20 Aug 2018 | Azerbaijan, Media Freedom, media freedom featured, News and features, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner][vc_single_image image=”102216″ img_size=”full”][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_column_text]Visitors to Eurasian countries — Turkey, Russia, Ukraine or, to a lesser extent, Azerbaijan — might be impressed by the sheer number of domestic television channels that offer news programming.
The average TV viewer in Turkey flipping through the local channels is treated to an alphabet soup — atv, Kanal D, NTV, STV, interspersed with FOX TV, CNN Türk, public broadcaster TRT and countless others — all employing a vast number of journalists and purporting to keep the viewers abreast of events shaping the domestic and global agenda. The broadcasts are slick: filled with chyrons, attention-grabbing graphics, remote reports, breaking news, heated exchanges between talking heads and all the other trappings of the modern-day 24-hour news cycle.
Watching the lively debates hosted by TV personalities, who exude an air of professionalism and discernment, with or without live audiences nodding in acquiescence or registering disapproval, viewers may be given the impression that they are being exposed to a wide range of opinions in a vibrant, competitive media market.
But does this wealth of channels translate into pluralism of points of view?
“Certainly not,” says Esra Arsan, journalism scholar and former columnist for Turkey’s Evrensel, one of the remaining newspapers supplying alternative news and commentary left in the country. “In Turkey, there’s no pluralistic media environment. The Turkish media have never been pluralistic in the true sense of the word, but at least there were once mechanisms that allowed for the voices of the right, left, mainstream and fringe wings to be heard, especially, on small media groups occupying the niche space,” she says, citing the formerly independent Turkish-language media, their Kurdish-language counterparts and those of other minority groups.
Arsan described the massive media reorganisation that took place in parallel with the rise of president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP party since 2007. “It was characterised by replacing the old media owners with the new ones with close ties to the government, and exercising total control over them, especially, in big media,” she adds.
During the Erdogan-inspired restructuring of the media, professional journalists and newsroom managers were forced out or jailed, Arsan says. The replacement managers left a lot to be desired. “Many of these people are uneducated, have no idea of journalistic ethics or professionalism, they’ve become the mouthpieces for the government”. She points out that more than 3,000 professional journalists who were working prior to 2007 are now jobless.
“Nowadays, no matter how many television broadcasters there are in Turkey, we can say the government exercises control over 90 percent of them,” says Ceren Sözeri, a communications faculty member at Istanbul’s Galatasaray University, citing a recent study conducted by Reporters Without Borders.
“Among the channels not under government control were stations belonging to Doğan Group, such as Kanal D and CNN Türk. Very recently, it was sold to Demirören Group, a conglomerate with close ties to the government,” Sözeri says.
Among the TV channels that are still able to provide diversity in the face of the pro-government news she tentatively cites FOX TV, Tele1 and HalkTV, the latter being associated with the CHP, the main opposition party. “With these exceptions, almost all other remaining channels work in conformity with the government, we can say we have an environment completely devoid of diversity,” Sözeri says.
Driven by Erdogan’s efforts to build a single-party regime, this media reorganisation pursued the goal of controlling information disseminated in the country. Buffered by the concurrent changes to the constitution and legal reforms, the jailing of journalists started to rise as well.
If this sounds familiar, that’s because it should: “What [Russian president] Putin did since he came to power, was establish control over influential media outlets that had the capacity to form public opinion, firstly, TV,” notes Gulnoza Said, Europe and Central Asia research associate at the Committee to Protect Journalists.
“All federal channels are very tightly controlled by the state now, with the instructions sent to the heads of TV companies on how to report on certain situations. It’s very clear that anybody who appears on your screen on a federal channel in Russia knows how they can and cannot speak about important and critical issues like Ukraine and Syria,” she says noting the two hot-button issues around Russia’s ongoing military involvement abroad.
According to the latest numbers released by the Media and Law Studies Association, a Turkish non-profit that offers legal protection to the rising number of journalists who find themselves in the crosshairs of the government, with 173 journalists in jail, Turkey currently holds the dubious title of the regional leader.
With 10 journalists currently in jail, according to a CPJ report, Azerbaijan is a distant second in the region, and number one among the former Soviet nations. Russia has five, according to the same report.
In addition to the state-owned AzTV and Ictimai (Public) TV that was created in 2005 as part of the country’s commitments before the Council of Europe, there are four nationwide broadcasters in Azerbaijan: Atv, Xazar, Space and Lider.
