[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”89947″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][vc_column_text]Join Index on Censorship, English PEN, Amnesty International UK, Reporters Sans Frontières, PEN International and the Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation for our vigil outside the Turkish Embassy in London, in protest over the detention of journalists and writers in Turkey. The London protest is one of several taking place at Turkish embassies around the world on 3 May, World Press Freedom Day.
Turkey is currently the world’s biggest jailer of journalists: one third of all imprisoned journalists in the world are being held in Turkish prisons, the vast majority waiting to be brought to trial. Meanwhile, more than 160 media outlets have been closed.
Let us know if you’re coming and invite your friends via the Facebook event page and please share details of the vigil on Twitter with the hashtag #FreeTurkeyMedia
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_cta h2=”TAKE ACTION” h2_font_container=”color:%23dd3333″ h2_use_theme_fonts=”yes” shape=”square” use_custom_fonts_h2=”true”]Show your support on social media
We are asking fellow journalists, writers, and supporters of freedom of expression to show their support for the many journalists and writers currently imprisoned and on trial in Turkey. Please follow @FreeTurkeyMedia on Twitter and show your support by tweeting a photo with a sign reading #FreeTurkeyMedia #GazetecilikSuçDeğildir
Write to the authorities
You can send a letter via Amnesty’s website to Minister of Justice Bekir Bozdağ calling for the release of our imprisoned colleagues.
Please also write to the Turkish authorities
Calling for all detained writers and journalists to have access to lawyers and to be released if they are not to be charged with a recognisably criminal offence and tried promptly in accordance with international fair trial standards;
Calling on the authorities not to use the state of emergency to crack down on peaceful dissent, civil society, media and education.
Süleyman Soylu Minister of Interior Affairs Ministry of Interior Affairs T.C. İçişleri Bakanlığı, Bakanlıklar / Ankara, Republic of Turkey Tel: (+90 312) 422 40 00 E-mail: [email protected]
Binali Yıldırım Prime Minister Çankaya Mah. Ziaur Rahman Cad. Çankaya / Ankara Tel: (+90 312) 403 50 00 Fax: (+90 312) 422 10 00[/vc_cta][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”89946″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][/vc_row]
With the hollowing out of the Turkish media landscape in recent years, honest coverage on the night of the historic referendum was rare. Only an hour or so after the polls closed, viewers across the nation left most of the sycophantic television networks and focused on the only one they believed was airing content worthy of their interest.
Murdoch-owned Fox TV’s openly secular and mildly nationalistic anchormen broke the news that there was something seriously wrong with the vote counting. Hour after hour, they featured the leaders of the No camp – those opposed to significantly increasing the powers of president Recep Tayyip Erdogan – and allowed them to speak critically about the results.
What these journalists did should not be considered extraordinary. They were simply doing their job by giving the referendum the fair and diverse coverage it deserved. But in Turkey, this was extraordinary: a single TV channel broke from its shackles, defied self-censorship and ended up with record-high ratings. Fox TV’s staff knew there was a growing public appetite for real news.
I personally witnessed this hunger on several occasions. Some of the news analysis posted on my personal blog, NAR, in which I dug into the emergency rule and the purge drew tens of thousands of readers from all directions. Most recently, my article about the content of a top-secret EU report on the coup at the Cologne-based Turkish-Kurdish independent news site Artigercek was read by more than 100,000 people in 48 hours.
It’s no wonder then that Fox TV was bombarded by AKP supporters who took to social media both during and after the broadcast, calling its coverage “treason”. These trolls demanded public prosecutors investigate the content. Their anxiety was, from their vantage point, justified: in a society where up to 88% of the public get news from TV sources, the Fox broadcasts would have an impact, penetrating the seemingly solid ground on which Erdogan and his supporters stand.
Yet it was only a glimmer of hope for the bulk of Turkish society, separated into two distinct camps by Erdogan’s ruthless desire for authoritarian rule. But the Fox referendum coverage at least gave optimists the ability to think that no matter how hard the oppression becomes, Turkey’s resilient journalists will do their best to resist.
The referendum race took place on “unlevel ground”, as international monitors described it, because Turkey’s media landscape has been warped. As a vital part of his strategic plan to take Turkey on the authoritarian path, Erdogan and his team, backed by the increasingly subservient judiciary, and sycophantic media proprietors, have meticulously and systematically narrowed the space for independent journalism since Gezi Park protests.
Since the summer of 2013, we have been forced to witness mass layoffs, detentions and the brutal shuttering or seizing of nearly 200 privately owned media outlets were brutally shut down or seized. The punitive measures had two key components: TV broadcasts were kept under strict scrutiny and the proprietors of the channels were either bribed with large contracts or simply threatened with closure. There was also a deliberate move to demolish the Cihan News Agency’s powerful network, which had been key to an independent monitoring of earlier elections. Both actions worked successfully for Erdogan’s autocratic architecture.
