06 Feb 17 | Mapping Media Freedom, News and features
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Each week, Index on Censorship’s Mapping Media Freedom project verifies threats, violations and limitations faced by the media throughout the European Union and neighbouring countries. Here are recent reports that give us cause for concern.
Three journalists working for Quotidien, a daily current affairs show, were violently ejected from of a conference at Palais des Congrès on 1 February after attempting to ask a question to leader of the National Front party Marine Le Pen, newspaper Libération reported.
Journalist Paul Larrouturou, who had an accreditation allowing him to be present during the Salon des Entrepreneurs, attempted to ask Le Pen about claims she had misused European parliament funds to pay her body guards.
Larrouturou asked Le Pen: “Was your bodyguard really your parliamentary assistant or…”.
The journalist was grabbed from behind before finishing the question. He and two of his colleagues were then prevented from coming back inside by security.
The National Front told French newspaper Le Parisien that it did not take responsibility for the actions of the security guards, saying: “It’s not us. There were no instructions [from us]. We don’t run the Palais.”
However, the journalists said it was a member of Le Pen security who gave the order to expel them.
This is not the first incident where the three journalists encountered problems with the Front National. They were assaulted by Front National supporters during the 1 May 2015 party march.
Turkish journalist Arzu Demir was sentenced to six years in prison on charges of spreading propaganda for a terrorist organisation through two books she has authored, independent news website T24 reported.
The İstanbul 13th High Criminal Court handed down a three year sentence for each book in a trial session held on 26 January.
Demir was being tried on charges of “spreading propaganda for a terrorist organisation,” “praising a crime and a criminal” and “inciting the public to commit a crime” in her books Dağın Kadın Hali, meaning The Female State of the Mountain and Devrimin Rojava Hali, meaning The Rojava State of Revolution.
Dağın Kadın Hali features interviews with 11 women who are Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) fighters, which is considered a terrorist organisation by the Turkish government. A Turkish court had banned the book and ordered it to be pulled from bookstore shelves on 15 March 2016.
The Rojava State of Revolution, banned in April 2016, investigates the current attempts to rebuild in the Syrian Kurdish city of Rojava.
In an interview with independent news website Bianet, Arzu Demir said: “I have always said, since the start of these trials, that the case is a political trial based on the current conditions. This ruling is proof of that. All I did, as I said in my statement, was journalism.”
“I am glad that I’ve written [these books] and I am continuing to write,” she added.
The court did not introduce any possible reductions to the journalist’s sentence on the grounds that she had shown “no regret” for the alleged crime.
The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) raided the flat of former editor-in-chief of Vesti.Reporter magazine, Inna Zolotukhina, in Kharkiv around 7.30 AM on 27 January, Detector Media reported.
“I opened the door and a crowd of men entered the apartment. There were seven people, three of them from Kyiv’s Security Service of Ukraine, two from Kharkiv’s Security Service of Ukraine and two witnesses”, Zolotukhina told Detector Media.
At the same time, another search was conducted at the journalist’s mother’s house in Brovary near Kyiv.
Later Zolotukhina wrote on her Facebook page that she had been interrogated by the SBU as a witness on 30 January. According to the journalist, the questioning lasted from 10.00 to 18.30.
“I have signed a non-disclosure agreement, so now I can’t say anything”, the journalist wrote.
The search and interrogation were linked to a criminal case on separatism brought against unidentified persons at Media Invest Group holding which publishes Vesti Newspaper and Vesti.Reporter Magazine. Many journalists and employees of the holding have been interrogated in connection to the case.
On 25 January a court in Baku sentenced journalist Fuad Gahramanli to 10 years in prison, Institute for Reporters’ Freedom and Safety reported.
The case is related to the armed incident between religious group, Muslim Union Movement, and police officers in the village of Nardaran where six people died, including two police officers.
