Cumhuriyet reporter Canan Coşkun Credit: Antonin Weber
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”Canan Coşkun, a journalist at daily newspaper Cumhuriyet who faces two upcoming trials for her reporting, talks about her attitude to the dangers of life as a reporter in Turkey, in the Spring 2017 issue of Index on Censorship magazine” google_fonts=”font_family:Libre%20Baskerville%3Aregular%2Citalic%2C700|font_style:400%20italic%3A400%3Aitalic”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Every two to three weeks recently, I have seen off a colleague leaving the courthouse for prison or snatched a few moments with a deeply missed, and now detained, workmate in the shadow of the authorities. But we aren’t afraid of this dungeon darkness because we journalists are only doing our jobs.
I have been a court reporter for Cumhuriyet since 2013, so I spend the large majority of my working life in the courts. We all have moments we cannot forget from our working lives. For me, one such day was 5 November 2016, the day when 10 of our writers and managers were arrested. I was waiting for the court’s decision right behind the barrier in the court building, and the moment I heard the decision I felt a flush of pride for our 10 writers and managers, followed by anger and deep depression for my friends.
I felt proud because the fact that they had been arrested for their journalism had been mentioned in the court’s decision. In listing examples of our reporting as the reason for the arrests, the judge took the government’s insistence that “they were not arrested for their journalism” and threw it out of the window. I felt anger and sadness because we were sending our friends off to an indefinite spell of captivity. The police would not even allow us to say goodbye to our colleagues who were only 30 or 40 metres away behind a barrier. But among the many feelings I had, fear was not one of them. When the attacks on journalism are on this scale, fear becomes a luxury.
After our 10 colleagues were arrested, many journalists from around Europe began visiting our newspaper’s offices. Our foreign counterparts wanted to hear about what had happened and how we felt, and they all had the same question: “Are you afraid?” From November onwards, arrests of journalists have continued at a regular pace. But just as on that day, my answer to that question today is short and sweet: “No!”
We are not afraid, because we are doing our work and we are concerned only with our work. We are not afraid, because we too feel as if we have been in Silivri prison with our colleagues for these long months. We are not afraid, because very little difference remains between being in and out of prison. We are not afraid, because the heads of our jailed colleagues are held high. We are not afraid, because Fethullah Gülen, the exiled cleric accused by the government of being behind last year’s failed coup attempt, was not once our “partner in crime”. We are not afraid, because the Cumhuriyet that governments of every era have tried to silence has only reported, is only reporting and will only report.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_icon icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-quote-left” color=”custom” align=”right” custom_color=”#dd3333″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_custom_heading text=”When the attacks on journalism are on this scale, fear becomes a luxury” google_fonts=”font_family:Libre%20Baskerville%3Aregular%2Citalic%2C700|font_style:400%20italic%3A400%3Aitalic”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Ahmet Şık, a reporter at my newspaper, has been under formal arrest since December 2016. Back in 2011, along with former military chief of staff İlker Başbuğ and many soldiers, police, journalists and academics, he spent more than a year in prison in relation to the “Ergenekon” case. The accusation was that they were attempting to overthrow the government.
Şık is currently under arrest accused of conspiring with the Gülen movement. But Turkey’s justice system is such that the case in which Şık was arrested in 2011 still continues, and this gave us a chance to see him in court on 15 February. I waited outside the courtroom doors and when they opened all I saw inside was a face smiling with hope: he was able to see his friends for the first time in months. Although Şık is a much more experienced journalist than I am, his desk in the office was close to mine and I missed him.
At that hearing, he summarised today’s fight to carry out journalism under the state of emergency, saying: “The story of those who think they have power, and who use this power to persecute journalists is as long as journalism itself.”
Last December, six journalists, including some of my friends, were held for 24 days in an inquiry into the hacking of minister Berat Albayrak’s emails. (Albayrak is President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s son-in-law.) Three of these journalists were later formally arrested by the courts. During this time, detained journalist Mahir Kanaat became a father, but he was unable to see his child. Fellow detainee Tunca Öğreten was not given the right to send and receive letters, or see anyone except his close relatives. He had to propose to his girlfriend via his lawyers.
Recently, I listened to one of these journalists relate a memory from his time in court. Having had their faith in justice shaken, they instead turned to superstition in the courtroom in a bid to be set free. Metin Yoksu, a freed journalist, said three of them had sat close to the courtroom exit and had replaced their shoelaces – which had been taken from them – with laces they had made from bits of water bottles. The result: those who were freed were those who had sat near the exit door.
Trust in Turkey’s justice system has fallen so far that we now rely on our superstitions. How depressing.
This article is part of the spring 2017 issue of Index on Censorship magazine. You can read about all of the other content in the magazine here.