As of 16 April 2017, the only two independent TV channels remaining are Fox TV and Halk TV. The vote counting was covered only by the Anatolian Agency, which is entirely under the rigid control of the ruling AKP. It was still remarkable that Turkey’s crippled and tarnished journalism could find a breathing space and reach out to public.
One wonders what the result of the referendum would have been if proper and balanced media coverage had taken place. Most probably the No camp would have benefited. But the ugly reality is that self-censorship has become normal and internalised in Turkey, especially since the last summer’s aborted coup. Neither investigative reporting nor public debate now exists.
The overwhelming majority of journalists who have been jailed – including the recently detained Die Welt correspondent Deniz Yücel – dared to dig into the corruption schemes that include, allegedly, the president and his family. Nearly all those behind bars – excluding Kurdish journalists, who find themselves targetted for many additional reasons – are editors, columnists and pundits who have tried to keep corruption and abuses of power under the spotlight.
In the post-referendum era, the restrictive conditions will remain unchanged or get worse. Erdogan will inevitably see the media as being responsible for his narrow victory of 51.4 %. Rather than ease his iron grip on journalism, the president knows he has to win the elections in August 2019 to secure his way to one-man rule. He has an invaluable instrument with which to strangle the media, which became more obvious when, following the referendum, he extended emergency rule by another three months. Have no illusions that the state of emergency will be discontinued before the next election and expect even greater pressure in the coming months.
The signs in that direction are strong enough: four consecutive indictments in the past two months targeting various groups of critical journalists – most of them now in jail – have seen calls for aggravated lifetime imprisonment. The case of Cumhuriyet daily is a prime example: the court was remarkably slow in defining a date for proceedings and then set the date for late July. All those in jail awaiting to be trialled in this case will now spend an additional three months behind bars. Meanwhile, the arrest of the newspaper’s accountant implies that the authorities are intent on weakening it — perhaps to extinction. Similar pressure should also be expected over the already strained Doğan Media Group.
Whether or not Fox TV will also be punished for its election coverage remains to be seen, but take it for granted that no critical pocket of journalism will remain unharmed. No wonder why many independent journalists are busy these days contemplating whether or not moving their base beyond Turkey’s borders will save their noble profession.
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Turkey Uncensored is an Index on Censorship project to publish a series of articles from censored Turkish writers, artists and translators.
“Of course my family are worried. Who in this country isn’t worried?” says Ramazan Ölçen, who was detained for owning the copyrights to Azadiya Welat (Freedom of the country), what was Turkey’s only Kurdish-language daily newspaper. It was shut down by a cabinet decree issued under Turkey’s state of emergency, which has been in place since 20 July 2016.
“On 4 March 2017, at around 6am, special operations officers and counterterrorism police raided my house [in Diyarbakır], which was completely unnecessary,” he says. “I would have voluntarily gone and testified if the prosecutor’s office had sent me a notice.”
Ölçen’s wife was terrified by the “special operations officers wearing masks on their faces and sporting automatic rifles” he says. “Honestly, I too was afraid.”
The couple’s one-year-old was spared that fear as he was asleep throughout. “He didn’t wake up to all that noise,” Ölçen says.
The officers searched the house for about an hour but found no evidence of a crime. They seized Ölçen’s mobile phone and he was taken into custody. He was held for two days and released on 6 March, but his family are still deeply worried.
“Detention was a situation we did anticipate, yet we were still surprised [by the raid],” he says.“We were expecting it because they were rounding up everyone whose name appeared in the mastheads of the press organisations that were shut down under Cabinet decrees to testify.”
From teaching French to Azadiya Welat
Ölçen was born in 1981 in the Silvan district of Diyarbakır. He graduated in French from Dicle University in 2003. For three years, he taught French at various schools as a contract teacher. “In 2006 I gave up teaching and chose not to renew my contract. Of course, school principals who didn’t deem contract teachers as teachers played a role in my decision. As did local education directors, ministry bureaucrats, education ministers and the government’s overall education policies.”
In 2008 Ölçen started working as a journalist at Azadiya Welat. He assumed many roles until the newspaper’s closure, from news editor and editor of culture and arts to editor of the language and literature pages.
In 2014 the formal owner of Azadiya Welat parted ways with the newspaper. Ölçen assumed the responsibility and became the formal owner of the copyrights of Zozan Publishing, the publishing group under which Azadiya Welat was published. “As such, my name formally entered the masthead of the newspaper of Apê Musa,” Ölçen said, referring to Musa Anter, a Kurdish dissident intellectual and writer, who was assassinated in 1992, often referred to as “apê” (uncle), a word of both affection and esteem.
