I never met her. I wish I had. But I knew she was a reporter, a good reporter telling of bad wars, and telling all the sides. And this one in Kobani (Ayn al-Arab) has many more sides than two, all of them bloody, all of them reeking of criminality. This carnage in Syria is perhaps the most corrupt, criminal, imperial assault in modern history. There are no “good guys” in this slaughter on the rapidly crumbling edge of Turkey. It’s all lies, deceit and power politics. Call it murder. Call it the ultimate man’s tough-guy game—bombardment, siege, street-fighting, and always the stupidity.
The dogs of war run wild and ignorantly. For what? For a nothing town destroyed by chaos. She was telling as much as she could. The Turks there, the intelligence guys, the cops, the Turkish army, all the government “watchers” watched her and her partner, Judy Irish. She was called a spy. Watch out, they said. Maybe you’ll even be arrested, they mumbled. And the word got around. Not an easy assignment. She confessed that she was worried. Who wouldn’t be?
Note the eyes. They would tell exactly what they saw, wouldn’t they? She had two children, this beautiful Lebanese-American woman. She was 30 years-old, hard-working and dedicated. Perhaps it was Napoleon who spoke about his Marshalls “marching towards the sound of the guns.” She didn’t need the advice. She followed the danger instinctively. Maybe she could make sense of it all in Iraq, Lebanon, the Ukraine, and lastly, Turkey? Maybe? Maybe not? She told of the ISIS killers being smuggled into Syria in trucks with NGO labels like World Food Organization. Turkey has been at this double-dealing game for years. But this kind of truth hurts and it did not endear her to the Turkish “watchers” and “handlers” and “muscle-guys.”
On the way back to the hotel in a town called Suruç a cement-mixer truck, massive and deadly accurate, somehow, some way, intervened to crush her car and her. It all had the stink of bad fish. Based on the historic violence visited upon journalists and other dissenters in Turkey such a first impression of foul play is logical.
The governor of that area immediately said that “Turkey is a democratic state of law. The allegations are completely untrue.” What is completely untrue is exactly what he said. Democracy and the rule of law have both been crushed by the cement-mixer truck known as the Turkish government. And Serena confirmed that in her reportage. And so passes a brave young woman’s life in Turkey. And so continues the war.
Three journalists facing life sentences have been released pending appeal after eight years in prison in Turkey. The Committee to Protect Journalists ranks the country No. 1 for imprisoning press.
On Thursday, an Istanbul court released Bayram Namaz, Arif Celebi, and Fusun Erdogan, who also holds Dutch nationality, after eight years in prison, with an appeal pending. They had received life sentences in November for “terrorism.”
The court released the journalists under a new law that caps imprisonment at five years before the conclusion of a trial – down from the previous ceiling of 10 years. The three had all worked for Ozgur Radyo (Free Radio), which has broadcasts in Kurdish.
“I can’t find a word to express my feelings,” said Erdogan, who helped co-found Ozgur Radyo in 1995 and later served as its director until her arrest in 2006.
Turkey has accused many of its imprisoned journalists of having ties to Kurdish groups. Part of the case against Erdogan stems from her alleged involvement in the banned Marxist-Leninist Communist Party, though she disputes that her lengthy detention had any valid ground.
“There was only one real reason for our arrest,” Erdogan wrote last year in a letter from prison. “Police were trying to intimidate members of the progressive, independent, democratic and alternative media.”
‘Decriminalize journalism’
Rights groups have long criticized Turkey for its lack of press freedom. On Thursday, the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) announced that 32 journalists remain in jail in Turkey, most of them for suspected links to the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party.
In 2008, a group of Turkish authors boycotted Germany’s Frankfurt Book Fair to protest their government’s clamping down on expression.
The release of the three journalists “has given us new hope for our campaign to decriminalize journalism in Turkey, but we need to go on for those journalists who are still behind bars in Turkey,” EFJ President Mogens Blicher Bjerregard said on Thursday.
In December, the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists described Turkey as the world’s No. 1 jailer of journalists for the second straight year, ahead of Iran and China.
mkg/jr (AFP, dpa)
via Istanbul court frees 3 journalists facing terrorism charges in Turkey | News | DW.DE | 08.05.2014.