Fuad Gahramanli is not a member of the religious group but was accused of promoting them on Facebook, where he urged people not to abandon the MUM’s leader and to continue protesting, IRFS reported.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Click on the bubbles to view reports or double-click to zoom in on specific regions. The full site can be accessed at https://mappingmediafreedom.org/
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
30 Jan 17 | News and features, Turkey, Turkey Uncensored
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Turkey Uncensored is an Index on Censorship project to publish a series of articles from censored Turkish writers, artists and translators.
[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]
Turkey’s state of emergency, announced after July’s coup attempt, was extended for three months in January. While new executive orders continue to increase the repression of opposition journalists, academics, trade unionists, performers and institutions, parliament is discussing changes to the constitution that have been described as a “regime change”. As in the past, the state of emergency has hit Kurdish-populated regions hardest.
The Amed Film Festival was held jointly by the Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality Culture and Art Directorate and the Middle East Cinema Academy Association (OSAD) in 2012. The objective of the festival was to introduce viewers to films created in the Middle East in all languages of the peoples of the region, with a special emphasis on Kurdish filmmakers, and to contribute to film production. The festival also aimed to “provide the groundwork for filmmakers to be able to express themselves on a free platform”. The second festival, planned for November 2016 under the slogan “Unlimited Cinema”, could not be mounted due to the appointment of a trustee to run the Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality and the arrest of its co-mayors, who were members of the pro-Kurdish HDP. Or rather, the festival committee asserted that trustee mayoralties were illegitimate due to “intervention in the people’s will” and decided not to work with the trustee.
In any case, it was unlikely that the trustee mayoralty would have allowed the festival to use any of the venues under its administration. Festival organisers made a call for solidarity to local and international festivals, asking them to show their films between 22-25 December, as “the duty of art and artists under these conditions is not to shrink away, but to raise their voices to explain the reality of the times”.
The festival’s films were shown in Diyarbakır, Istanbul, Van, Batman, Cyprus and Italy. They were put on in trade associations, trade unions and other associations in Diyarbakır (Pir Sultan Abdul Cultural Association and Cemevi, TMMOB, and Eğitim Sen), at the Batman Culture and Art Association in Batman, at the Cyprus Üretim Sokağı Cultural Centre in Cyprus, and at the Mezopotamya Cinema and contemporary arts centre Depo in Istanbul. The Italian leg was organised by Gianluca Peciola from the Left Ecology Freedom Party.
Peciola had been behind the successful initiative to twin Rome’s mayoralty with Kobane in 2015, and he expressed his solidarity with the festival: “There is heavy repression in Turkey, especially in the cultural and artistic fields. We are in solidarity with Kurdish artists and the Kurdish people, whose cultural values and cultural works are being repressed in Kurdistan. We want to demonstrate this solidarity through this work.”
The festival had planned to screen 90 films but it was only able to show 45. However, the call for solidarity and the responses to that call created a positive atmosphere. In Diyarbakır alone, 2,000 people watched the films.
Director Zeynel Doğan, who sits on the festival committee, said that the festival had been stronger before, having been weakened when it lost its support. Despite this Doğan said its “energy had increased”.
Amed Theatre Festival, which had been organised by Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality City Theatre shortly before the film festival, experienced similar issues.
After the trustee was appointed to the mayoralty, the Amed Theatre Festival was cancelled. Subsequently, 10 theatre groups from Turkey and Europe that were going to be part of the festival performed on their own stages between 21 November and 5 December in support of the festival, under the slogan “We are the reality, you are playing with reality”.
MKM Teatra Jiyana Nû, a troupe who perform in Kurdish, explained its solidarity with the festival: “The issue here isn’t merely that a festival is not taking place, the issue is that the breath that society is able to take thanks to art is being allowed to be stifled. We do not want that breath to be stifled, and even if the Amed Festival cannot physically take place in Amed [Diyarbakır], we say ‘Amed Theatre Festival is everywhere’ in the belief that one day it will definitely once again be held there.”
It is worth also noting that no large festival in Istanbul has responded to the Amed Festival’s call for solidarity: from the perspective of the Istanbul festivals, it is becoming much more difficult for regional festivals to stand in solidarity with one another.