Azerbaijani media rights lawyer Alasgar Mammadli says that all these channels fail to inject diversity into the discourse in his country because no outlet presents a balanced viewpoint.
“The media only cover the government’s point of view. Considering the realities of Azerbaijan where the majority of information is obtained through TV and radio, we not only don’t have access to objective information, there’s no room for pluralistic news, we only have one expression, one colour.” He calls it “propaganda coming from the government that is disseminated to a large swath of the public,” noting that the internet is the only place offering some semblance of pluralism.
“In the entire region, I’d probably not name a single country where we’ve seen a positive trend, with the slight exception of, surprisingly, Uzbekistan,” says CPJ’s Said, noting that with the new administration of president Shavkat Mirziyoyev there has been a process of liberalisation, and for the first time in more than two decades, there are no journalists in jail.
Said notes that another negative trend is very visible in Ukraine since Russia annexed its region of Crimea in 2014. “At the time, after the Euromaidan [the wave of civil unrest that resulted in the government change], the Ukrainian media space had been relatively free for some time, but right now what we see is that the authorities are trying to control the flow of information, and the attempts are very visible and quite strong.”
Said explains that Ukrainian journalists are facing obstacles practically every day, stressing that she is not talking about Russian journalists trying cover the news from Ukraine. “The [Ukrainian] Ministry of Defense is making it extremely difficult for local journalists to get the so-called ‘military accreditation’ that would allow them to go to the eastern part of the country and cover combat operations,” says Said, adding that one of the newly imposed requirements is that the journalists applying for accreditation must provide previously written stories about the conflict.
“I would say it is censorship, because the government is trying to control the way the journalists cover the conflict,” she points out.
Galina Petrenko, director of Detector Media, a Ukrainian media watchdog organisation, disagrees: “There is pluralism [in Ukraine]. The economic interests doubtless manipulate the discourse, as the largest media belong not to the government, but to oligarchs, formidable businessmen conjoined with the power. That’s why business interests of each of these owners are reflected in the content of the media they own.”
Ukraine’s TV and radio council puts the number of the national TV broadcasters at 30, in addition to 72 regional channels. The country counts 120 satellite TV channels.
Maria Tomak of the Kyiv-based Media Initiative for Human Rights in Kyiv says that oligarchic ownership of the media has implications for pluralism. “We do have the freedom of speech, in comparison with Russia and other nations, but we do have limitations that are sometimes very tricky and are related to the economic factors, since we don’t have all that many independent media.”
She says that there is more than one “clan” or “group of influence” engaged in a struggle for power and influence. This conflict more or less preserves a tenuous pluralism. “When they start ‘oligarchic wars’, TVs show documentary footage or run news stories that clearly indicate who calls the shots at a particular channel. They mudsling or broadcast expose-style programmes, but it’s hard to call them objective, and it is hard to call it pluralism in its ideal sense.”
Bad examples are contagious
“The countries of the region quite often and quite speedily learn from each other’s negative experience,” says Mammadli. “For instance, Azerbaijan started officially blocking sites in February of 2017 through amendments to legislation. Before that, it was prevalent in Turkey and Russia.” He adds that the majority of the blocked sites are related to the alternative news sources. Mammadli puts the number of the internet sites and resources blocked in Russia at more than 136,000.
“We live in a region neighbouring Russia and Turkey and share ties with them, which speeds up the migration of these experiences into our country. Thus, the negative changes or attitudes towards human rights or the tendencies to limit freedom and rule of law in these countries can come to our country very fast,” he says. “It turns into a competition with the following logic, ‘the neighbor did it and got away with it, so let me try and see what happens’.’’
CPJ’s Said notes that these traditionally autocratic regimes keep one eye on the USA, which has been regarded as the flagman of press freedom and liberal democracy for decades. “Everybody used to look up at the USA, but since Trump was elected president, you know his routine, he wakes up in the middle of the night and starts tweeting, attacking journalists and critical media, calling everything they produce ‘fake news’.”
In her view, this definitely affects global press freedom, as dictators and elected officials with autocratic tendencies step up their pressure on critical media outlets in their own countries.
Arsan says of the effects of this phenomenon in Turkey: “If the dictator says the news is wrong or fake, even if you bring the most truthful news to them, be it on the issue of the human rights, war, the economy, the people will tend to disbelieve you. This makes the job of a journalist that much harder, because we chase the truth, and we see the tendency to disbelieve or outright denial on behalf of the audience.”