Journalist Canan Coşkun is a court reporter at Cumhuriyet. She is currently charged with defaming Turkishness, the Republic of Turkey and the state’s bodies and institutions in one of her articles. Her article covered the story of a truck full of weapons hidden under onions. The second charge is that she depicted the police who combat terrorism as a target, for a story about Turkish Kurds being arrested.
Turkey Uncensored is an Index on Censorship project to publish a series of articles from censored Turkish writers, artists and translators.
Translated by John Butler
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”From the Archives”][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”80569″ img_size=”213×289″ alignment=”center” onclick=”custom_link” link=”http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0306422016657010″][vc_custom_heading text=”We are journalists, not terrorists” font_container=”tag:p|font_size:24|text_align:left” link=”url:http%3A%2F%2Fjournals.sagepub.com%2Fdoi%2Fpdf%2F10.1177%2F0306422016657010|||”][vc_column_text]June 2016
Valeria Costa-Kostritsky looks at a developing trend where journalists are being accused of terrorism and arrested for reporting the news.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”89086″ img_size=”213×289″ alignment=”center” onclick=”custom_link” link=”http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0306422013489932″][vc_custom_heading text=”Turkey’s media: a polluted landscape
” font_container=”tag:p|font_size:24|text_align:left” link=”url:http%3A%2F%2Fjournals.sagepub.com%2Fdoi%2Fpdf%2F10.1177%2F0306422013489932|||”][vc_column_text]July 2013
As protests continue in Istanbul, journalist Yavuz Baydar calls for the media to resist government pressure to filter the news.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”80569″ img_size=”213×289″ alignment=”center” onclick=”custom_link” link=”http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0306422016657030″][vc_custom_heading text=”Scoops and troops: Turkey’s future ” font_container=”tag:p|font_size:24|text_align:left” link=”url:http%3A%2F%2Fjournals.sagepub.com%2Fdoi%2Fpdf%2F10.1177%2F0306422016657030|||”][vc_column_text]June 2016
Writers from acclaimed independent newspaper Radikal on its closure and the shape of Turkish investigative journalism today.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_custom_heading text=”The Big Squeeze” font_container=”tag:p|font_size:24|text_align:left” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.indexoncensorship.org%2Fmagazine|||”][vc_column_text]The spring 2017 issue of Index on Censorship magazine looks at multi-directional squeezes on freedom of speech around the world.
Also in the issue: newly translated fiction from Karim Miské, columns from Spitting Image creator Roger Law and former UK attorney general Dominic Grieve, and a special focus on Poland.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”88788″ img_size=”medium” alignment=”center” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://www.indexoncensorship.org/magazine”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_custom_heading text=”Subscribe” font_container=”tag:p|font_size:24|text_align:left” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.indexoncensorship.org%2Fsubscribe%2F|||”][vc_column_text]In print, online. In your mailbox, on your iPad.
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Following last month’s failed coup, journalists in Turkey are facing the largest clampdown in its modern history. Journalists covering the events from abroad have not escaped unscathed, including a number in the Netherlands who have faced threats and attacks.
Unusually, the journalists of the Rotterdam-based Turkish newspaper Zaman Today welcomed the increased police presence. Long before the military coup that failed to remove Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan from power, the government had been targeting journalists. But today a Dutch police officer drops by frequently to check if Zaman’s journalists are alright. It makes journalist Huseyin Atasever, who has been working for the Dutch Zaman since 2014, feel safe. Or at least safer than he has felt in a while.
On the morning of Tuesday 19 July Atasever was on his way to Amsterdam when he received a phone call. A Turkish-Dutch individual had been abused by Erdogan supporters at a mosque in the city of Haarlem. Atasever decided to go there immediately.
“I found a man sitting in a corner on the floor talking to the police,” he told Index on Censorship. “He was injured and his clothes were torn.”
After Atesaver had interviewed the victim, who had been targeted for being critical of Erdogan, he approached a group of Erdogan supporters nearby to hear their side of the story.
“When these men realised that I work for Zaman Today, things got grim,” Atasever said. “A few of them surrounded me and started shouting death threats at me. They told me ‘we will kill you, you are dead’.”
“Thanks to immediate police intervention I managed to get away unhurt,” he added.
More than ever before, Turks all over the world have seen their diaspora communities divided between supporters and critics of Erdogan.
At around half a million people, the Netherlands has one of the largest Turkish communities in Europe. In the days after the coup, thousands of Dutch Turks took to the streets in several cities to show their support for the Turkish president. Turks critical of the Erdogan government had told media that they’re afraid to express their opinions due to rising tensions.
People suspected of being supporters of the opposition Gulen movement, led by Erdogan’s US-based opponent and preacher Fethullah Gulen, which has been accused of being behind the coup attempt, have been threatened and physically assaulted in the streets. The mayor of Rotterdam, a city with a large Turkish community, urged Dutch-Turks to remain calm and ordered increased police protection of Gulen-aligned Turkish institutions.