“Cutting off the breath of society” is a good description of the repression being carried out in the Kurdish region. Fifty-two of the 106 pro-Kurdish mayoralties have had trustees appointed to them, and 76 co-mayors are under arrest on the grounds of “supporting terror organisations”. The state of emergency Executive Order Regarding the Taking of Certain Precautions shut down dozens of associations in the region. The cultural and artistic divisions of municipalities in the region are being rendered non-functional.
All the actors in the Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality City Theatre, which creates and puts on plays in Kurdish, have been fired. From the time pro-Kurdish parties began to take over municipalities in 1999, there was a big revival in cultural and artistic life in Turkey’s Kurdish provinces. New venues opened, regular audiences began to attend events and workshops held by these venues integrated the young people of the region into the artistic environment. Even during the peace process, these institutions were under surveillance, but despite these conditions, they made an important contribution to the protection and development of Kurdish language and culture, its use as a language of artistic production and its institutionalisation.
The dismantlement of artistic groups working at venues such as theatres under municipality control, the Cegerxwin Cultural Centre and the Amed Art Gallery is a sign that from now on these spaces are only to be used in ways that suit the political and cultural agenda of the new municipal administration.
In a funny sense, the way in which the Amed film and theatre festivals were left without support or venues after refusing to work with the trustee has led actors in Diyarbakır’s cultural and artistic world to critically evaluate their own practices. Artistic institutions that had been able to create and prosper for years thanks to the opportunities provided by municipal administrations saw this as an opportunity for cooperation with local organisations and to form an independent model of production and circulation. This also opened the way for certain ideas which had been considered before, such as travelling festivals, to be put into practice. According to filmmaker and OSAD board member İlham Bakır, another example of a future intention now being put into practice thanks to the de facto predicament of the festival was an independent structure to show films over a wider geographical area in cooperation with other institutions.
Filmmakers from the region, as part of the work aiming to restructure the Kurdish movement along egalitarian and democratic lines in political and social life, have long considered the questions of how a democratic cinematic production and distribution model can be put into place and whether a cinematic fund could be established independently of the government. Indeed, they have even invited a group of filmmakers from Istanbul to discuss the idea of a cinematic commune.
Both festivals are preparing to open their own venues in order to continue working independently.
Meanwhile, as artistic groups are no longer be able to benefit from the political advantages the Kurdish movement provided in the region, the idea of a commune has gaining traction.[/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:1485772040601-4013dd52-0984-10″ taxonomies=”8607″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
27 Jan 17 | News and features, Turkey, Turkey Uncensored
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Turkey Uncensored is an Index on Censorship project to publish a series of articles from censored Turkish writers, artists and translators.
[/vc_column_text][vc_video link=”https://youtu.be/LzWBgzJrQdo”][vc_column_text]As tens of thousands of women took to the streets around the world on 21 January, another woman, the Turkish MP Şafak Pavey was being treated in hospital for injuries sustained during a physical assault on the floor of the Grand National Assembly during debates on constitutional amendments.
Pavey had just delivered a moving speech in which she warned that the presidential system being considered would bring about unchallenged one-man rule. The “bandits”, as she called them, a group of women MPs belonging to the ruling AKP, attacked her and two other MPs, Aylin Nazlıaka, an independent, and Pervin Buldan from the Kurdish HDP. The AKP MPs were said to be acting under a male colleague’s orders.
The attack contrasted sharply with the pictures of enthusiastic women from around the United States and the world committed to sisterhood and equality. The distance between the two extremes might seem to be yawning but isn’t. In Turkey, the gap opened up in just four short years.
The empowered mood created by women marching for equal rights and uniting their voices in opposition reminded me of the heady days of 2013 when the anti-government Gezi Park protests rocked Turkey. Like the demonstrators in DC and London, people all over Turkey took to the streets to raise a chant against our own Trump: President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In Gezi, the seeds of dissent spread through social media and bloomed across the country just as the women’s march did across the globe. It was just the beginning, or so we thought.
