8 Mar 2019 | Awards, News and features
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Released from prison on 24 February 2019, Zehra Doğan is a Kurdish painter and journalist who, during her imprisonment, was denied access to materials for her work. She painted with dyes made from crushed fruit and herbs, even blood, and used newspapers and milk cartons as canvases.
Doğan used to work in Nusaybin, a Kurdish town caught in the crossfire between Turkey and Kurdish militants. She moved to the town to report on the conflict in 2016 and edited Jinha, a feminist women-only Kurdish news agency reporting in the Kurdish language.
When she realised her reports were being ignored by mainstream media, Dogan began painting the destruction in Nusaybin and sharing it on social media, and her art became important evidence of the violence in the town.
Doğan focused on striking, dark political scenes, but also on colourful scenes of traditional Kurdish life. In her most famous artwork, she adapted a Turkish army photograph of the destruction of Nusaybin, depicting armoured vehicles devouring civilians. In July 2016, she was arrested where witnesses testified in court that she was a member of an illegal organisation.
Although her trial ended with no sentencing, Doğan remained in prison until December 2016. In March 2017, Doğan was acquitted of “illegal organisation membership” but sentenced to almost three years for “propaganda” – essentially posting her painting on social media.
Her persecution is not isolated and takes place amid a crackdown on Turkish civil society. Using emergency powers and vague anti-terrorism laws, the authorities have suspended or dismissed more than 110,000 people from public sector positions and arrested more than 60,000 people between the attempted coup of July 2016 and the end of the same year.
Together with media and academic freedom, artistic freedom has come under attack. As a result, according to the Economist: “Artists have become more cautious, as have galleries and collectors.” Doğan’s situation was noticed by many artists in the world: Banksy painted a huge mural for her in New York and Ai Wei Wei sent a letter to her.
During her time in prison Doğan continued to produce journalism and art. She collected and wrote stories about female political prisoners, reported human rights abuses, and painted despite the prison administration’s refusal to supply her with art materials.
Doğan produced her own paint from food, drinks, and even her menstrual blood. She did not have brushes but used feathers of birds that fell into the prison yard. Security guards seized and destroyed the paintings she tried to send out of prison and punished her with a ban on communications with the outside world. She also gave drawing classes to other inmates and taught them how to make their own paintbrushes.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”104691″ img_size=”full” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2019/01/awards-2019/”][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/2″][vc_column_text]
Index on Censorship’s Freedom of Expression Awards exist to celebrate individuals or groups who have had a significant impact fighting censorship anywhere in the world.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1551975581366-1308b39d-3e20-6″ taxonomies=”26925″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
24 Feb 2019 | Awards, Awards Update, Fellowship 2019, News and features
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Artist Zehra Doğan, a Kurdish painter and journalist, has been released from a Turkish prison. Dogan, originally sentenced to two years, 9 months and 22 days on 24 March 2017, was tried over a painting depicting the destruction in the town of Nusaybin and sharing it on social media which was deemed by the courts as “terrorist propaganda”.
While in prison, Doğan, who has been nominated for a 2019 Freedom of Expression Awards in Arts, continued to write and produce art despite not having access to materials. The artist began using food and even her own blood as paint and letters, milk cartons or newspapers as her canvas. Doğan had also founded JINHA, Turkey’s first women’s news agency, which was shut down in 2016 under Statutory Decree No. 675 along with 180 other media outlets in the wake of the failed coup.
“We are very pleased to hear about her release and that she can rejoin her loved ones,” says CEO of Index on Censorship, Jodie Ginsberg. “We admire her strength and her perseverance to keep her art alive despite imprisonment and conditions. Her detention was unjust and we hope that there is justice for her and many others who continue to be arbitrarily detained in Turkey.” [/vc_column_text][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/4″][vc_single_image image=”104529″ img_size=”full” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2019/01/awards-2019/”][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”3/4″][vc_column_text]
Zehra Doğan, a Kurdish painter and journalist, has been shortlisted in the Arts category for the Index Awards 2019. Find out more.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1551005624780-09a05fdd-dde0-1″ taxonomies=”55″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
21 Feb 2019 | Awards, Campaigns -- Featured, Statements, Turkey, Turkey Statements
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Index on Censorship condemns a criminal indictment sent to a Turkish court against 16 civil society leaders including artist Meltem Arikan, actors Memet Ali Alabora and Pinar Ogun, and journalist Can Dündar.
“This farcical indictment shows how far Turkey’s government is willing to go to silence dissent and should show the world how much freedom of expression has degraded for all of the country’s citizens,” said Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of Index on Censorship.
The criminal court has 15 days to examine the indictment charging the 16 with attempting to overthrow the government for their part in the 2013 Gezi protests, the biggest anti-government demonstrations since President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Islamist government came to power in 2002. Almost six years after the protests during which tens of thousands people across Turkey took the streets, the 16 named in the indictment now faced a possible lifetime behind bars without the possibility of parole, according to a report in Ahval.