The men who had threatened Atasever were arrested, but released shortly afterwards. Atasever said he has pressed charges against them. He still receives threats on social media every day: he has been called a traitor, a terrorist and a coup supporter on Twitter. His photo and contact details have been shared on several social network sites accompanied by messages like “he should be hanged” and “let’s go find him”.
On 1 August Zaman Today’s Dutch website was hit by a DDoS attack and knocked offline for about an hour. An Erdogan supporter reportedly had announced an attack on the website earlier via Facebook, and Zaman Today announced it will be pressing charges.
It hasn’t just been journalists of Turkish descent who have been attacked. During a pro-Erdogan demonstration at the Turkish Consulate in Rotterdam, a TV crew for the Dutch national broadcaster NOS was verbally harassed by a group of youth. NOS reporter Robert Bas told the network that his cameraman had been assaulted and their car was also damaged. “There’s a very strong anti-western media atmosphere here,” Bas said in a live TV interview at the scene.
The Dutch Union for Journalists (NVJ) is worried about growing intimidation of journalists in the Netherlands, NVJ chairman Rene Roodheuvel said in Dutch daily Trouw. “The political tensions at the moment in Turkey and the attitude towards journalists there may in no circumstance be imported into the Netherlands,” he said. “We are second in the world when it comes to press freedom. Media freedom is a great good in the Dutch democracy and it must always be respected.”
“AKP supporters believe that media, especially in the west, are part of an international conspiracy to overthrow Erdogan,” Atasever said. Being a journalist for Zaman Today, he is not new to receiving threats. Many Turks feel the Western media is “the enemy”, he explained. “But we are even worse because we are of Turkish descent. They see us as traitors of our country.”
The government took control of the Turkish edition of Zaman in March 2016. Zaman was a widely distributed opposition newspaper, and very critical of the Erdogan government. The paper had ties with Gulen, who has denied any involvement in the coup attempt, but the Turkish government accuses him a running a parallel government. Zaman and its English-language edition, Today’s Zaman, have since been turned into a pro-government mouthpiece.
Most of Zaman’s foreign editions, however, have so far avoided government control. Zaman has editions in different languages around the world. The Dutch edition, Zaman Vandaag, with a circulation of 5,000, has managed to keep its editorial independence.
While independent journalists in Turkey are being arrested one by one, journalists of Turkish descent in the Netherlands are starting to worry too. “I know for a fact that our names have been given to the Turkish government by Dutch AKP supporters, labelling us as traitors and enemies of the state,” said Atasever, who has no plans to travel to Turkey.
“If our names are on a wanted list, which I expect they are, we will be arrested as soon as we set foot in Turkey.”
It was at the early hours of Friday that a journalist sent a note to her colleagues.
“We are told by the management that our publication is discontinued with immediate effect,” she said. “We are told to pack our belongings and leave the office. You can’t imagine how sad I am.”
The weekly news magazine Nokta, which had been launched in the aftermath of a military coup in 1980s, is no more.
Lately, under a new management, Nokta belonged to the critical mass of what remained of independent journalism in Turkey, with long reads and popular, bright commentators such as Perihan Mağden and Gükhan Özgün.
My colleague went on to say that the management internal communique cited the loss of a printing house as the reason for the closure. Given the waves of restriction over basic freedoms in the wake of Emergency Rule declared in 81 provinces of Turkey, this explanation came as no surprise.
Commenting on the closure, a Kurdish colleague who has extensively covered the operations in Cizre and Diyarbakır, added: “It’s a disaster to have the media outlets shut down, but it’s even worse to see media professionals left without a job.”
In another incident, Paolo Brera, a well-known reporter with La Repubblica, was held by the police officers at Sultanahmet Square yesterday while interviewing tourists, and taken to police headquarters. At first his whereabouts were unknown, and Italy had to intervene at the highest level to have him released after four hours.
As of Friday afternoon the situation of the columnist and human rights lawyer Orhan Kemal Cengiz was unclear. Cengiz is an international figure and close friend of the Kurdish lawyer Tahir Elçi who was assassinated in Diyarbakır last summer. Among other assignments, Cengiz followed the case of Christian missionaries slain in Malatya in 2007. He attended the UN’s Human Rights Summit in Geneva some months ago, commemorating by explaining the situation to a larger audience. His colleagues are on standby, knowing that he is held at the Anti-Terror Unit in Istanbul. His wife, also a lawyer, had been told that the detention was related to a case from 2014, but nobody has any further details.
The Emergency Rule means that no lawyers other than those appointed by the bar associations are now allowed to have access to all the cases. What is also known is that those who are arrested are held in cells at police headquarters.