“Vulnerable stability” as the dangerous consequence
The shrinking plurality in the media throughout the entire region leads to a somewhat distorted processes of decision making during elections, says Said.
“The lack of plurality, which is a lack of democratic process or access to such, does, in general, make any society more vulnerable. If we look at the situation inside any country, also, when you look at dictators like Putin, you may get an impression that their power is very stable and strong. But that’s a very vulnerable stability,” she adds, explaining it with the fact that it is, ultimately, one person making decisions for the entire country of millions of people.
“If you look at what Erdogan has been doing for the last 10 years or so, he has been pursuing the policy of turning Turkey into a regional leader and suppressing any alternative voice. Same with Putin and his foreign policy in Ukraine with the annexation of Crimea, or Syria. In a way, it is back to the USSR, where people could discuss things only among their family or close friends in their kitchens.”
In the opinion of Arsan, as media plurality shrinks, societies become increasingly unaware of crises, which might set them on a path to disintegration. “This is the process of criminalising political discussion,” she said. “This is common in many Eurasian countries, as well as in the Middle East. These are the dictatorships without an end. People don’t want to go to the ballot boxes anymore because they don’t think they can effect change.”
For Mammadli, the people’s inability to access true information and analyse it means that they are contending with mass propaganda. From this point of view, the societies where people don’t know the truth will base their reactions on a lie, he says.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_column_text]
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Media freedom is under threat worldwide. Journalists are threatened, jailed and even killed simply for doing their job.
Index on Censorship documents threats to media freedom in Europe through a monitoring project and campaigns against laws that stifle journalists’ work. We also publish an award-winning magazine featuring work by and about censored journalists.
Learn more about our work defending press freedom.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Index on Censorship’s project Mapping Media Freedom tracks limitations, threats and violations that affect media professionals in 43 countries as they do their job.
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8 Aug 2018 | News and features, Turkey
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”102049″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][vc_column_text]When Turkish forces attacked Kurdish villages in the southeast of the country in 2016 after the collapse of a ceasefire between Ankara and the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) in July 2015, journalist Nurcan Baysal was there to document the human rights violations. The state declared military curfews, cut off electricity and water supplies and then began bombing civilians in their homes.
“The Turkish media say only terrorists were killed in the basements of Cizre, but 54 of them were students from Turkish universities who went there just to show solidarity and tell the Kurdish people ‘we are with you’,” Baysal tells Index on Censorship. “The security forces burnt them alive — they didn’t want them to return.”
Among the dead were Kurdish fighters, but also journalists and civilians, including children. “With the shooting and bombing, it became too dangerous for people to go outside. Some old people died because they didn’t have enough food.”
Baysal, a Kurdish human rights activist and journalist from the Kurdish-majority province of Diyarbakir, says it was too dangerous even to retrieve those killed from the streets. The children of one dead woman tried in vain to keep dogs from her body by throwing rocks.
“People say things in Turkey are bad, and they are right, but they think it’s the same situation all over the country,” Baysal says. “In the southeast, we aren’t just talking about journalists being locked up. Right now in one area, there are 50 dead bodies still on the ground; they are being eaten by animals.”
Baysal’s political awakening came in July 1991 when the tortured body of her neighbour, Vedat Aydin, a prominent human right activist and politician, was found under a bridge after he was been taken into police custody. She then began her career working for the UN Development Programme where she focused on poverty and strengthening women’s organisations in Diyarbakir. During this time she established a number of NGOs focusing on the forced migration of the Kurdish people. Her experience saw her take up an advisory role in the Northern Irish peace process in the late 1990s.
Baysal was back in Ireland in May 2018 to collect an award from the Irish human rights organisation Front Line Defenders, who named her its Global Laureate for Human Rights Defenders at Risk for 2018.
(Photo: Jason Clarke for Front Line Defenders)
“There was a lot of coverage in the Irish papers, which is good because you don’t tend to read much coverage of Kurdish issues elsewhere,” she says. “The international community does not pay attention to the violence against the Kurdish people. The international community is indifferent.”
In March 2013 a new peace process began, but by May 2013 Baysal began to see an increase in village guards, paramilitaries hired by the Turkish government to oversee the inhabitants, in half of the areas she works in. “In those villages we were trying to implement a development programme, but I could see something was wrong and I knew what that meant for peace.”