ON MONDAY, AUGUST 5, TURKISH DEMOCRACY WILL DIE IN PUBLIC, STRIPPED NAKED BY THE FORCES OF FASCISM AND TREASON. ALL APPROPRIATE AND DISPROPORTIONATE VIOLENCE WILL BE RENDERED.
THE BIGGEST LEGAL FIASCO IN HISTORY, ONE CALLED ERGENEKON, WILL BE DECIDED BY JUDGES WHO HAVE SPENT YEARS SLEEPING AT THE BENCH. IN BIZARRE HARMONY, THE HAPLESS ACCUSED HAVE SPENT YEARS IN PRISON AWAITING THEIR RIGHT TO A SPEEDY TRIAL DUE TO DELAYS IN THE GATHERING, TAMPERING, POLLUTING AND CREATION OF EVIDENCE. COMPLICATING MATTERS FURTHER, SECRET WITNESSES HAD REMAINED SO SECRETIVE THAT THEY WERE DIFFICULT TO LOCATE AND COMPENSATE. THUS DIRECT CONFRONTATION AND EXAMINATION BY DEFENSE COUNSELS WAS NOT AVAILABLE.
BUT THIS MONDAY, THIS BLOODY MONDAY, WILL BE THE DAY THAT JUSTICE SPEAKS GIBBERISH AND ALLTHE CLOCKS IN TURKEY RUN BACKWARDS. ALL PEOPLE WHO BELIEVED IN THE RULE OF LAW WILL GATHER IN PUBLIC DISBELIEF AT THE ABSURD VERDICT RENDERED BY ABSURD JUDGES EDUCATED AT THE ALICE IN WONDERLAND SCHOOL OF LAW.
THE GOVERNOR OF ISTANBUL, A MAN NAMED HAPPY, HAS HAPPILY BUT UNDEMOCRATICALLY BANNED ALL GATHERINGS, DEMONSTRATIONS, CHANCE MEETINGS, AND SOCIAL DATES BETWEEN BEAUTIFUL WOMEN AND HANDSOME MEN WITHIN 15,000 KILOMETERS OF THE COURT, WHICH IS LOCATED AT THE PRISON. UNHAPPILY NAMED SILIVRI, THE PRISON IS IN FACT 380,000 KILOMETERS (ON AVERAGE) FROM THE EARTH ON THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON. SOMEWHAT PARADOXICALLY, GOVERNOR HAPPY CONFIDENTLY CLAIMS TO BE A LAWYER.
TO CHEER AND HASTEN THE CITIZENRY ON ITS COLLECTIVE WAY TO DISBELIEF AND DESPAIR, GOVERNOR HAPPY HAS ASSEMBLED DIVISIONS OF ROBOCOPS TO SQUEEZE PEPPER GAS AND BATTALIONS OF RUBBER-BULLET MARKSMEN TO LACERATE FOREHEADS AND DESTROY EYE SOCKETS. SINCE THE WEATHER WILL BE SEASONABLY HOT, THE EVER HELPFUL HAPPY WILL GATHER HIS COLORFUL FLEETS OF ACID WATER SPRAY TRUCKS TO REFRESH THE BY NOW BEATEN, BRUISED AND SEMICONSCIOUS CITIZENS OF WHAT WAS ONCE CALLED THE REPUBLIC OF TURKEY, A SECULAR NATION OPERATING UNDER THE RULE OF LAW.
MONDAY, BLOODY MONDAY, THE SADDEST OF ALL POSSIBLE DAYS.
Cem Ryan Istanbul, the unhappiest of cities in the unhappiest of countries
4 August 2013
“It was a cold, bright day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.” 1984, George Orwell
Amberin Zaman, fired after writing outspoken columns in a Turkish newspaper, is one of a dozen columnists dropped from their priviliged perches in the past year. ROY GUTMAN / MCT Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/05/13/v-fullstory/3395466/turkeys-journalists-say-press.html#storylink=cpy
ISTANBUL — Veteran journalist Hasan Cemal was forced out of his job in March for defending his newspaper’s decision to publish secret protocols that embarrassed Turkey’s ruling party.
