14 Dec 18 | News and features, Turkey, Turkey Uncensored
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”104347″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][vc_column_text]Deniz Altınay doses and tamps coffee in a way that shows he has done it many times before. Just three years ago, his daily routine used to be much different.
Back then, he would often stand in front of a dozen students in a classroom at the University of Mersin and lecture about media and communications. But that was before he and about 20 other academics were dismissed from the university for signing a petition calling for peace in protest against Turkish military operations in Kurdish provinces at the beginning of 2016.
Soon, the coffee machine starts to buzz and gurgle. He turns to students waiting on the other side of the counter and smiles. Along with two other dismissed academics and a friend, Altınay is one of the founders of Kültürhane, which literally means “House of Culture,” in the coastal city of Mersin. Kültürhane houses a library of 5,000 mostly donated books, a working space, as well as a café that doubles as an event venue.
Since Altınay and his partners were banned from teaching, the group of academics created a space where students could regularly drop in, learn and cram for exams. After all, even if they can’t give their high-achieving students an “A” anymore, they can at least serve them coffee and tea for their hard work. It’s a hierarchy that has been turned, if not upside-down, from vertical to horizontal in a country in which the relationship between academics and students is traditionally strict, epitomised by the word hocam, a mark of respect meaning “my teacher” or “my professor” used by every student, even when addressing them informally.
“To be honest, it was harder for our students and our friends to get used to it than for us,” Altınay says, laughing heartily. “Some of my students would say ‘Hocam, please don’t take the trouble of bringing us anything,’ and I would need to tell them ‘on the contrary, you should ask me to bring it because treating my students and friends is a great pleasure for me.’”
Kültürhane has allowed them to realise many things they wouldn’t have perceived at the university, he says. “The things we could change at the university were limited. Transforming the relationship with our students was important for us. We are no longer the university’s employees, and Kültürhane has provided us a very different kind of freedom. We can finally define the limits ourselves.”
Much like Turkey’s universities at present, the country’s streets are most certainly not spaces where people can engage in free speech. As public spaces become increasingly oppressive, the small niches of freedom like Kültürhane become even more valuable. “Here, we are making each other feel better. It’s like therapy.”
And a much needed one. When a platform called Academics for Peace issued a statement on 10 January 2016 calling for the end to Turkish military operations in a number of urban areas in southeastern Turkey, such as Cizre, Silvan, Nusaybin or Diyarbakır’s historic neighbourhood of Sur, they received overwhelming support from their colleagues. Some 1,128 academics signed the statement, while another thousand added their name to the list after the document went public. “We, as academics and researchers working on and/or in Turkey, declare that we will not be a party to this massacre by remaining silent,” the statement read. “We demand an immediate end to the violence perpetrated by the state.”
Those were strong words tearing decades of silence and hypocrisy apart. Intellectuals had kept mum when it came to the dirty military war against the Kurds, but with the nationwide Gezi protests still fresh in the memory, people were finally daring to speak up. The retribution, however, was harsh. Hundreds of academics who didn’t withdraw their signatures were first suspended and then dismissed by decree after the government acquired exceptional powers under the state of emergency that was declared in the wake of a coup attempt on 15 July 2016. Investigations were opened individually against each signatory on charges of “conducting propaganda for a terrorist organisation.”
Thirty-eight signatories of the Academics for Peace petition have been sentenced to 15 months each in prison so far, while two others have been sentenced to 18 months in jail. Some academics, such as political science professors Füsun Üstel and Büşra Ersanlı, rejected the possibility of a suspension of their sentence, meaning that they will spend time in prison when their verdict is upheld on appeal. More than 300 cases are continuing while prosecutors have also launched new trials, including cases against academics in Mersin and Adana. On the flip side, pro-government mafia boss Sedat Peker was recently acquitted in a case that was launched against him for threatening the petition’s signatories, saying he would “take a shower in [their] blood” — a ruling that clearly highlighted the concept of crime according to the Turkish judiciary doesn’t quite correspond to international human rights standards or pretty much to any conventional wisdom.
Solidarity classes against academic ban
Altınay says their ordeal is not just legal but also economic. Many academics had to leave the country to continue their career in universities in Europe or the United States. Others who stayed, either by choice or because they were slapped with a travel ban, struggle to find work and make ends meet.
