As the Arab world smolders, the world has pointed to nearby Turkey — secular, democratic, stable, prosperous — as a beacon by which an embattled region might readjust its confused geopolitical compass. So it is no small irony that, booming economy aside, Turkey is looking less like a futuristic role model and, increasingly, like a country that is more enamored of the authoritarianism that others are so passionately trying to shrug off.

Two of my friends were among the seven journalists who were arrested in an early-morning police roundup in Istanbul and Ankara this past week. Nedim Sener and Ahmet Sik are well-respected investigative reporters who have worked for leading publications in Turkey, and who have received international acclaim for their work documenting human-rights abuses. They were originally charged with “belonging to a terrorist organization and inciting the public to hatred,” according to their lawyers, though the incitement charge was later dropped. Both men deny the allegations against them. Both are still under detention.(See pictures of coexisting cultures on the streets of Istanbul.)

They were arrested as part of a long-running investigation into a shadowy network of military and ex-security men who allegedly planned to topple the Islamic-rooted government in the early 2000s. The investigation began in 2007 and was widely hailed at the time as a bold step forward for Turkish democracy, which has long wrestled with the specter of military involvement in politics. It was the first time former generals were called to task for their behavior, and it set a new standard for the supremacy of civilian rule. Ironically, Sik was part of the journalistic team that first published the diaries of a former navy general, which led to the investigation in the first place.

Yet nearly four years on, there have been no convictions, and the investigation appears to have turned into a campaign to silence critical media and the opposition. “In the absence of evidence that the police have credible reason to think Ahmet Sik and Nedim Sener are responsible for wrongdoing, their arrests are a disturbing development,” says Emma Sinclair-Webb, Turkey researcher at Human Rights Watch. “It raises concerns that what is now under investigation is critical reporting rather than coup plots.”

Both Sener and Sik had been critical not just of the government but also of a key government backer: a powerful Islamic brotherhood led by a reclusive Pennsylvania-based imam called Fethullah Gulen, whom some critics allege now controls the Turkish security forces. Before his arrest this past week, Sener was already on trial on charges of, among other things, revealing classified information in a book in which he alleges the complicity of the security forces in the murder of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in 2007; Sik was about to publish his own book on the Gulen network, provisionally titled The Imam’s Army. “Whoever gets near this [issue] burns,” Sik said as he was arrested. (Watch TIME’s video “Turkey’s Unconventional Muslim Minority.”)

This past week’s detentions follow last month’s raid on the offices of Odatv, a news website critical of the government; four Odatv journalists were arrested. “Journalists are being detained on the one hand while addresses about freedom of the speech are given on the other. We do not understand this,” the U.S. ambassador to Ankara, Francis Ricciardone, said following the raid. He was harshly criticized by the Turkish government, with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan calling him an “amateurish ambassador.” Erdogan has refused to comment on the wave of media arrests, saying they are a legal matter.

There is more than just the arrests. The government’s “you’re either with us or against us” attitude has created a palpable sense of repression in the press, particularly since media and business interests are closely linked. The main government-critical news group, Dogan, was slapped with 4.8 billion lira ($3.05 billion) in tax fines in 2009 after a row with the government over corruption allegations involving members of Erdogan’s party. “Young reporters are now intimidated to ask certain questions of the Prime Minister and some ministers,” wrote Murat Yetkin, a veteran Ankara commentator for the Radikal newspaper. Reporters worry that they might lose their press card or be banned from further meetings. Erdogan has personally sued dozens of cartoonists and journalists for defamation. Under his administration, thousands of websites have been shut down at times, including YouTube, Vimeo and Blogger.

Turkey is now counting down to elections in June that appear likely to see Erdogan re-elected for a third time. Although the main opposition Republican People’s Party has a new leader in mild-mannered former bureaucrat Kemal Kilicdaroglu, it is bogged down by years of stagnation and outdated rhetoric. If re-elected, Erdogan has promised to make a new and more democratic constitution drafted by broad social consensus a top priority. He’ll deserve those plaudits from abroad if he follows through.