Amberin Zaman lost hers in April following a succession of outspoken columns that criticized the government’s Syria policy and its treatment of the large Kurdish minority.
After Nuray Mert criticized Turkey’s Kurdish policies and voiced concern that Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the powerful prime minister, risked becoming an authoritarian leader, she was dismissed from her job as a television show host with NTV and then fired early last year by the newspaper Milliyet.
All were columnists in Turkish newspapers – royalty in this country’s media realm – who enjoyed perks, prominence and a modicum of freedom to report the news and give their views, far more than ordinary journalists. They are among more than a dozen Turkish columnists who were fired or quit under pressure in the past year, according to the U.S.-based Committee to Protect Journalists.
Before they were forced out, Erdogan put pressure on their publications and attacked them by name or indirectly, raising a multitude of questions about whether Turkey has the advanced democracy it claims 10 years into Erdogan’s prime ministership.
“If this is journalism, then down with your journalism,” Erdogan declared in a speech about Milliyet, Cemal’s newspaper, after it published the minutes of Kurdish politicians’ talks with Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, a group the government had previously demonized as terrorists but is now negotiating with.
Turkey, a nation of 80 million, has emerged as one of the most stable Muslim majority states, and its economy is the second fastest-growing in Europe. Three visits by Secretary of State John Kerry in his first three months in office confirm the country’s growing role in regional affairs. On Thursday, President Barack Obama will receive Erdogan at the White House, where the topics are likely to be the civil war in Syria and what role Turkey can assume in Middle East peace talks.
Yet freedom of expression on contemporary issues lags woefully behind progress in other spheres, stymied by a government that regularly seeks to intimidate publishers, editors and reporters, as well as columnists. The Carnegie Endowment, a nonpartisan U.S.-based think tank, concluded early this year that press freedom in Turkey “is moving backward.”
Media-government relations “have always been problematic in Turkey, because political power groups have always tried to control the media and the community of journalists,” exerting pressure “through economic, political and legal instruments,” Cemal wrote in his final column, which Milliyet refused to publish but which was distributed by the International Press Institute, a Vienna-based association of news executives that promotes free press issues. .
Cemal, a veteran with 45 years’ experience, had consistently supported the present government, and his departure rocked the Turkish media world.
The enablers of this state of affairs include an ownership structure in which media are held by large conglomerates that often compete for government contracts, in a conflict of interests; a judicial system that has jailed more people claiming the label of journalists than any other country, according to several studies; and finally a general lack of solidarity among journalists.
In place of hard-hitting watchdog reporting, the result is self-censorship. Some journalists say 30 percent to 40 percent of their reports are never published.
“Flattery is the key thing in Turkish media,” Mert told McClatchy. “It has never been as bad as it is now.”
Major events go undiscussed. Is there a risk of blowback from allowing Islamist extremists to cross into Syria and join al Qaida-related fighters? “It’s a huge story. It should be on the front page every day,” Zaman told McClatchy. But it goes untouched.
Why Turkish government support for the Syrian rebels has failed to topple President Bashar Assad is another topic that is not addressed. “In Turkey, if you criticize the policy, they label you as pro-Assad,” Zaman said.
And strangely for a country that aspires to be a regional leader, Turkish media barely covers the war in Syria, relying instead on international news agencies.
Are there any contracting scandals or government corruption in Turkey? You’d hardly know from reading the mainstream media.
And what’s entailed in the deal between Turkey’s national intelligence agency and Ocalan, a captive for 14 years, leading him to order the withdrawal of the PKK armed forces from Turkey? The topic is barely mentioned. Then there’s the related subject that has many Turks’ heads spinning: How can the PKK go from being a terrorist group to a trusted negotiating partner so quickly?
Some of the answers – or at least the questions – could have been provided by the likes of Mustafa Gokkilic, a specialist on Kurdish issues. He was one of few Turkish journalists to go to the scene in late summer 2012 when the PKK mounted a major operation in the mainly Kurdish town of Semdinli, near the Iraqi border. But in late March he was fired without explanation from his job as a reporter for Haberturk TV.