But the ordeal is ultimately psychological. One of the signatories of the petition, Mehmet Fatih Traş, committed suicide months after being dismissed from the University of Çukurova, in the nearby city of Adana. A letter to a colleague revealed that Traş had experienced significant mobbing from other academics who accused him of being a “PKK sympathiser,” in reference to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party. As a result, the rector’s office cancelled three of Traş’s courses. In tribute and a reminder of the hardships some academics went through, Kültürhane’s library now bears his name.
“What we do shouldn’t be over-romanticised either,” Altınay says. “We are open seven days of the week, we work up to 10-12 hours a day. It’s physical work that also wears you out mentally, and we need to make a living out of it.”
Without a doubt, solidarity among academics has been one of the key elements that has kept them going. One of the first initiatives was founded in the city of Eskişehir in western Turkey a few months after the petition circulated. A group of academics who were suspended from their positions began organising “solidarity classes” off campus. More than 50 classes have been held since under the label of “Eskişehir School.” The initiative’s founders have now opened their own space – a café with a screening room and a workshop studio – called Uçurtma (Kite). Eskişehir, perhaps the only locality in Turkey that resembles a student city thanks to the quality of its university programs, was an ideal place for the burgeoning solidarity to bear fruit.
“We were one of the first groups which became the object of an investigation. We organised the first solidarity class in May 2016. We hadn’t been dismissed yet at the time,” said Pelin Yalçınoğlu, a former lecturer at the faculty of education of Anadolu University. “We wanted to draw attention to what universities were and show that it was not possible to lock knowledge inside a campus. If they were not going to give us space for questioning, we thought we might do it elsewhere.”
Since May 2016, people have gathered every two weeks to learn and discuss a different subject. The day of our interview, Eskişehir School was holding a class on theatre with Tülin Sağlam, a prominent expert on the art of theatre in the country. Just like the organisers, Sağlam was dismissed from her position at the prestigious language, history and geography department of the University of Ankara for signing the petition.
“There were animated debates among us when we decided to choose the name Eskişehir School for our initiative. While we were wondering how we could fulfill [the underlying ambitions], everybody loved the name.” But as time passed, the initiative needed a space to take root. Economic needs were pressing too. If the meagre financial support collected for the school was used in helping out an academic who was dismissed with one of the first emergency decrees, it wasn’t enough for the founders who soon met the same fate. And so was born Uçurtma.
“This is a space to allow Eskişehir School to continue existing,” Yalçınoğlu said. While some of her colleagues started making a transition and others kept working in jobs related to their own field, Yalçınoğlu wanted to invest herself in an activity that could feed Eskişehir School. “What we all want is actually to make Eskişehir School worthy of its name. If you call it ‘school,’ it should have a say and a perspective on the production of knowledge in this country. We would like it to do its own research, publish its own articles, organise seminars and conferences; [we just want it] to go beyond the classes.” Their new endeavour started with a two-day symposium on law and dystopia in November.
Dismissals as censorship
Both Kültürhane and Eskişehir School show that some of the dismissed academics are choosing the road less travelled and keeping up the fight by creating their own spaces for knowledge, even if it means an uncertain future for their careers. In both efforts, the common concern is that the government is now dictating what should be taught at Turkish universities, and what should not.
“There is an intense propaganda activity going on,” Altınay said. “Dismissals are part of this propaganda and also a very serious censorship mechanism. By doing so, they are erecting a very clear obstacle for the expression of certain thoughts. These are not ideological thoughts at all, but scientific truths. And they are raising a generation who won’t know anything about these scientific truths. I don’t know a bigger censorship than that.”
Kültürhane, which turned one this year, became such a breathing space for many people that the founders even became an object of mirth. “They are teasing us, ‘how fortunate that you were dismissed,’” Altınay said. In a year, they have organised around 150 events, discussions or workshops on all types of subjects and topics.
Kültürhane’s co-founder, Ulaş Bayraktar, also feels inspired by the public’s response. “We didn’t plan anything or even know what we were doing. We just had a feeling. I personally never attached a lot of meaning to being an academic or a public servant. Our means have changed, but it’s the same journey. The difference is that we don’t have an official title anymore.” For the future, he hopes to see all the initiatives cooperating together. “If we can develop such a model, I think these initiatives can leave a mark. But I am hopeful. All these efforts give us the hint of the power of being together.”