See TIME’s special report “The Middle East in Revolt.”

See the best pictures of 2010.

While us hacks in Britain do not fear a dawn knock at the door – as some of our Turkish colleagues do – we should not feel too pleased with ourselves

I was horrified yesterday to read that the supposedly moderate Islamic party now ruling Turkey has begun silencing critics. Not just its secular enemies, we knew about that, but previous sympathisers who nonetheless believe that governments should not be above the law or political accountability.

Older journalists and writers in Turkey recall the days when some subjects were simply taboo – criticising the all-powerful military or supporting communism. Suggesting that the Turks committed genocide against the Armenians during World War I got no less a figure than Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk into trouble recently.

“I don’t remember a time when we were free in this country to write on anything … but we felt safer than today because we knew what to write and what was restricted. Now it’s more complicated,” the columnist Ismet Berkan told yesterday’s FT.

 

There’s a particular issue here – the future of Turkey, an important country – and the more general point about “what it’s safe to write about” – an issue that affects us all on the keyboard, even here in Britain. I’ll come back to that.

 

Given the dishonest way the European Union has treated the protracted, phoney negotiations for Turkish access to the EU, I have some sympathy for the resurgent nationalism that is tilting the Turks away from the secular west under the Justice and Development (AK) party led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the current prime minister.

 

My underdog’s impulse is accentuated by the snooty disdain with which Turkey’s secular elite, the commercial, intellectual, political and military types dominant in Istanbul and Ankara, seem to regard AK leaders, let alone their headscarf wearing supporters. The Times carried a feature last year whose well-heeled interviewees dripped with condescension.

 

But the Turkish government has been arresting ever-wider circles of “subversives” and “terrorists” as two inquiries into alleged coup plots – a military plot known as “Sledgehammer” and a network called “Ergenekon” – for four years now.

 

At one level this could be seen as an attempt to cleanse the “deep state” network that has had huge influence over the modern Turkey, which arose from the ruins of the Ottoman empire in 1918, one of the few post-Versailles states to thrive.

 

But the pace seems to have quickened as the next election approaches and, as so often, the revolution has started to devour its own children.

 

A journalist called Nedim Sener, best known for a book exposing police negligence in investigating the murder of an Armenian journalist, was arrested recently after receiving threats. So was Ahmet Sik, another writer – previously sympathetic to the Ergenekon inquiry – who had also criticised the prime minister.

 

It’s a bad sign, especially since Turkey is currently held up as a model that modernising Islam could follow elsewhere in the Middle East where Arab peoples have been overthrowing autocracies of varying shades of depravity in 2011.

 

What has Turkish press freedom to do with the rest of us? Well, I listened with one ear yesterday to colleagues discussing the half-hearted attempts by the Scottish football authorities to do something about the latest outburst of sectarian violence between Celtic and Rangers fans after last week’s Old Firm match, which Catholic Celtic won 1-0.

 

One of my chums, who used to work for a Scottish newspaper and grew up in those parts, said that one thing reporters were simply not allowed to do was to write that Scottish football had problems with sectarian violence.

 

What were the others? Apparently, you could never write in this particular paper that “Hogmanay is not as good as it used to be” or submit a disparaging review of a Scottish rock band. They were all brilliant and that was that, explained my friend, who had learned this lesson the hard way.

 

Food for thought there, too, but no grounds for complacency in England, either. On the train home I read the FT – my end-of-day read – and found columnist Philip Stephens tackling the Libyan-LSE connection in much the same way as I did here myself last week.

 

Fine. Except that Stephens went much further than I did in saying we Brits are, one way or another, all involved in shabby compromises with autocracy and should get used to it. London’s position as a crossroads for the world’s investments makes the capital a “global Laundromat” for all sorts of dirty money and its owners.

 

What’s more, the Laundromat is underpinned by a host of specialist skills – clever bankers, imaginative accountants, smooth PR executives – along with ancient and prestigious institutions that could also help cleanse money and reputation.

 

Stephens could have added lawyers and estate agents (those “hideously vulgar” new flats on Hyde Park symbolise what he means), though he did mention Wimbledon, Henley and Ascot, which all contribute to the mix.