“This was a source of immense pride for me and until the day it was shut down with a cabinet decree I tried my best to be worthy of the tradition of Apê Musa in terms of serving the Kurdish language.”
At Azadiya Welat, the day started with the editorial morning meeting. In addition to journalism and editing, Ölçen was in charge of administrative affairs. They worked hard to meet the printing deadlines.
On 28 August 2016 the police raided the newspaper’s head office in Diyarbakır, detaining 25 of its employees. The newspaper was then only “temporarily” shut down. A new decree shuttered it permanently in October of the same year.
A troubled history
When the newspaper was closed, Ölçen started working as a freelance journalist, as did around 3,500 other former employees.
Recently, Ölçen started working as an editor for the Kurdish language newspaper Rojeva Medya, which started publishing after Azadiya Welat’s closure. Rojeva is not a direct successor, Ölçen says, most of its employees are former Azadiya Welat journalists, and the two have very similar editorial policies.
Azadiya Welat, which had been in print for 21 years, was no stranger to suppression. As a Kurdish outlet, even before the state of emergency, it was constantly harassed by authorities, its journalists routinely imprisoned and tried. It was shut down and reopened countless times. Currently, ten of its journalists and distributors are in prison, most of them serving convictions issues before the coup attempt.
Many of its journalists have been in and out of jail since that first raid in August 2016, but the price the newspaper has paid in its nearly a quarter of a century history has been much higher than that.
In 2010, Metin Alataş, an Azadiya Welat distributor, was found hanging dead from an orange tree in Adana. In 2014, Kadri Bağdu, a distributor for Azadiya Welat was murdered in an armed attack.
More recently, Azadiya Welat journalist Rohat Aktaş was killed during a curfew in the southeastern town of Cizre while he was reporting on the security forces’ operations in the area. Aktaş was allegedly killed along with many other civilianswho were hiding in a residential basement where they had taken refuge from the shelling in February 2016. But the authorities wouldn’t leave him alone after his death. On 7 March the Diyarbakır Prosecutor’s Office launched criminal proceedings against Aktaş. The prosecutor asked for up to seven years on terrorism-related charges for the slain journalist.
Not surprisingly, Kurds have had more than their fair share of difficulties since Turkey’s 15 July coup attempt. Many pro-Kurdish outlets have been shut down under Turkey’s state of emergency, which was itself extended this week for another three months. The ban on the Kurdish language seems to be making a de-facto comeback. With Turkey’s 16 Aprilreferendumexpected to turn the country even more authoritarian, the prospects for any minority outlets being able to thrive seems slim. Will things ever improve for the country’s Kurdish media?
Ölçen is not entirely optimistic. “However, I am not completely hopeless either. There have always been pressures and there always will be. But there has also always been resistance against pressure, and those will also always be.”[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]
Turkey Uncensored is an Index on Censorship project to publish a series of articles from censored Turkish writers, artists and translators.
In a country marked by increasing authoritarianism, a strident crackdown on press and social media as well as numerous human rights violations, Turkish-British technologist Alp Toker brought together a small team to investigate internet restrictions. Using Raspberry Pi technology they built an open source tool able to reliably monitor and report both internet shut downs and power blackouts in real time. Using their tool, Turkey Blocks have since broken news of 14 mass-censorship incidents during several politically significant events in 2016. The tool has proved so successful that it has been implemented elsewhere globally.
2017 Freedom of Expression Digital Activism Award-winning Turkey Blocks was presented an illustration created by cartoonist Aseem Trivedi
Internet shutdowns – the wholesale censorship of millions of voices and silencing of entire populations – pose a grave threat to the media, democracy, most of all vulnerable communities and ordinary citizens. Since the invention of the world wide web we have come to rely on the internet for personal communication, news gathering, publishing and almost every aspect of our lives. That reliance has introduced a single point of failure which is now being exploited by authorities who seek to control narrative and restrict the flow of information on an unprecedented scale.
In 2015, I was in Ankara when so-called Islamic State launched a deadly terror attack, killing over a hundred people at a rally. In the hours that followed the authorities restricted access to social media and communication networks; victims were unable to contact their loved ones or reach out for help. Journalists were unable to contact eyewitnesses or ask critical questions so essential in a healthy democracy.
Our mission was born: Since then my organisation Turkey Blocks has developed new technology that can pinpoint and validate reports of shutdowns in real time. Through 2016 we uncovered evidence of over a dozen major blackouts during national emergencies, arrests of opposition party members and a devastating attempted military coup. We provided the data that enabled media, local press and international communities to report with confidence and push back to keep the internet on. We encouraged the government to become more transparent and limit use of their telecommunications kill-switch. Today our cause crosses political lines and resounds throughout Turkey’s polarised society.