The Committee to Protect Journalists generated a storm of reaction last year when it said Turkey had jailed 61 journalists in direct connection with their work. The Turkish Justice Ministry disputed CPJ’s tally, saying that some of those convicted had committed “grave crimes such as membership of an armed terror organization, kidnapping, possession of unlicensed weapons and dangerous substances, bombing and killing.”
The Justice Ministry’s claims underscored harsh laws that ascribe membership in a terrorist organization to anyone who writes an article promoting its goals.
A McClatchy analysis of the Committee to Protect Journalists’ list and government indictments shows that 52 of the 61 indicted or imprisoned for their writing or reporting report for Kurdish news outlets, and most appear to have a connection with the PKK through an affiliated “popular front” organization, the Union of Communities in Kurdistan.
But many of the cases are paper thin, said Dunya Mijatovic, a Bosnian who is the representative for freedom of the media of the 57-nation Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. “There were cases of people simply reporting things connected with the PKK,” she said.
The other nine cases involved charges growing out of Ergenekon, one of several mammoth cases alleging a military conspiracy to overthrow the elected civil government. But some of those cases appear to be completely baseless – such as the charge against reporter Ahmet Sik that two books he wrote exposing the conspiracy made him a part of it.
Sik and another leading investigative reporter, Nedim Sener, spent more than a year in detention. “There is nothing that connects me with Ergenekon. I see myself as an outsider,” Sik told McClatchy in an interview. “It’s not possible” to have been a part of the conspiracy, he said. “I would never be a friend of them, let alone enter into an alliance.” But he expects a jail sentence in June.
There are signs of possible change, in the form of judicial reforms, the latest of which has just been signed into law and redefines terror, decriminalizing speech in support of a terror organization if it does not incite to violence.
But no one knows the implications for journalists in jail of what is known as the Fourth Judicial Reform, because the government has largely avoided discussing it. McClatchy made more than half a dozen attempts by phone and in writing to obtain a comment from the Ministry of Justice, without response.
Mijatovic of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said the newest reform could be a change for the better, but “only if it is implemented.”
In recent weeks, the Turkish judiciary has released four Kurds from pretrial detention, according to Committee to Protect Journalists. All had been charged with membership of a terrorist group based on articles they wrote. The Turkish media have given the case minimal coverage.
But that still makes Turkey among the least hospitable nations for journalists in Europe, Mijatovic said.
“This is not only by far the highest number of journalists in prison among OSCE participating states; the sheer number of imprisoned journalists – either convicted or in pretrial detention – raises fundamental questions on the legislation governing media freedom in Turkey,” she told McClatchy.
Perhaps the greatest irony of the latest crackdown, against columnists, is that they have long been one of the few sources of news on controversial topics in the largely docile media in which they appear. Columnists here also have enormous perks. Zaman said she earned “a fat salary” as a columnist, supplemented by well-paid television appearances, and Mert said she earned as much as $20,000 a month, 15 times the average reporter’s salary.
“The whole system is corrupt,” said Zaman, who has international credentials as the Turkey reporter for the Economist weekly and as a past special contributor to the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post.
Columnists “take up all the room in newspapers, and very often, they’re the ones chatting with ministers and officials. They double up as news reporters,” Zaman told McClatchy. “They get so-called scoops from high-level sources and they don’t check the facts.” To maintain that access, she notes, the columnists write little that would anger their sources.
“I’m not saying we previously had such a great free press and a fantastic democracy, and lo and behold, these guys came along and it all fell apart,” Zaman said. But today, she said, “there is only one power, and it is Recep Tayyip Erdogan.”
Mert agreed. Previously, and particularly under coalition governments, “there were spaces for criticism.” Today, “we have a very strong one-party government, a monopoly of power,” she said.
Gareth Jenkins, a writer and analyst based in Turkey since 1989, said one reason for the weakness of the media was the lack of solidarity among journalists.
In Turkey, he said, if a journalist says something critical that the government doesn’t like, “other journalists go after them.” He paraphrased Pastor Martin Niemoller’s famous summing up of the duck-for-cover mentality in Hitler’s Germany. “People remained quiet when lunatic nationalists got banged up in prison. People kept quiet when those with whom they disagreed were under pressure. Now their turn has come.”