Yalçınoğlu, Altınay and Bayraktar don’t expect the current situation for dismissed academics to change in the near future. In the face of ever-worsening political pressure and a severe economic crisis, they are determined to conserve their small-scale haven of knowledge. These initiatives should perhaps also be considered as their modest response to their dismissals.[/vc_column_text][vc_images_carousel images=”104349,104348,104346,104343,104342,104341,104345″ img_size=”full” autoplay=”yes”][/vc_column][/vc_row]
21 Nov 18 | Campaigns, Campaigns -- Featured, Statements
21 November 2018
To the attention of:
EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission, Ms Federica Mogherini,
EU Commissioner for European Neighbourhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations, Mr Johannes Hahn,
We, the undersigned organisations, urge the addressed European Union (EU) officials to discuss Turkey’s freedom of expression crisis and fractured rule of law during their high-level political dialogue with the Turkish government on 22 November 2018.
More than 160 journalists are imprisoned in Turkey today, with hundreds more on trial for exercising their right to freedom of expression. In 2018, the World Press Freedom Index ranked Turkey as 157 out of 180 countries, on the basis of the level of freedom available to journalists. Since 2016, Turkey’s position in the index has progressively decreased from 151 in 2016 and 155 in 2017. Journalists and media outlets are mostly targeted on charges of affiliation with, membership of, or propaganda for a terrorist organisation, charges mostly linked to the attempted coup of July 2016. Despite the lifting of a two-year-long state of emergency on 18 July 2018, and its replacement with similarly restricting legislation, such attacks are still taking place. Just last week, on 16 November 2018, in a targeted operation against civil society,13 people including academics, journalists and lawyers were arrested on suspicions of similar charges, some of whom were subsequently released under judicial control.
Following the attempted coup in July 2016, the Turkish authorities cracked down on independent press and journalists, resulting in widespread closures of media outlets, dismissal of 10,000 media workers and mass prosecutions of journalists. The Turkish judicial system has thus far failed to provide redress in these cases, a further sign of the deterioration of the rule of law in Turkey.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) response to this situation has been weak until now: focusing on the need to exhaust domestic remedies as a principle of admissibility of cases before the Court, and failing to fully recognise the impact of the repression of which Turkish journalists and civil society are the victims. Where ECtHR rulings on journalists have been made they have been blatantly ignored and not implemented by the Turkish authorities. Newly introduced legislation in Turkey, dovetailing in many cases provisions concerning purportedly temporary and exceptional measures introduced under the state of emergency in order to respond to the attempted coup, also casts a shadow over respect for human rights in the country.
We remind you that pursuant to the Treaties, the European Union’s “aim is to promote peace, its values and the well-being of its peoples” and that “in its relations with the wider world, the Union shall uphold and promote its values and interests”, including contributing to the protection of human rights. Given the mandate of your roles within the European Union’s system, we urge you to include the above-mentioned issues at the heart of your conversation with the Turkish government during the high-level political dialogue planned in Ankara on 22 November 2018. In particular, we request you to engage with Turkish authorities with a view to agreeing on concrete actions aimed at the protection of journalists and human rights defenders in Turkey, for the respect of the right to freedom of expression in Turkey. Finally, we demand that the EU stresses the need for Turkey to concretely improve its respect for the rule of law and human rights, as a prerequisite for a further deepening of the EU-Turkey relationship.
Yours sincerely,
Article 19
International Press Institute
European Federation of Journalists
Index on Censorship
Reporters Without Borders
Pen International
English Pen
Norwegian Pen
Articolo 21
cc.
Mr Pier Antonio Panzeri, Chair of the European Parliament’s Human Rights Committee European Parliament Rue Wiertz Altiero Spinelli 15G205 1047 Brussels
Mr David McAllister, Chair of the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee European Parliament Rue Wiertz
Altiero Spinelli 15G205 1047 Brussels
Mr Christian Berger, Head of EU Delegation in Turkey Büyükesat Mahallesi Uğur Mumcu Cd. No:88 06700 Çankaya/Ankara Turkey
12 Oct 18 | News and features, Turkey, Turkey Uncensored
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After 495 days in pre-trial detention on a trumped-up charge of terrorism, Murat Sabuncu was allowed to return to his desk as editor-in-chief of Cumhuriyet in March 2018. In a country where around 90 percent of the media is slavishly pro-government, Cumhuriyet — Turkey’s oldest and arguably its most prestigious newspaper — had established a reputation for independence and as a standard-bearer for journalistic reporting.
His reinstatement lasted a mere six months. A ruling by the Supreme Court of Appeals on 7 September resulted in the dismissal of several members of staff, including Sabuncu. A new board was appointed and with it came a shift in editorial policy. Those who took control of the paper were none other than the people who testified against Cumhuriyet staff in the first place. Around 30 journalists and writers — some of whom had also been in jail — resigned in protest.