Online censorship is increasingly used to mask more severe human rights violations – not just in Turkey, but from China, Vietnam, Pakistan, India, Kashmir, to Cameroon and Bahrain and all over the world. My team’s mission now extends beyond Turkey to cover several other countries as part of our NetBlocks observatory project. With new allies like Access Now and Index’s own Mapping Media Freedom project, standing alongside the global Open Source and open technology communities we send a unified message to those who seek to silence independent voices: as long as freedom of expression and digital rights are not safeguarded, our mission will continue and we will persist.
Alp Toker and Isik Mater of Digital Activism Award-winning Turkey Blocks at the 2017 Freedom of Expression Awards (Photo: Elina Kansikas for Index on Censorship)
For his one-man protests, Ildar Dadin was sent to prison in December 2015 where he was tortured, before his conviction was quashed in February 2017. Read the full profile.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”84888″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center”][vc_column_text]
Despite the persecution he faces for his work, Rebel Pepper continues to satirise the Chinese state from a life in exile in Japan. Read the full profile
Established in 2015, Turkey Blocks is an independent digital research organisation that monitors internet access restrictions in Turkey. Read the full profile.
Maldives Independent, the Maldives’ premiere English publication and one of the few remaining independent media outlets, was formed in exile in Sri Lanka in 2004. Read the full profile.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Milyonlarca sesi toptan susturan internet kesintileri, medya ve demokrasinin etkili çalışmasını engelliyor ve en önemlisi, savunmasız toplulukların ve vatandaşların hayatını zorlaştırıyor. İcat edilmesinden bu yana, kişisel iletişim, haber alma, yayınlama gibi pek çok yönden internete bel bağlamış durumdayız. İnternetin yaşantımızda bu kadar büyük bir yer kaplaması, erişimin kısıtlanması durumunda büyük boşluk yaratıyor.
IŞİD’in Ekim 2015’te Ankara Garı yakınlarında düzenlenen miting sırasında gerçekleştirerek yüzlerce kişinin ölümüne sebep olduğu, Türkiye tarihinin en ölümcül terör saldırısı sırasında ben de Ankara’daydım. Saldırının hemen akabinde yetkililer sosyal medyaya ve iletişim ağlarına erişimi kısıtladılar; o sırada mitingde bulunanlar ailelerine ulaşıp “ben iyiyim” diyemediler, yaralı olanlar için yardım isteyemediler. Gazeteciler, her sağlıklı demokraside olması gereken bilgiye ulaşma özgürlüğünden mahrum bırakıldılar. Görgü tanıklarıyla iletişime geçip, olaylarla ilgili ayrıntıları öğrenemedikleri için konuyla ilgili haber yapmakta zorlandılar.
Görevimiz artık belliydi. O günden itibaren Turkey Blocks organizasyonu olarak, internet engellemelerini gerçek zamanlı olarak saptayabilen ve doğrulayabilen yeni bir teknoloji geliştirdik. 2016 yılı süresince, ulusal krizler, muhalefet partisi üyelerinin tutuklanması ve askeri darbe girişimi gibi olaylar sırasında ülke çapında ondan fazla kesintiye dair bulgular elde ettik. Elde ettiğimiz veriler, medya, yerel basın ve uluslararası organizasyonların internet kullanıcılarına doğru ve ayrıntılı bilgi vermelerini ve kullanıcıların internet kesintilerine karşı durabilmelerini sağladı. Hükümeti daha şeffaf olmaya ve internet kesintilerini en aza indirgemesini teşvik ettik. Girişimimiz bugün siyasi sınırları aşarak, ayrım gözetmeksizin tüm Türkiye’ye bilgi sağlıyor.
Dijital sansür, sadece Türkiye’de değil. Çin, Vietnam, Pakistan, Hindistan, Keşmir, Kamerun ve Bahreyn gibi dünyanın birçok ülkesinde meydana gelen ve gittikçe ciddileşen insan hakları ihlallerini gizlemek için giderek daha çok kullanılmakta. Ekibimizin yeni misyonu, NetBlocks gözlemleme projesi dahilinde, Türkiye dışındaki diğer ülkelere de ulaşmak. Access Now ve Index on Censorship’in Mapping Media Freedom Projesi gibi müttefiklerle birlikte küresel Açık Kaynak, Özgür Yazılım ve açık teknoloji topluluklarının yanında yer alarak, bağımsız sesleri susturmak isteyenlere ortak mesajımızı gönderiyoruz: Misyonumuz, ifade özgürlüğü ve dijital haklarımız korunmadığı sürece var olacak ve yolumuza devam edeceğiz.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”12″ style=”load-more” items_per_page=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1492791622630-bd3f02e6-28e4-6″ taxonomies=”8935″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