The government finds different ways to intimidate the free media
Apr 6th 2013 | ISTANBUL |From the print edition
FIRST comes the phone call, usually from a prime ministerial adviser. Displeasure over the critical writings of a columnist is relayed. He or she is admonished. “Tone it down,” bosses plead. The columnist stands firm and is then sacked.
Fearful of antagonising Turkey’s autocratic prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, media bosses (who have diverse business interests) have begun a cull. Many recall the $2.5 billion fine slapped on the Dogan Group, Turkey’s biggest media conglomerate, in 2009. Its owner, Aydin Dogan, was forced to shrink his empire and dump some critics of Mr Erdogan before the pressure eased.
By some counts scores of journalists have been sacked (soon after she started this story, your correspondent was dropped as a columnist by a local paper). Yet Ercan Ipekci, president of the Turkish Journalists Union, calls the sacked hacks “the luckier ones”. Turkey is now the world’s leading jailer of journalists. Estimates vary, but at least 49 are behind bars. The World Press Freedom Index 2013, recently published by Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based lobby group, ranked Turkey 154th among 179 countries, behind such places as Mali and Afghanistan.
The government retorts that most jailbirds have been locked up for violating Turkey’s anti-terror laws. Mr Ipekci disagrees. He cites Omer Celik, who faces up to 15 years’ imprisonment on charges of “acting under the orders of a terrorist organisation”. Much of the evidence against him focuses on his reporting on the activities of “a political party” (probably an allusion to the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party). A fresh legislative package, part of Mr Erdogan’s new stab at peace with the Kurds, will narrow the scope for “terror crimes”. Rights groups are not impressed. “If passed by the Parliament in its present form…it would represent another missed opportunity to deliver genuine human-rights reforms,” declared Amnesty International.
A growing number of journalists are resorting to self-censorship to survive. Coverage of alleged corruption scandals linked to the government is a no-go area. So is Turkey’s covert support for Syrian rebels. A recent investigative piece in the New York Times in which it was claimed that Ankara’s Esenboga airport has become a big hub for Qatari and Saudi arms flowing to the rebels was dutifully ignored.
Ironically, the newspapers are instead pointing fingers at Germany, where Turkish journalists complain that they are being denied access to what looks like becoming a show trial, involving the murder of ten people, eight of them of Turkish origin, between 2000 and 2007. Their gripe is over the allocation of press places at the trial in a higher Munich state court of five suspected members of the NSU, a neo-Nazi terrorist movement. By giving only 50 press places for the trial, the Munich court seems bent on keeping it an all-German affair. Ahmet Davutoglu, the Turkish foreign minister, has called on his German opposite number, Guido Westerwelle, to get the trial moved. But the court refuses to budge.
Proponents of Mr Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development (AK) have seized on the affair as proof that “the West is no better than Turkey.” For all its flaws, their argument runs, AK has made Turkey a more democratic place. It is true that Mr Erdogan has done more than any secular rival to tame the generals and accommodate the Kurds. In the bad old days of weak coalition rule, Kurdish journalists were tortured by the dozens or even killed. Then media bosses would bend before the army. But after ten years of AK rule such arguments are wearing thin. Pity the reckless hack who dares say so.
From the print edition: Europe
via The press in Turkey: Not so free | The Economist.
With the exception of a few semi-democracies in Balkans and Eastern Europe, nowhere in the world is the self-destructive role of media proprietors is more visible, more irrational, more aggressive than in Turkey.
Greedy owners of the big media groups – some ideologically close, some distant to the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) – with huge economic interests in business other than media, strictly power-dependent of the government and bureaucracy, offer their ‘services’ through their media outlets for the political executive, as well abuse their ownership extensively to advance their influences.
Along with legal restrictions which squeeze the freedom of press, it is this arrogant, ‘unholy alliance’ between the government and media proprietors which set an example before the world how a vastly diverse media landscape like the one in Turkey, can turn into an ‘open air editorial prison’.
The proprietors often without any external pressures impose self-censorship on the government policies, block investigative journalism. They stand for non-coverage of corruption; black-out of stories and comment that contain criticism about issues that may damage their relations with the prime minister, deadly keen on their own economic interests.
Turkish media’s case is therefore rather unique in its complications.
