to tackle and overcome free expression challenges for them and their audiences. Legal support, career development, training in advocacy and fundraising, networking and digital security are all part of this mentorship scheme.
The film, called “essential viewing” (Dazed & Confused) and “rare and inspiring” (The Times) follows musicians in Mali after its capture by jihadist militants in 2012. Music, one of the country’s most important forms of communication, disappeared overnight. Radio stations were destroyed, instruments burned and musicians faced torture, even death. But rather than lay down their instruments, Mali’s musicians fought back. The film is currently premiering in the United States. Details about screenings can be found HERE.