Cumhuriyet had been split between competing factions for years: a group of left-wing nationalists, who saw themselves as defenders of the Atatürkist doctrine, and another group consisting of journalists and writers ranging from social democrats to socialists who are much more critical of the country’s official ideology, particularly on the Kurdish issue. That feud has only escalated in recent years as Turkey has become increasingly polarised, not just between religious and secular, but also between nationalists, including within the Islamic community, and those who demand a confrontation with the dark pages of the country’s history.
A key question is whether the latest change in management is a natural consequence of the divide or part of the government’s continued efforts to silence a powerful oppositional voice – especially at a time when the judiciary’s independence is routinely up for debate.
Ahmet Şık, a prominent and outspoken journalist, recently turned MP for the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), has no doubts about the answer. “Those who are claiming to have liberated Cumhuriyet are the same ones who collaborated with people who arrested us, threw us in prison by serving as false witnesses,” Şık tweeted. “They are no better than those who have looted this country.”
Şık spent time in pre-trial detention and was released in March 2018 along with Sabuncu. Both men were eventually sentenced on 25 April to seven-and-a-half years in prison on terror-related charges but were freed pending appeal.
Godsend for the government
Cumhuriyet is a unique example in Turkey. While most media organisations in the country are run by a corporation, it is administrated by a non-profit organisation called the Cumhuriyet Foundation. The chairman of the new board is Alev Coşkun, a former politician who has been a board member since the early 1990s. A lot of Şık’s anger is directed towards Coşkun, who was chairman prior to the board election held in 2013. When Coşkun lost, he sued his own newspaper. After a four-year-long legal spat, the board was invalidated by the Supreme Courts of Appeals. In his capacity of the acting chairman, Coşkun convened a new board election, which he eventually won over Akın Atalay, with the support of other discontented ex-board members. Atalay, a lawyer by profession, was the latest defendant released from pre-trial detention in the Cumhuriyet case. He was also given the longest sentence of eight years, one month and 15 days for “aiding a terrorist organisation without being a member”.
Coşkun’s role in the case against Cumhuriyet has been controversial. “He is the person responsible for the investigation,” says Ergin Cinmen, one of the lawyers who represented Cumhuriyet’s staff during the trial. “The trial was launched after Coşkun testified to the prosecutor. Coşkun was also heard during the trial as the prosecutor’s witness and repeated his accusations.”
The nature of Coşkun’s allegations proved to be a godsend for the government, according to Banu Güven, a journalist who closely followed the trial. “The arguments used against the former board in their dispute contain precisely the accusations the government desired,” she says.
The background of the case goes back to 2008 when a police operation named Ergenekon was launched against military officers accused of plotting a coup and their alleged media connections. Cumhuriyet’s Ankara office was searched and veteran Ankara bureau chief Mustafa Balbay arrested along with the revered editorialist İlhan Selçuk. The latter, who was 73 years old at the time, was released two days later, but Balbay remained in pre-trial prison for almost five years. The investigations were allegedly led by prosecutors and police officers linked to the movement around the cleric Fethullah Gülen, then an ally of the government.
In 2013 this narrative was turned upside down. After one of the prosecutors who had overseen Ergenekon instigated probes against ministers and pro-government businessmen, the split between the ruling party and the Gülen movement reached a point of no return. Gülen was now seen as the arch nemesis of the government and would be accused of orchestrating the failed coup attempt of 15 July 2016. Ergenekon convicts, including Balbay and former chief-of-staff İlker Başbuğ, were set free. Verdicts against them were quashed by the Supreme Court of Appeals. To top it all, the entire Ergenekon plot to overthrow the government came to be regarded as a fiction invented by Gülen organisation members. Liberals, guilty in the eyes of staunch secularists for turning a blind eye to the Islamic roots of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), were now blamed by the government for being tools of the Gülen movement.
In the middle of all this, Coşkun lost his election to the board. The paper changed under his successor Atalay, particularly following the appointment of Can Dündar as the new editor-in-chief in 2015. Cumhuriyet’s editorial policy became a less “old school”. It was more outspoken on the Kurdish issue at a time when the government was whipping up tensions around the conflict with renewed and vicious military operations in the southeast. The newspaper began unequivocally distancing itself from the political establishment. In May 2015 Cumhuriyet ran pictures that allegedly showed weapons sent to Jihadi groups in Syria on trucks belonging to the Turkish intelligence agency. This, as far as the government was concerned, was the last straw. Accused of “treason” by president Recep Tayyip Erdogan during a live broadcast, Dündar was arrested and charged with espionage. His editorial policy was declared the root of all evil.