Globally, there are three criteria to judge the health of any media in any country: Freedom, independence and pluralism/diversity.
There is not a problem with the latter: with 40 national dailies, 2500 local papers, 250 private TV channels, 1300 radio stations and more than 150 news sites and online portals, Turkey has a big, competitive sector.
It is the first two that present problems.
While mainly Kurdish dissent is subjected to legal punishment, and tiny, partisan Turkish press and a few independent papers operate freely and largely undisturbed by law, the media moguls are busy suffocating the freedom, and strangling editorial independence of the big groups.
The recent, spectacular case of daily Milliyet illustrate the pattern more clearly than ever. It has all the ingredients of how the ‘unholy alliance’ works: a scoop, a prominent columnist being fired, an editor who ended up in his post with zero credibility and a historic Turkish paper as a lame duck. Plus a proprietor asking the prime minister who he should appoint as editor-in-chief.
Let us first have a quick glance at the background of the case:
Minutes of the meeting on İmralı Island between the jailed PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan and the pro-Kurdish [Peace and Democracy Party] BDP delegation was published on Thursday, Feb. 28. Next day, Prime Minister Erdoğan furiously targeted Milliyet in public, saying ‘if this is journalism, down with it!’
He quoted also a line – to make his case – by the veteran chief columnist of the paper, Hasan Cemal. The day after, Editor of Milliyet timidly explained he stood behind the story. But, a couple of days after, Hasan Cemal’s column was absent.
It was censored by the direct orders of the proprietor – Demirören family.
Further more, ‘father’ Demirören demanded the Editor a to halt “such coverage” and Cemal be fired. The trauma spread to rival mass daily, Hürriyet, whose proprietor, Aydın Doğan, imposed a ban on coverage of Milliyet incident. Hürriyet’s columnists were asked for days not to comment at all.
Last Tuesday, upon his return after a two week ‘ban’, Cemal filed again article, fiercely defending the role of journalism, criticizing the media proprietors and Erdoğan. When it was once more refused, he resigned from Milliyet.
The ‘victim’ this time was a internationally known, powerful liberal voice, author of several taboo-breaking books – on Kurds and Armenians. He was also known for his staunch, consistent support for the elected government for its EU reforms and at times it was threatened by military memorandum in 2007 and with a closure case in 2008.
Milliyet sufficed with a brief note about the departure, while its columnists preferred to ignore it. His colleagues looked the other way because they feared losing their jobs or because they are hostile to Cemal’s liberal views. The indifference tells even more about the miserable state of the journalism here.
But, within hours, the article was posted on-line.
It is also published in English at the IPI’s website.
Who is the real culprit here? For many the way out is to put the entire blame on Erdoğan. But it is there thing get complicated.
Two days ago, in his usual blunt manners, he was on the record, telling that the proprietor of Milliyet had (after he purchased the daily last autumn) visited him and asked whom he should hire as editor in chief. He also told that he in response had given a name, but the recruitment had failed.
Erdoğan has little respect for rich media proprietors. Two years ago, he had complained that they were constantly knocking on his door to ask advice and expect favors. ‘I tell them, do not come to me, it is your business’ he said.
He vilified them also later, by calling them ‘shopkeepers’. Not a single proprietor of big groups came out and protested in the name of media freedom.
The other side of the coin is, Erdoğan weighs very heavily with his emotional outbursts. He may not have been imposing decisions in media himself, but whatever he says has consequences.
Yet, at the end of the day it is up to the proprietor, also, to rise up and defend media freedom as much as the journalists do. It is also up to the proprietor, too, to grant his staff editorial independence.
The problem is systemic. In a fresh Turkey Report passed by the European Parliament, it is recommended that ownership pressures must be by laws be prevented. It said that EP ‘..notes with concern that most media are owned by and concentrated in large conglomerates with a wide range of business interests, reiterates its call for the adoption of a new media law addressing, inter alia, the issues of independence, ownership and administrative control.’
It is a welcome acknowledgment, finally, of the root cause of the problem.
As long as the proprietors with other economic interests than only media stand begging before the political powers, with their eyes only fixed on winning public tenders, there will be no editorial independence, thus no freedom, in the ‘mainstream’.