After a brutal suppression that left at least 10 dead and over 8,000 injured, the Gezi spirit, that united voice, faded away. The most significant political heritage was the “Vote and Beyond” organisation, which launched an incredibly effective election monitoring network during the June 2015 elections. Thanks to that group and the popular young Kurdish leader Selahattin Demirtaş’s energy, the outcome of the polls reflected the full and complete picture of Turkey’s population in parliament. The combined opposition parties were the majority in the assembly and to continue governing, the AKP would be forced to form a coalition. Then things happened.[/vc_column_text][vc_single_image image=”85130″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][vc_column_text]As the ceasefire with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) collapsed and armed conflict resumed, coalition negotiations ground into political deadlock as the summer wore on. Erdogan called a snap election for that November that lined up with his political ambitions. Less than a month before the election, a staggering terror attack rocked Ankara and ongoing deaths of security personnel in the country’s south-east added to a grim mood. At the polls, the AKP regained its majority in parliament. Though the governing party was nominally back in full control, it lacked political legitimacy and popular support, both of which would be delivered by the rogue military units that staged the failed July 15 coup and paved the way for Erdogan’s emergency rule.
Witch hunts are a strange thing. Even if you spot one when it’s getting underway, it’s always too late to stop it.
After the election, the political opposition was locked out of enacting change through parliament. It was further paralysed by Erdogan’s “shock and awe” tactics, which saw the leaders of the parties assaulted on the floor of the assembly or imprisoned on fabricated terror charges. Opposition voters are too depressed now to remember the confident and exhilarating days of the Gezi protests.
It would be a mistake to dismiss Turkey’s experience as a unique case. There are parallels with the unfolding situations in Russia, Poland, Hungary and now the USA. The bullies of our interesting times are singing from the same hymn sheet, using identical language and narratives — power to the right people, experts and intellectuals are overrated, overturn the establishment. The forces of resistance must now share strategies as well. Opposition to the growing threat of illiberal democracy needs to network and be vocal or else our initial responses to the horrors and human rights violations — including the purge of Turkey’s press under emergency rule — would be a waste of time.
Here’s a small taste of where we failed in Turkey — a warning to Europeans and Americans of what not to do.
“No” is an intoxicating word that gives emotional fuel to the masses. After swimming in the slack waters of identity politics or concerning yourself with whether or not your avocados are fair trade, taking to the streets en masse for a proper cause is like a fresh breeze. But as we learned in Turkey, “No” can also be a dead end. It exists in a dangerous dependency on the what those in power are up to. It shouldn’t be mistaken for action as it is only a reaction.
“No” is unable to create a new political choice. It is an anger game that sooner or later will exhaust all opposition by splitting itself into innumerable causes intent on becoming an individual obstacle to the ruling power.
Make no mistake: the bullies of the world are united in a truly global movement. It is sweeping all before it. And it’s not just Putin, Trump, Erdogan or even Orban, it’s their minions, millions of fabricated apparatchiks that invade the political, social and digital spheres like multiplying gremlins.
What the opposition must do — what Turkey’s protesters failed to do — is strengthen the infrastructure, harden networks and open strong lines of communication between disparate groups whether at home or abroad. All those lefty student movements, marginalised progressive newspapers or resisting communities that are labelled as naïve or passé until now must coalesce around core campaigns and goals.
Failure to move beyond “No”, in Turkey’s case, has made alternative and potential political movements all but invisible. There are just three leftist newspapers in Turkey, three ghosts to break news about women MPs being beaten up. And that’s because we can’t move past “No” when others were shut down or silenced.[/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:1485771885900-d32a2643-5934-8″ taxonomies=”8607″][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][/vc_column][/vc_row]
24 Jan 17 | News and features, Turkey, Turkey Uncensored
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Turkey Uncensored is an Index on Censorship project to publish a series of articles from censored Turkish writers, artists and translators.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]A journalist with hope is a common contradiction in these strange days. When I set forth to share my thoughts on what the new year may offer us, I was overwhelmed by the thickening siege on our profession worldwide.