“What makes the trial against Cumhuriyet unique is that the case is entirely based on criminal charges laid out against an editorial policy,” says Cinmen. “This is something unprecedented in the world.”
“Journalism was on trial,” says Güven. “The objective was to eradicate a pluralist editorial policy backing freedoms and peace.” She stresses that while the new board members accused their predecessors of being “liberals who had supported Erdogan against the military tutelage,” they were the ones who collaborated with the government in laying the groundwork for the trial.
A “lost struggle” for editorial independence
When Coşkun testified to the prosecutor days after the raid on Cumhuriyet’s offices on 31 October 2016, he was seen carrying an edition of Cumhuriyet which featured a report on Gülen on its front page. It also emerged that Coşkun had written an anonymous letter to the president’s office. In the letter, Coşkun accused his successor of having “organic ties” with both the Gülen organisation and the pro-Kurdish HDP. His allegations echoed Balbay’s statement after he had stopped writing for Cumhuriyet a few months before. “Everything from being [pro-Gülen] to pro-Kurdish is allowed at Cumhuriyet,” Balbay tweeted.
Both Coşkun and Balbay were witnesses for the prosecution, causing a huge uproar in the court. During Coşkun’s court statements when he deplored the presence of Turhan Günay, Cumhuriyet’s literary editor who had spent nine months in prison despite his later acquittal. “Why is Günay even here in this trial?” Coşkun asked. Günay’s voice interrupted his statement: “Thanks to you, sir.”
If Coşkun’s role has rubbed salt in the defendants’ wounds during the case, Cinmen argues that the government was determined to silence Cumhuriyet no matter what. “The decision had been made,” he says. “Coşkun and his letter were merely instrumentalised.”
Academic Ceren Sözeri, one of Turkey’s most prominent media experts, also emphasises that the newspaper won’t adopt a pro-government policy just because Coşkun was re-elected as chairman. Yet the new board may also have to pay its dues to the government, Sözeri warns. “If the operation against Cumhuriyet is usually thought as two separate trials (the management case and the criminal case), it was essentially a struggle for editorial independence. I believe that this struggle was lost.”
Güven believes that the change in management was the result of direct government intervention. If there is one subject the old board and the government agreed on, Güven argues, it was the Kurdish issue. A shift of the newspaper’s tone on the Kurdish issue was to become decisive. “Though there are still opposition writers in Cumhuriyet, the newspaper is now more acceptable in the government’s eyes.”
After taking over the newspaper, the new board solemnly announced in a front-page editorial that Atatürk and his principles “had returned to the newspaper”. “Harsh accusations against the previous editorial policy and statements in the form of martial law declarations show that [the board’s] concerns go beyond merely reporting,” says Sözeri. She stresses that the way the newspaper changed hands played a “decisive role” for those journalists and writers who resigned. “It is very hard, even impossible doing real journalism on government’s terms,” she says.
In a country where shifts in the editorial policies of newspapers are only considered natural after changes in management, Sözeri warns that the handover in Cumhuriyet could be a tragic turning point. “Protecting editorial independence is key to preventing such shifts,” she says. “This is only possible through association and solidarity.”
Without that solidarity, an important press freedom case degenerated into one in which both journalists’ freedom and the very future of their newspaper were at stake.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1539616867253-70d074aa-d114-8″ taxonomies=”55″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
20 Sep 18 | News and features, Volume 47.03 Autumn Extras
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The special report in our Autumn 2018 issue of Index on Censorship magazine, The Age of Unreason, focuses on bullshit busting and what happens when emotion trumps facts. See how prone to bullshit you are by taking our quiz, based on articles featured in the magazine.
The Turkish government are banning Charles Darwin from its textbooks. True or false?
A California-based university (USC) found Reddit is the main news source for young people. True or false?
US journalist Brian Williams was in a helicopter hit by a missile. True or false?
According to Consulta Mitofsky, trust in Mexican media has dropped by 12% in the last decade. True or false?
Donald Trump coined the term "fake news". True or false?
Cryonic companies sell death as optional. True or false?
Bumble bees use colour and spatial relationships to decide which colour of flower to forage from. True or false?
Research conducted by Columbia University found 40% of Donald Trump supporters relied on Fox for their news. True or false?
Brazil was the first Latin American country to legalise same-sex marriage in 2010. True or false?
Parenting forums are the websites people are most likely to lie on, according to research by Indiana University. True or false?
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