For her work covering what she says aren’t just ordinary human rights violations, but war crimes in Turkey’s southeast, Baysal has endured threats, intimidation, travel bans and worse. Legal cases have been taken against her, two of which have gone to court. “One of these was for reporting on what I witnessed in Cizre, such as the used condoms left by Turkish soldiers which show the horrible things they did there,” she says. “There were other journalists there but they decided not to write about it, and the Turkish media has closed their eyes, so I knew what I had to.”
Her work was on this issue was censored. “In Turkey there is usually a process if you want to censor something, but in this case there was no process, they just did it,” she says.
The court case lasted two years, at the end of which she was given a ten-month prison sentence — one she wouldn’t serve as long as she didn’t re-offend — for “humiliating Turkish security services” with her article and accompanying photographs. She told the judge that she has even worse photographs that she didn’t publish out of respect for the victims.
When Turkey began its military incursion, code-named Operation Olive Branch, into Afrin, Syria, which was under the control of Kurdish YPG forces, in January 2018, Baysal criticised the Turkish government and called for peace in a series of five tweets. Then, on Sunday 21 January 2018, while she was watching a film with her children at her Diyarbakir home, she heard a noise that she couldn’t understand at first. “It took me a moment to realise the noise was coming from my door,” she says. “They tried to break it down, but it was so strong that the wall around it crumbled and in came a 20-man special operations team with masks and Kalashnikovs. I don’t know what they were planning to find in my home, but when they did this they were sending a message and a lot of other people got scared.”
Baysal spent three nights in prison before being bailed following a series of protests, not just locally, but internationally. Three hundred supporters gathered outside the detention centre, she received the support of Kurdish MPs and her case was raised in the European Parliament.
Baysal now awaits trial on charges of “inciting hatred and enmity among the population”. If convicted, she faces up to three years in jail.
A lot of Turkish newspapers now refer to Baysal as a terrorist, she explains. “The word ‘terrorist’ is used so much that right now half the country are terrorists. Academics for Peace? Terrorists. Students? Terrorists. Doctors? Terrorists. Those who use the word ‘peace’? Terrorists.”
“Kurdish society is a colonised society. Two Kurdish wedding singers were put in prison because they were singing Kurdish songs. A student has been imprisoned for whistling in Kurdish. I really don’t know what it means to whistle in Kurdish,” she laughs.
Baysal explains how in many Kurdish areas, Kurdish mayors have been imprisoned, only to be replaced by government-appointed administrators. In one part of Diyarbakir, Kurds had planted flowers in yellow, red and green, the colours of the Kurdish flag. “One day we woke up and they had taken the heads off all the flowers. Why? The administrators said ‘these are the colours of the PKK’.”
In the November 2015 general election in Turkey, the leftist pro-Kurdish HDP surpassed the 10% threshold necessary to win seats in the new parliament. The effect on the peace process was immediate. The Turkish government saw the process as benefitting only the Kurdish parties, not themselves, Baysal says. “If you ask them now, they will say there is peace, and they are only fighting the PKK, but in their eyes you are PKK if you speak in Kurdish.”
Over the last three years, all Kurdish street signs have been replaced with Turkish ones. “They say ‘those Kurdish signs are PKK’,” Baysal explains. And what about Kurdish media? “Well, we don’t have Kurdish media anymore either, they’ve all been closed.”
Various neighbourhoods in the Sur district of Diyarbakır have been demolished as part of an “urban regeneration programme”
Turkey’s Kurds have known war for a long time, but this time it is different. Rather than fighting in the mountains, war has now been brought into the cities. Since 2015, Turkish forces have demolished entire Kurdish towns and cities. “This is what happened in Sur, which today it is a flattened area,” Baysal says. “Sur is a city that’s 7,000 years old. It’s part of the history of humanity, not just the history of Kurdish people. The story of Armenians, Assyrians — and it’s been ruined.”
Tens of thousands of Kurds have been made homeless by this destruction, with many making their way to other Kurdish towns and cities, while others have set up camp in tents along roads.
In the 1990s, Kurdish people felt that even though they were at war there was always hope, Baysal explains. “With the peace process there was always the belief that things would get better, but today we don’t have hope — no hope at all in the Turkish state.”
“Having seen what has happened in the last three years and how cruel this state can be, I really don’t know what will happen in the future. Everything is unclear. We don’t know tomorrow or even tomorrow morning. This is how we live now.”[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_column_text]
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Turkey Uncensored is an Index on Censorship project to tell the stories of censored Turkish writers, artists, translators and human rights defenders.