Arikan was nominated for a 2014 Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Award in the arts category.
The other 12 individuals named in the indictment are: Osman Kavala, Mücella Yapıcı, Tayfun Kahraman, Hakan Altınay, Gökçe Yılmaz, Can Atalay, Çiğdem Mater Utku, Hanzade Hikmet Germiyanoğlu, İnanç Ekmekçi, Mine Özerden, Yiğit Aksakoğlu, Yiğit Ali Ekmekçi.[/vc_column_text][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1550765322731-f7944837-909a-0″ taxonomies=”55″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
24 Jan 2019 | Europe and Central Asia, News and features, Turkey, Turkey Uncensored
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Social media apps on phone, Jason Howie/Flickr
After the widespread anti-government Gezi Park protests in 2013, social media platforms became an alternative source of news as the conventional mainstream media lost its credibility due to its biased reporting. Thereafter, posts were increasingly muzzled by the government, something that intensified in the wake of the failed coup attempt in July 2016. This is a particular problem for Turkey’s Kurds who have taken to social media in the absence of Kurdish media, which has largely been shuttered.
According to BIA Media Monitoring Reports, 182 media outlets have been shut down since the coup attempt. The actual number of news sites, social media posts and online news reports that have been blocked is unknown.
Özcan Kılıç, a lawyer who mostly defends Kurdish journalists and media outlets warned that if there aren’t deferments of verdicts in the cases, there could be more than 7,000 social media users imprisoned in the country. He points out that journalists facing charges related to their social media activities have mostly been sharing links to their own news articles.
“Kurdish journalists mostly share their pieces on their own social media pages because pro-Kurdish TV channels, newspapers are shut down and access to the pro-Kurdish news outlets are banned. The only way to inform people is through their own social media pages, such as Twitter or Facebook,” says Kılıç. “There is a double standard against Kurdish journalists and news outlets. I had a client newspaper which was prosecuted for publishing a photo of Öcalan [one of the founders of the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party] while he was smiling for ‘making terrorist propaganda by representing a terrorist organisation’s leader positively’. The judiciary approach is ‘If mass media did it, it is journalism, if Kurds did it, it is propaganda’.”
“When Redhack leaked the emails of Berat Albayrak [then-energy, now the economy minister and a son-in-law of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan] they started to focus on the social media posts,” Kılıç adds. “In the leaked files trial, it was the socialist, leftist and Kurdish journalists who were prosecuted and the only evidence was their news stories that they posted online.”
When the government woke up to social media as a free speech medium, it launched a virtual patrol squad of police officers under the Department of Cybercrime in several cities. According to General Directorate of Security Affairs, the virtual patrols are able to deal with offences falling within the scope of the Public Security Division, listed as online sexual harassment, threat, insult, pandering, inducing suicide, blackmail and obscenity.
Kılıç says that these virtual patrol squads “check all the corners of the internet and create digital reports on individuals’ social media profiles”.
Police reports on social media profiles are collected from open sources, therefore these reports cannot be used as evidence in the prosecutions. “Very few of the courts take these notice and asks for further evidence,” says Kılıç. “But some are. When they ask for authentication of the social media profile which was subjected to trial, prosecutors use even personal information of suspects’ family, children or spouse.”
Kılıç’s note refers to the case of Kurdish journalist Rawin Sterks, in which the prosecutor demanded he be charged with conducting propaganda for a terrorist organisation due to his Facebook post about a documentary he had made about Reşit Marinus, a Kurdish peshmerga, the military forces of the federal region of Iraqi Kurdistan. Sterk denied the charge against him. Istanbul’s 34th Heavy Penal Court didn’t accept the indictment saying that the preamble of “the ‘peshmerga’ title did not refer any PKK militants”. The prosecutor then submitted another indictment, which restated the information in the first, but also added a police report which included some photographs and posts of Sterk’s family. The court then accepted the indictment.
Kılıç said that journalists who are targeted with charges often go public but non-journalists don’t because they fear for the impact on their families. “Regardless if they are educated or not, Kurdish people have an expression problem,” he says. “The Kurdish media is shut down, they cannot gather and celebrate Newroz, they cannot protest. So they do the most convenient thing and post their views on social media.”
When Turkey invaded Afrin, a town in northern Syria, on 10 January 2018, the Ministry of Interior stated that 845 people taken into custody for their online posts about the military operation. Most of them were Kurdish.
“Even posting Selahattin Demirtaş’s [former leader of People’s Democratic Party which is pro-Kurdish and the third biggest party in Parliament. Demirtaş is in prison for more than two years] would be considered ‘terrorist propaganda’,” says Kılıç. “After Afrin operation, even religious, AKP electorate Kurdish people get detained for social media posts.”
He warns: “A bigger crackdown is approaching for the social media posts for the last 5 years. Especially towards the posts that related to the protests which sparked by the Islamic State’s attacks on Kobani in 2014.”[/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:1548178869839-7300ed07-67e9-0″ taxonomies=”8607″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
