Tag: press freedom

  • Turkey Targets Press Freedom

    Turkey Targets Press Freedom

    OpEdNews Op Eds 3/12/2013 at 01:43:21

    opednews.com

    Turkey Targets Press Freedom

    by Stephen Lendman

    Turkey is more police state than democracy.

    No country imprisons more journalists than Turkey. Ragip Zarakolu understands well. He’s a prominent human rights activist/publisher. He’s a former Nobel Peace Prize nominee. He’s been maliciously targeted for years.

    In 1998, he won the International Publishers Association (IPA) International Freedom to Publish Award. He couldn’t attend the Frankfurt ceremony. Authorities confiscated his passport.

    In 2003, he received the NOVIB/PEN Free Expression Award. In 2008, IPA gave him a second Freedom to Publish Award.

    In March 2012, he was imprisoned. He was targeted after receiving the Assyrian Culture Centre’s Assyrian Cultural Award. It honored his human and minority rights advocacy.

    He’s been wrongly charged with state crimes more than 70 times. He faces 15 years in prison if convicted of current terrorist-related ones. His trial begins in April.

    He’s one of thousands of journalists, lawyers, activists, and others accused of belonging to or aiding and abetting the Kurdistan-based Union of Communities. Turkey conflates it with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

    Zarakolu calls charges against him “state terrorism.” Turkey is part totalitarian, he says. Authorities target journalists and intellectuals urging “Kurdish question” solutions.

    An atmosphere of fear prevails. Widespread arrests follow. No one’s safe.

    The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) calls itself “an independent nonprofit organization that promotes press freedom worldwide.”

    It reported on “Turkey’s Press Freedom Crisis: The Dark Days of Jailing Journalists and Criminalizing Dissent.”

    via OpEdNews – Article: Turkey Targets Press Freedom.

  • Kurdish journalists, media workers released in Turkey

    Kurdish journalists, media workers released in Turkey

    Istanbul, February 11, 2013–The release of at least seven journalists and media workers from pretrial detention is a positive step toward restoring the press freedom climate in Turkey, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

    A court in Istanbul on Friday ordered the release pending trial of the individuals, who were imprisoned in December 2011 on charges of supporting and collaborating with the banned Union of Communities in Kurdistan, or KCK, and Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, according to news reports. The individuals still face prison terms if convicted of their charges and all have been banned from traveling outside Turkey, news reports said. Their trials, which began in September, are expected to resume in April, the reports said.

    The journalists who were released include Zuhal Tekiner, chairwoman of the board of the pro-Kurdish Dicle News Agency; Çağdaş Kaplan and İsmail Yıldız, both reporters for the agency; and Ziya Çiçekci, news editor for the pro-Kurdish daily Özgür Gündem, according to the BBC and other news reports. The court also ordered the release of Ömer Çiftçi, owner of the now-defunct pro-Kurdish opinion magazine Özgür Halk ve Demokratik Modernite, and Saffet Orman, another individual affiliated with the magazine, news reports said. Pervin Yerlikaya, an accountant for Özgür Gündem, was also released, the reports said.

    News reports did not identify a reason for the release of the journalists and media workers. International human rights and press freedom organizations have urged Turkey to halt prolonged detention prior to a court date.

    “We hope that this is the first step on the road to ending the practice of holding journalists in pretrial detention,” said CPJ Deputy Director Robert Mahoney from New York. “Turkey, however, should honor its international commitments and heed calls from its international partners such as the European Union and stop jailing reporters for their work.”

    Turkey is the world’s worst jailer of journalists, according to CPJ research. At least 49 journalists were behind bars when CPJ conducted its worldwide prison census on December 1, 2012.

    For more data and analysis on Turkey, visit CPJ’s Turkey page here.

    via Kurdish journalists, media workers released in Turkey – Committee to Protect Journalists.