Learn more about Turkey Uncensored.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Media freedom violations in Turkey reported to and verified by Mapping Media Freedom since May 2014
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6 Aug 2018 | Global Journalist, Mapping Media Freedom, Media Freedom, media freedom featured, News and features, Turkey, Turkey Uncensored
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Yavuz Baydar (YouTube)
It’s 2016. Turkey is in a state of emergency after the failed coup against the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Journalists like Yavuz Baydar found themselves more at risk than ever before. He had a decision to make: leave Turkey while he still could, or stay and potentially become part of the more than 160,000 journalists, protesters, dissidents and political pundits have since been jailed.
Baydar is an accomplished journalist with a career that spans four decades. In addition to his journalism roles, he was a co-founder of the non-profit P24, Platform for Independent Journalism which acts as an example of editorial independence in the Turkish press. He is the recipient of the 2014 Special Award of the European Press Prize (EPP) for excellence in journalism and in the same year completed an extensive research paper on self-censorship, corruption of ownership in Turkish media, state oppression and threats over journalism in Turkey during his Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School of Government. In 2017 he was awarded the Morris B Abram Human Rights Award by UN Watch. He has worked with Süddeutsche Zeitung, the Guardian, Huffington Post, Al Jazeera, The New York Times, and Index on Censorship, even his regular opinion columns for the Turkish dailies Today’s Zaman, Bugün and Özgür Düşünce. In early February 2018, Baydar was awarded the prestigious ‘Journalistenpreis’ by the Munich-based SüdostEuropa Gesellschaft.
He decided to leave Turkey for France.
Two years later on 25 June 2018, Erdoğan was re-elected president with 53% of the ballot to his closest rival Muharrem Ince’s 31%. Under Turkey’s new constitution, Erdoğan has been given autocratic powers that enable him to appoint ministers and vice-presidents, call for a state of emergency and intervene directly in the rule of law.
He keeps in touch with the status of press freedom in Turkey in his ‘Gazette’ which acts as a hosting site for curated links to the news articles of the day. In his latest endeavor, Baydar is in managing editor at Ahval. He took some time to answer some questions from Index on Censorship’s Nicole Ntim-Addae.
Index: What makes you such an ardent supporter of media freedom?
Baydar: My education. I had the great chance of being enrolled at the prestigious School of Journalism at Stockholm University. It was a wonderfully open and generous environment. There, as our dean used to say, ‘we learned the basics of the social role of the profession’. We learned how much bravery it demands. It taught us to be free of any dogma, and act fearlessly against the holders of power. I owe a lot to the school, but also to Swedish Radio and TV Corporation. Then, also the BBC World Service was important for the formation.
Index: Where were you when you made the decision to leave? What was the trigger?
Baydar: I was at home. It was a very intense night. And in the morning, after a short sleep, I assessed the situation and concluded that no matter with the outcome of the putsch, we the journalists would be declared the scapegoats and forced to pay the price. In any case, already then, Turkey had turned into hell for journalism.
Index: How is France different than Turkey? Do you feel settled there?
Baydar: Excellent environment, has always been for its commitment to freedom. It was perhaps there for the so called Young Turks, who were at the opposition to Sultan 120 years ago, had settled there. As I am now.
Index: What does you hope for Ahval to accomplish?
Baydar: Good, honest journalism. Strong coverage for facts, especially economy. That it accurately, fairly informs Turkish readers, who are stripped of independent sources. Also the international audience gets a comprehensive picture of the reality in the country. Our backbone is the critical minds. We are not an opposition outlet; we are critical. It is the essence of journalism.
Index: How difficult has it been to be away from home?
Baydar: For me, not much. I lived abroad long enough, so I am accustomed to it. For some of the staff, it may be difficult, because many of them experience the exile for the first time.
Index: Considering that Erdoğan won the election, and was awarded additional powers by and was awarded additional powers by the referendum, safe to return home soon?
Baydar: No. It is an unfree environment. Has no space for independent criticism. And the rule of law has been suspended over there. We will have to wait some time, before conditions change.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_column_text]
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Media freedom is under threat worldwide. Journalists are threatened, jailed and even killed simply for doing their job.
Index on Censorship documents threats to media freedom in Europe through a monitoring project and campaigns against laws that stifle journalists’ work. We also publish an award-winning magazine featuring work by and about censored journalists.
Learn more about our work to protect press freedom.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row full_width=”stretch_row_content”][vc_column][three_column_post title=”Global Journalist / Project Exile” full_width_heading=”true” category_id=”22142″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