Justice Minister Bekir Bozdağ said in an interview yesterday that in “crimes related to terrorist activities” individuals can be detained for at least seven-to-eight days. “Our staff is working on the possibilities of even extending that time,” he said, adding that he shares the concern that it will be very difficult to distinguish innocents from criminals.
The overall situation continues to be opaque, with scarce information, and experienced journalists caution each other to compare what’s being officially stated with what’s really being done. The measures so far leave little doubt that the media and the academia are under severe pressure, and the growing concern is there is an escalation of a clampdown, without much explanation of what the media and academic freedom had to do with the very coup attempt itself.
Turkey has faced severe turmoil since last Friday’s attempted military coup. While it was ultimately thwarted, 290people were left dead as of 18 July with many more injured. In response, the government has since cracked down on dissent and suspended the European Convention on Human Rights, with more than 50,000 people rounded up, sacked or suspended from their jobs.
In addition, the country has seen an increase in violations against media workers, with journalists murdered, held hostage, arrested and physically attacked, as well as having equipment confiscated or destroyed. These violations have raised concerns from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, whose representative on freedom of the media, Dunja Mijatović, has said: “Fully recognising the difficult times that Turkey is going through, the authorities need to ensure media freedom offline and online in line with their international commitments.”
Worries over these freedoms have only increased since President Erdogan announced on Wednesday that Turkey would be in a state of emergency for the next three months, enabling the government to initiate arrests and investigations in response to the failed coup.
Here are five reports from Index on Censorship’s Mapping Media Freedom project that give us most cause for concern.
15 July, 2016: Mustafa Cambaz, a photojournalist for the pro-government newspaper Yeni Safak, was shot and killed by soldiers during the failed coup attempt. Earlier that day, he had tweeted: “We are taking the streets following our commander-in-chief Erdogan’s call and order”. The Committee to Protect Journalists was quick to condemn the attack, with the Europe and Central Asia Program coordinator Nina Ognianova calling on “Turkish authorities to punish those responsible for killing Mustafa Cambaz to the full extent of the law”.
15 July, 2016: Renegade members of the Turkish militaryseized control of several media outlets and studios throughout Turkey, taking hostages and disrupting broadcasts. In Istanbul, soldiers gained control over the Dogan Media Center, which contains multiple news outlets including Hurriyet newspaper, the English-language Hurriyet Daily News and television stations CNN Turk and Kanal D.
Hostages were also taken in Ankara, where a news anchor for state broadcaster Turkish Radio and Television was forced to read a televised statement announcing the coup attempt at gunpoint. All hostages were eventually released and broadcasting resumed as normal by the morning of 16 July.
17 July: Turkey’s telecommunications regulatory body, TIB, blocked access to five websites including media outlets Gazetport, Haberdar, Medyascope, ABC Gazetesi, and Can Erzincan TV. Twenty more were blocked two days later following approval from a judge.
18 July: A pro-government Twitter user released a list of journalists who were accused of involvement in the coup and therefore subject to arrest. Journalists from both state and privately run media outlets were included on the list, which was circulated via social media at a time when public authority figures began to take measures to shut down websites that were critical of the government.
19 July: At least 34 journalists had their press credentials revoked in the aftermath of the coup. The decertifications impacted journalists from a variety of media outlets, including the daily newspaper Meydan, the liberal Taraf, Nokta magazine and Irmak TV. The Directorate General of Press and Information of Turkey stated the decertifications were done for the sake of national security in the aftermath of the coup.
Mapping Media Freedom logged a number of threats to press freedom from Turkey over the past seven days. Here are the rest of the reports:
15 July: One hour after the first reports of the coup attempt, social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube, were blocked. Access was eventually restored.
15 July: A photographer for Hurriyet, Selcuk Samiloglu, was physically attacked by a group of men while attempting to cover clashes on the Bosphorus Bridge.
15 July: CNN Turk cameraman Ahmet Akpolat was restrained by the neck and verbally threatened by military personnel when he refused to comply with a demand to hand over a tape during a raid of the Dogan TV building in Istanbul. His camera was broken.
19 July: The office of Istanbul newspaper Gazetem Istanbul was vandalised by several dozen men claiming the publication had supported the failed coup.
19 July: Valentin Trushnin, a reporter for Russian TV channel REN, was revealed to be on Turkey’s “banned foreigners list” when he was taken into custody at Ataturk Airport.
19 July: Turkish Radio and Television Supreme Council canceled broadcasting licenses for 24 TV channels and radio stations due to their alleged ties to the Gülen movement.
20 July: Local police barred LeMan, a satirical Turkish magazine, from printing and distributing its newest issue, a special edition on the failed coup.
20 July: Access to Wikileaks was blocked after it released 30,000 emails from President Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP).
20 July: The office of Meydan was searched and editor-in-chief Levent Kenez and editorial manager Gulizar Baki were arrested. They have since been released.
It was at the early hours of Friday that a journalist sent a note to her colleagues.
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