  • Turkey Cannot Defend Record On Press Freedom

    Turkey Cannot Defend Record On Press Freedom

    Journalists and activists participate in a rally calling for press freedom in central Ankara
    Journalists and activists participate in a rally calling for press freedom in central Ankara, March 19, 2011. (photo by REUTERS/Umit Bektas)
    By: Kadri Gursel for Al-Monitor Turkey Pulse. Posted on February 4.

    Turkey holds a notorious world “championship” title: it’s the country that keeps the largest number of journalists behind bars. And no one in the world no longer questions whether Turkey is being done injustice.

    About This Article

    Summary :

    Kadri Gursel writes that by criminalizing any press article that seems sympathetic to the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), the Turkish government worsens its image as a leading violator of press freedom.

    Author: Kadri Gursel
    Posted on : February 4 2013

    All major international groups advocating press freedoms agree that Turkey fully deserves the championship in imprisoning journalists.

    Most recently, the World Press Freedom Index 2013, released by the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (RSF), listed Turkey among the worst offenders, ranking it 154th among 170 countries. Thus, Turkey fell six places down the ladder compared to last year.

    The RSF said Turkey is “currently the world’s biggest prison for journalists” and that the imprisoned journalists include “especially those who express views critical of the authorities on the Kurdish issue.”

    To get a better idea of the situation, one should note that Finland, which topped the list as the country where the press enjoys the greatest freedom, had a violation score of 6.38, while Turkey got 46.56. And Sudan, ranked 170th at the bottom of the list, scored 70.06.

    Turkey’s bad grades led the RSF to place it in the category of countries where press freedom is in a “difficult situation.”

    The report stressed that, “The state’s paranoia about security, and itstendency to see every criticism as a plot hatched by a variety of illegal organizations, intensified even more during a year marked by rising tensions over the Kurdish question.”

    Earlier, on Dec. 1, 2012, the New York-based Committee for the Protection of Journalists (CPJ) released a report on jailed journalists around the world and declared Turkey the champion with 49 journalists behind bars. Iran came second with 45 journalists in prison, followed by China with 32.

    Obviously, the situation poses a grave image problem for Turkey and its leadership at a time when they claim the country’s democracy is an example for the Middle East.

    The Turkish leaders, however, seem to believe they have found easy short cuts to supposedly manage this image problem.

    A persistent, systematic rhetoric claiming that the imprisoned journalists are in fact terrorists used to be one of their methods.

    They must have decided that this was not convincing enough because they are now accusing international press groups which raise the problem of Turkey’s jailed journalists of “collaborating with terrorists” and “writing made-to-order reports.”

    Take, for example, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Speaking at his party’s parliamentary group meeting last week, he said: “Supporters of terrorism are in prison holding press cards. The chap gets caught with a gun, gets caught for killing a member of the security forces. And then what does he say? That he is working in the press.  international organizations that say we have a negative attitude towards the press have gone as far as to issue made-to-order declarations depicting developments in Turkey in a negative light.”

    In early December, Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc told a visiting delegation from the International Press Institute (IPI) that not more than three journalists were imprisoned in Turkey.

    In March 2012,  Minister in charge of EU affairs Egemen Bagis argued on the BBC’s Hard Talk show that no Turkish journalist had been imprisoned for practicing his or her profession, and that those in jail had landed there for crimes such as murder, bank robbery and sexual assaults.

    Indeed, international press freedom groups assume a great responsibility when they take on the arduous task of determining how many journalists are behind bars and whether they have been imprisoned in relation to their professional activities or for other offenses.

    To defend as “journalist” a person standing trial for non-journalistic activities that constitute a genuine crime would before all damage the credibility of those organizations.

    In a special report released last October under the title of “Turkey’s Press Freedom Crisis,” the CPJ said it was able to establish that 76 journalists were behind bars in Turkey, and that 61 of them had been imprisoned in relation to their professional activities. The situation of the others, it said, remained under examination.

    Two months later, the CPJ unveiled its “2012 Prison Census” report, which revised the number of Turkey’s imprisoned journalists down to 49 as some were released in the meantime.

    The fact that the overwhelming majority of journalists in Turkey’s prisons are Kurds is not a coincidence. Those journalists work for media outlets that support the  Kurdish movement. Naturally, political activists have the right to do journalism on a selective agenda as long as they respect professional ethics.