Having recently witnessed President Tayyip Erdoğan praising Donald Trump for putting a CNN reporter in his place, what keeps swirling in my mind is the age-old Turkish saying that goes, in a rough translation: “Snow falls over the mountains that you trust.” It means disappointment is piling up and there is nowhere you can turn to.
That’s the taste Trump, elected as the leader of the “free world”, leaves when he redefines the professional standards we have grown up with, taken for granted and sought to establish in less free environments.
That leaves journalists, particularly those in Turkey, deeply stunned and more helpless than ever. Wishing for better times is a fragile exercise, a distant daydream, a hopeless task. What makes one think in those terms is the sheer horror of what we have been subjected to may only be a harbinger of what comes next, in a higher level of oppression.
The year we left behind marks an ordeal most of us would prefer to forget. Yet it is impossible. In every possible aspect, 2016 was annus horribilis for what we in the bold and independent flanks of Turkish journalism stand for. The year will go down in history as a midwife of a series of lethal blows to people’s right to have access to truth and diverse opinion.
It became a period of severe punishment with the constitution suspended and the rights of the Fourth Estate eviscerated. The introduction of the state of emergency, which was enthusiastically championed by Erdoğan, only accelerated the strangulation of the free word.
In the final days of 2016 journalism was in ruin: 146 journalists in jail (it now stands at 152), placing Turkey in the special position of having around 60% of the global total of journalists behind bars. More than 9,000 journalists have lost their jobs, or around 45% of the active journalists at home. Erdoğan’s regime also ended the year by shuttering more than 190 media outlets – a blend of all political leanings and various identities – leaving only one (out of 245) TV channels, the tiny Halk TV, as the lone critical voice. The remaining independent newspapers on the political left struggle with financial and circulation problems. Their alternative narrative is barely heard. A number of journalists – including myself – had to leave the country, chased into exile by the forces of the counter-coup that launched an immense purge and nearly 1,000 had their press cards cancelled. And more foreign colleagues experienced harassment at the hands of officials – as the arrest of Dion Nissenbaum of the Wall Street Journal showed – and deportations.
We entered the new year with a yet another announcement that the authorities had launched a massive legal inquiry and arrested over 62,000 people for “clandestine activity” on social media — such as critical tweeting — of which 17,000 were already indicted. This news came as Bekir Bozdağ, minister of justice, proudly declared that 25 new prisons are now being built, a 22% increase in capacity.
Journalism is a profession in agony. Frankly, none of us in this now dreaded exercise of informing the public can see any way out. The odds are that Erdoğan is only inches away from securing a fully empowered executive presidential rule, equipped with impunity and it is fair to assess that the state of emergency will continue as long as his party deems necessary. One can only pray — as a colleague told me over the phone recently — that the AKP shows mercy to release jailed journalists, who were all jailed for doing their job. Under such circumstances, it is an arduous task to report about daily events; forget about plunging into daring investigations of official corruption in the public interest.
Which leaves me with one hope for 2017: we won’t be able to give up. Turkey’s independent journalists will continue to do what they know best. But it will have to be mainly online from editorial bases outside the country. This will be a very tough battle for our integrity and a long-term one. We will have to keep our spirits intact. But we need the consistent, courageous backing of our colleagues in the West.
“The West is largely silent. And Erdoğan is triumphalist. ‘Now that the demagogue Trump is about to become the world’s most powerful man, the authoritarians believe history is on their side’,” wrote Owen Jones in The Guardian, adding:
“Turkey is a warning: democracy is precious but fragile. It underlines how rights and freedoms are often won at great cost and sacrifice but can be stripped away by regimes exploiting national crises. The danger is that Turkey won’t be an exception, but a template of how to rid countries of democracy. That is reason enough to stand by Turkey. Who knows which country could be next?”
Indeed.[/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:1485774465935-7b8b8f3b-cd52-8″ taxonomies=”8607″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