 

That all sounds better coming from the FT than it would in the Guardian, since more of the FT’s readers fit that particular mould. Where he put me on the back foot was in pointing out that another attraction of London lies in its “draconian libel laws” and the battery of lawyers that polices them. “The media is muzzled” by threats and writs the moment it makes inquiries into dodgy-but-rich residents, the FT pundit writes.

 

Is it that bad? In today’s Guardian, doughty FoI campaigner Heather Brooke, herself a refugee from the land of the First Amendment, complains that the British royal family (“are we living in Thailand?”) is above criticism just because there are set procedures for MPs to criticise “Air Miles” Andy Windsor – part of our ancient historical settlement with the crown when parliament deposed it.

 

Though Brooke works herself up into a lather I’m not sure she’s on the right track here. Anyone who lives in Britain – Heather has been here a long time now – must have noticed that, for all their privileges, the royals are an easy target for media torment, tabloid and broadsheet.

 

Charlie Windsor’s clod-hopping forays into planning inquiries are both exposed and abused, not least by the Guardian.

 

Prince Andrew’s matrimonial woes have been the stuff of ridicule for years now. Only Wills and Kate (“Catherine”) are still on the upswing of the media cycle: it won’t last much beyond 29 April.

 

So it’s not the royals who are above criticism, let alone the local political elite, but rich foreign plutocrats – Mohammed Al Fayed, for example. I’d love to know more about his money and people like him. But it’s time-consuming and difficult work so Fleet St usually – not always – goes after the low-hanging fruit.

 

Randy vicars, greedy councillors, silly MPs – none of them can afford a decent City law firm with the meter running, so they all get a harder time than investment bankers do – even this week, when their egregious greed is again on display. The problem is not confined to Britain, of course.

 

In Ireland and France, our two near-neighbours, the rogues get away with it too often. And in all countries some of the rogues take the precaution of owning a newspaper or six. Happy birthday again, Rupert! Don’t eat too much over-rich cake, it can be dangerous at your age!

 

And self-censorship plays a part. What, even at the saintly Guardian? Sometimes, yes, I think. It’s not like working for one of Fleet St’s autocracies. No one writes deliberately to see their work end up on the electronic spike, so Murdoch staff find it easier to attack the BBC – often and at length – than explain the predatory tactics of Sky or why Chris Patten’s memoirs were ditched by HarperCollins.

 

At the Telegraph, you do not lightly write about publicity-shy, tax-lite owners of weird castles on the Channel Islands – it’s easier to accuse elected MPs of lesser follies. At the Daily Star, owned by Richard “Asian Babes” Desmond, you do not write about foul-mouthed porn barons. The Mail, well, it is a law unto itself and reflects the robust prejudices of its editor, Not-Sir-Paul-Dacre, who has not been in power for half as long as Colonel Gaddafi and its shows to his credit.

 

It is more heterodox than is widely appreciated by non-readers and has taken a strong stance against greedy bankers, who, by happy coincidence, prefer the more sympathetic FT. So do bank advertisers. But elected governments fear the Mail most.

 

And us? I have always sensed liberal, middle class ill-ease in going after stories about immigration, legal or otherwise, about welfare fraud or the less attractive tribal habits of the working class, which is more easily ignored altogether.

 

Toffs, including royal ones, Christians, especially popes, governments of Israel, and US Republicans are more straightforward targets. Why, Margaret Thatcher almost did not make the cut (so we read) in yesterday’s splendid G2 International Women’s Day anthology of 100 great gals. Amazing!

 

Nor has it been easy to smuggle anything creditable about Tony Blair into the paper for several years now, though tyrants with more convincing leftwing credentials sometimes get the benefit of the doubt.

 

So while we hacks do not fear the knock at the door in a Turkish dawn, we should not feel too pleased with ourselves. And remember, dear reader, that we are also striving much of the time to tell you what you’d rather know rather than challenge your prejudices and make you cross.

 

As the old saying goes, we are all guilty.

Source: Guardian