    The problem in Turkey, however, stems from the way  the judiciary and the security apparatus regard journalistic activities that sympathize with the ideological and political line of the PKK, considered to be a “terrorist organization.” They tend to directly criminalize that type of journalism as “terrorist organization activity” and those journalists as “members of a terrorist organization.” And this propensity, which results in restrictions on press freedom, is backed by the government.

    When more than 30 employees of the Dicle News Agency and the Ozgur Gundem newspaper were arrested in late 2011 on grounds they belonged to the Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK), an outlawed Kurdish organization, the prosecutor who drew up their indictment listed basic and simple journalistic activities as evidence of their membership in a terrorist group.

    To convince the international community that the imprisoned journalists are terrorists drawing on this legally flawed approach of the Turkish judiciary is impossible.

    It seems government officials are now attempting to discredit those who refuse to be convinced by Turkey’s official reasoning.

    An extreme example of those attempts came early last week when Star and Yeni Akit, two newspapers close to the AKP government, published reports alleging that the RSF had provided financial support for members of Turkey’s outlawed Marxist-Leninist Communist Party (MLKP).

    The RSF rejected the allegations as “grave, disgraceful and absurd.”

    In an article addressing those newspaper reports and Erdogan’s remarks, CPJ director Joel Simon wrote:

    “In indictment after indictment reviewed by the CPJ, prosecutors have said that journalists who express dissenting political views are being directed by terrorist groups. Thus, the government reasons, they are themselves terrorists.

    ‘’These kind of attacks do nothing to change international public opinion, which is united in the view that Turkey is the world’s worst jailer of the press. In fact they reinforce the perception that an intolerant government deliberately conflates critical expression with terrorism in order to intimidate its perceived opponents.”

    Kadri Gürsel is a contributing writer for Al-Monitor’s Turkey Pulse and has written a column for the Turkish daily Milliyet since 2007. He focuses primarily on Turkish foreign policy, international affairs and Turkey’s Kurdish question, as well as Turkey’s evolving political Islam.

    Read more: https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2013/02/turkey-record-on-press-freedom.html#ixzz2K0aauCsr
  • Conflating critics with terrorists in Turkey

    Conflating critics with terrorists in Turkey

    Conflating critics with terrorists in Turkey

    By Joel Simon and Bill Sweeney/CPJ Staff

    TURKEY-GOVERNMENT

    Erdoğan speaks at a meeting in parliament on Wednesday. (AFP/Adem Altan)

    The government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is quick to brand critics as “terrorists,” and that’s one of the main reasons that Turkey was the world’s worst jailer of the press when CPJ conducted its recent census of imprisoned journalists. This week, the prime minister and two pro-government newspapers applied the label once again to critics, illustrating the extremely difficult climate confronting any Turkish journalist who challenges official positions.

    Speaking at a parliamentary meeting on Wednesday, Erdoğan lashed out at commentators who criticize the policies of the Justice and Development Party, or AKP. “These types who are named columnists do not know their places when they criticize on TV, saying the AKP administration is behind the world in terms of democratization,” he said. “They say the EU is very much progressed. Progressed in what? We know how they shelter terrorists.” In October, the European Commission published a progress report on Turkey’s reform agenda that was critical of its press freedom record, among other things. Although EU membership remains on Ankara’s agenda, accession has moved in fits and starts due in part to concerns about Turkey’s press freedom and judicial record.

    Erdoğan’s comments came two days after two pro-government newspapers, Star and Yeni Akit, ran very similar stories that freely used the word “terrorist” in describing critics. The papers targeted our colleagues at Reporters Without Borders (RSF), which also concluded that Turkey is the world’s worst jailer of the press. Star accused RSF of “providing support to the members of the terrorist organization MLKP,” referring to the banned Marxist Leninist Communist Party. In particular, the papers said RSF was paying Necati Abay, longtime spokesman for the Platform of Solidarity with Arrested Journalists, a group that has tried to bring the plight of imprisoned Turkish journalists to light.

    Abay, who now lives in exile in Germany, has faced numerous criminal prosecutions over the years based on the unpopular political views he has expressed as a journalist. Abay said this week that while he is a member of RSF–just like thousands of journalists all over the world–he has never received financial support from the group. He also reiterated that he has no ties to the MLKP.

    Star also questioned the Committee to Protect Journalists. “It was confirmed that the lobby of outlaw terrorist organizations was at the basis of the harsh criticisms of the International Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) against Turkey,” the paper said. Stories in both papers closely echoed arguments made in recent government memos that have tried to rebut independent research on imprisoned journalists.

    The effect of these comments and reports is to conflate critics with terrorists. When the government and its allies link the EU or RSF or CPJ with terrorism, they are essentially making the same case that state prosecutors make regularly against journalists in Turkey. In indictment after indictment reviewed by CPJ, prosecutors have said that journalists who express dissenting political views are being directed by terrorist groups. Thus, the government reasons, they are themselves terrorists.

    These kinds of attacks do nothing to change international public opinion, which is united in the view that Turkey is the world’s worst jailer of the press. In fact, they reinforce the perception that an intolerant government deliberately conflates critical expression with terrorism in order to intimidate its perceived opponents.

    UPDATE: RSF has put out a statement rebutting the allegations and calling them “grave, disgraceful, and absurd.” Click here to read the press release.

    Joel Simon is the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. He has written widely on media issues, contributing to Slate, Columbia Journalism Review, The New York Review of Books, World Policy Journal, Asahi Shimbun, and The Times of India. He has led numerous international missions to advance press freedom. Follow him on Twitter @Joelcpj.

    via Conflating critics with terrorists in Turkey – Blog – Committee to Protect Journalists.

  • State media regulation? Ask the reporters in Turkey’s jails how it works

    State media regulation? Ask the reporters in Turkey’s jails how it works

    When journalists make trouble for the PM in Istanbul, the tax inspectors or counter-terrorism officials soon appear in the newsroom. So now almost no one makes trouble

      • Peter Preston
      • The Observer,
    Turkeys prime minister on 010

    Live on every channel: when Turkey’s prime minister decides to speak, every broadcaster in the country seems to rearrange its schedules. Photograph: Ahmed Abd El Fattah/AP

    Here’s one truly educational stopover for Lord Justice Leveson when he flies back from the Australian sun. Take a transit break at Ataturk airport, Istanbul, and wander around a little. Talk to reporters, editors, publishers, tycoons and politicians (as I did last week). Then ponder the meaning of two small words that somehow got lost in your famous inquiry: press freedom. It seems so simple to you, I know. You need no lectures from Michael Gove. But prepare to be amazed – and depressed.

    Turkey isn’t a dozy media backwater. It has a big state broadcaster, 300 or so private TV stations, more than a dozen of them with nationwide coverage, and 1,000 private radio stations. It has as many as 50 papers with some kind of national reach. The Istanbul Journalists Association can summon over 3,000 working members to its meetings. And one paper, Hurriyet, lies just behind the Guardian when you count worldwide reach online. There on the borders of Europe, Nato’s old frontline, still taking the democratic tablets of EU membership, Turkey seems a raucous, rumbustious, newsy place – just the sort of spot David Cameron says he likes best.

    Isn’t something missing, though? Every country in the world has its corruption problems and Turkey is sliding down the global league tables of dodgy dealing compiled by Transparency International. But you won’t read about that in a newspaper. Corruption coverage doesn’t seem to exist these days. Any country with so many TV stations could offer the wonders of full variety, something to suit all tastes: yet when Recep Tayyip Erdogan wanted to make a pretty standard speech live last week, variety took a cold bath: channel after channel ditched programmes to bring you the great PM live and untouched.

    And then, of course, there are the empty chairs at press conferences. That’s because 76 correspondents and editors are in prison – some awaiting trial, some serving sentences under an anti-terror law so mistily drawn that almost any reporting of what is said or done can be termed incitement and land you behind bars.

    Turkey, increasingly, is freedom’s crisis zone. Much too often, it locks journalists up and loses the key; so fear stalks the newsrooms, an apprehension that one article out of place will fall foul of some terror law, or bring the tax inspectors running, crawling over every pound you ever earned or

    spent. The biggest newspaper and TV group in Turkey got the full tax treatment a couple of years ago. Initially fined almost £2bn over allegedly unpaid taxes, it was forced to sell major papers and its biggest TV station, even after a nerve-racking bargaining process brought the sum down to £370m. Mop your brow, Starbucks! Memo to publishers: you, too, are vulnerable if you step out of line. And if you’re in some other business besides the media, then that business is vulnerable as well. There’s personal pressure to reckon with. There’s a clear message to make entrepreneurs quake. There are plenty of sanctions if you start making waves.

    Thus, there are no waves. The PM can and does single out columnists for florid criticism on his TV appearances. They can and quietly do lose their jobs. Istanbul seems full of unemployed columnists. Erdogan can call the owners together for private meetings. They seem to do their duty as instructed. Academics estimate that 70% of Turkey’s media now backs the governing AKP.

    But if you forget about the 76 in jail, and indeed the Silivri prison that houses them and hundreds of other active human rights cases – students, MPs, former generals and police chiefs – then, superficially, life goes on much as usual. Football, game shows, celebrity scandals – all the usual stuff appears in its usual places. Columnists, too, function much as you’d expect – except they tend to write out about overseas issues, nothing close to home.

    So press freedom, m’lud? It’s a thin, frail thing, growing more anorexic every day. And, of course, you can make excuses. The country endures PKK terror attacks. Its neighbours – Iraq, Iran, Syria – are instability incarnate. History is a long, mournful succession of elected administrations ousted by coups ancient and modern, hard and soft. Freedom doesn’t always put down deep roots in soil like this – and the EU, blowing hot then cold about Turkish membership, hasn’t helped one bit.

    Yet excuses, however reasonable, don’t quite do the job. For if freedom can’t be crisply defined, then the loss of freedom exists in a fog of its own. The AKP media minister (and deputy PM) talks amiably enough about a new package of laws which – in his “expectation” – may clarify anti-terror laws and allow the release of “real journalist” prisoners. But there only seem to be three such prisoners on his reckoning, so hang out no flags.

    Barristers remember the last such package with mordant gloom. There’s outside pressure from the Council of Europe and the EU; you reform some statutes; but nothing happens – either because the judges carry on regardless or because the government covertly tells them to take no notice. Which is it? Nobody knows. But the result is nothingness, much the same.

    Meanwhile, as the International Press Institute mission I’m part of moves from paper to paper and politician to politician, there’s a descant from far away. Cameron has called in Fleet Street’s editors and told them to propose their own regulatory system – featuring £1m fines et al – within 48 hours … or else.

    Turkish editors look baffled. Even Erdogan wouldn’t issue such threats in the open, they say. Our home secretary wants to let police pound back along personal email and social-media trails to protect the public from “criminals” – but Turkey’s incarcerated journalists are “criminals” too. While reformers push for the abolition of secret special courts within prisons, Britain’s justice ministry pushes for new rules of secret evidence. All these moves are read and noted along the Bosphorus. Now Evan Davis of Today is getting it in the neck from No 10, Erdogan-style. What’s happening to Britain, please?

    My new friends want to go to the European court of human rights. I explain Downing Street doesn’t want to go there ever again. And that’s before the difference between arresting 47 or so journalists and sources over Operations Elveden and Weeting and locking away dozens of Kurdish reporters in Silivri has to be explained again.

    Leveson, it appears, has discovered the power of Twitter on his long flight to Sydney. Editors, for better or worse, have agreed to a new, non-statutory regulator with the big bazooka of Damocles hanging over it. And Harriet Harman – whom I once went to the European court to support in a press freedom case when she was Liberty’s advance guard of disclosure – is threatening to get the statutory underpinnings out when back in office. Hacked Off seem as violently hacked off as ever.

    Well, that’s politics, my lord, wherever you find it. All Turkey’s main opposition parties are against Erdogan’s press repressions, of course. Politics is a very shifting underpinning of freedom. No British editor, apparently, can be trusted to keep his or her word. The din continues.

    But a few days in Turkey shed a more unkindly light. You can feel it in Istanbul when the husband of a journalist released from prison too late to treat her deadly sickness talks about what he’s lost: not just a wife, but the truth in his life.

  • Canadians in Istanbul denouncing anti-terrorist laws, urging press freedom

    Canadians in Istanbul denouncing anti-terrorist laws, urging press freedom

    Newruz Kirkay’s husband, Kenan, has been in jail for 11 months and on a hunger-strike for 42 days. The 33-year-old said her husband, a journalist, was only detained because he is Kurdish. On Nov. 14 a high-level PEN delegation visited Turkey to protest the plight of detained writers.

    Michelle Shephard

    National Security Reporter

    8bd5e9d7407698b1bcdb4223f25b

    ISTANBUL, TURKEY—Newruz Kirkaya says the last time she spoke with her husband he was the one reassuring her, despite the 11 months he has spent in jail without trial and 42 days without food to protest his detention.

    “He told me, ‘I’m losing weight but it’s OK.’ I think he was trying to prepare me psychologically for this,” she said one night this week, as she wrapped her hands around a cup of tea.

    “This is an attack on our personal lives and it’s all about our ethnic identity.”

    Kenan Kirkaya is a Kurdish reporter and one of dozens of writers and journalists being tried for terrorism. He is accused of membership in the Union of Kurdistan Communities (KCK), an umbrella group allegedly linked to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

    His wife, 33, claims the prosecution’s evidence consists mainly of articles he has covered on Kurdish issues.

    “He is only a journalist. The only problem is that he’s a Kurdish journalist. That’s the only thing,” she said.

    Kurds make up about one-fifth of Turkey’s population and the PKK has waged a war to separate for more than three decades, claiming more than 40,000 lives.

    Turkey is often hailed for its democratic progress, but the prosecution of thousands of Kurdish journalists, politicians and activists since 2009 has led to accusations of human rights violations under the government of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan.

    Pressure to free the jailed journalists increased this week with a visit of a PEN International delegation, including the group’s Canadian president, John Ralston Saul.

    In a meeting with President Abdullah Gül, the group urged Turkey to take “quick and concrete” action, warning that the plight of jailed writers overshadows the country’s political and economic progress.

    According to PEN, the president agreed about the “international repercussions.”

    “These developments deeply sadden me, and as President, I more than anyone else want to see that they are resolved and no longer on the country’s agenda,” Gül reportedly said.

    At a press conference here Thursday, Saul denounced the country’s anti-terror laws and urged reforms that would “clearly distinguish between incitement to violence and the expression of non-violent, if controversial, ideas.”

    “There is absolutely no need for broad, badly-defined anti-terror laws that can be used by any sort of authority . . . to limit freedom of expression in ways which have nothing to do with the possibility of terrorism,” said Saul, who was joined by 20 other members of the delegation including Toronto Star columnist Haroon Siddiqui.

    PEN is also calling for an end to lengthy pre-trial detentions and proceedings that often drag on for years.

    The Committee to Protect Journalists has accused Turkish authorities of conflating “support for the Kurdish cause with terrorism itself. When it comes to Kurdish journalists, newsgathering activities such as fielding tips, covering protests, and conducting interviews are evidence of a crime.”

    Newruz Kirkaya hoped the PEN visit would bring international attention to her husband’s case and hunger-striking prisoners.

    There are close to 700 prisoners refusing food. This weekend six of Turkey’s leading Kurdish politicians joined the protest on its 60th day.

    Among the demands is the right of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan to have access to his lawyer. He has been held incommunicado on an island south of Istanbul for 15 months.

    via Canadians in Istanbul denouncing anti-terrorist laws, urging press freedom – thestar.com.