CNN.com
May 6, 2011 Friday 4:17 PM EST
Turkey press freedom under fire
By Ivan Watson and Yesim Comert, CNN
Istanbul, Turkey
The four-year investigation into an alleged plot to overthrow Turkey’s
government just keeps getting bigger. But as police arrest more and
more journalists accused of aiding the coup plot, press freedoms
groups are expressing alarm.
With more than 50 reporters currently behind bars in Turkey, activists
argue freedom of expression is under fire in a country that is often
promoted as a model Muslim democracy for the turbulent Middle East.
Meanwhile, many writers claim that a new taboo has emerged in this
Byzantine web of politics, power and press… an enigmatic Muslim
cleric who leads a vast network of international schools and
businesses from his home in exile, a farm in the U.S. state of
Pennsylvania.
Last March, police swept through the Istanbul homes of two
high-profile investigative journalists, seizing documents and
detaining the reporters: Posta newspaper columnist Nedim Sener and
online news editor Ahmet Sik.
These arrests came after police detained the editors of Oda TV, a
hard-line secularist internet news portal that often criticized the
government of prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The journalists have yet to be formally charged. They join hundreds of
other jailed suspects awaiting trial in the sprawling investigation
into “Ergenekon,” an alleged gang led by ultra-secularist Turkish
military officers aimed at toppling Erdogan’s Islam-inspired
government.
Supporters of the Ergenekon investigation argue it is “demilitarizing”
Turkish society.
But the arrests have spread fear among many Turkish reporters.
On a chilly and rain-soaked day last month, several hundred
journalists marched through the streets of Istanbul, waving signs
saying “Hands Off My Opinion.”
“We are here to protest the growing repression over Turkish media by
the Turkish government for the last couple of years,” said Can Dundar,
a well-known columnist and anchorman for Turkey’s NTV.
“We want to be free to write. We want to be free to talk and we want
to be free to publish our books without any repression or fear,” he
added.
“At present, 57 journalists are in prison in Turkey and the number of
ongoing trials that can result in imprisonment of journalists is
estimated to be from 700 to 1,000,” said Dunja Mijatovic, the
representative on freedom of the media for the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe in a recent report.
Meanwhile, in a report issued this week on World Press Freedom Day,
the Washington-based watchdog organization Freedom House rated Turkey
“partly free.” Turkey, which is currently negotiating to join the
European Union, was ranked 112 out of 196 countries, next to
Bangladesh, Congo-Brazzavile, and Uganda.
In an interview with CNN last November, Sener ominously predicted that
he might be targeted for his criticism of the Turkish government.
“Today there is direct pressure from the political authority. They can
easily corner the reporter they don’t like for news they don’t like
and act in ways that can lead to getting fired,” said Sener, who
received a World Press Freedom Hero award from the International Press
Institute for his book investigating the 2007 assassination of
Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor Hrant Dink.
Turkish government officials deny claims the media atmosphere is
growing increasingly intolerant.
“The issue here is not the big bad government trying to silence the
press,” wrote Egemen Bagis, Turkey’s European Union integration
minister, in the pro-government newspaper Today’s Zaman.
“Despite the expression of concern from the highest echelons of the
state on the arrest of the journalists, the prosecutors have clearly
stated that they have evidence that links the journalists to the
Ergenekon terrorist group,” Bagis added.
Some observers, including the two recently detained reporters, have
observed a pattern of arrests targeting critics of an enigmatic figure
on the Turkish political scene… the influential Muslim cleric and
powerful supporter of the Turkish government Fethullah Gulen.
>From his home in exile on a farm in Pennsylvania, Gulen is the
inspirational leader of an enormous network of schools and
universities operating in more than 120 countries around the world. He
speaks to his followers through a small empire of pro-Gulen
newspapers, publication houses and TV stations in Turkey as well as
over the internet. During his victory speech after winning a
referendum on constitutional reform last year, Erdogan took care to
thank his “friends across the ocean”…code-words for the Gulen
movement.
“The government… and the Fethullah Gulen group are the taboos in
Turkey. It is very dangerous to write about these in Turkey and I
write about them,” said investigative journalist Sener said in his
November 2010 CNN interview.
Meanwhile, as he was being led from his house to a waiting police car,
the arrested journalist Ahmet Sik yelled out to the crowd of people
gathered on the street, “If you touch him, you will burn.”
When he was arrested, Sik was in the midst of writing a critical book
about the Gulen movement titled “The Imam’s Army.” Police seized his
book as evidence.
Another author of a recent book slamming the Gulen movement is also
behind bars. In “Devotees on the Golden Horn: Yesterday’s State,
Today’s Religious Movement,” former police commander Hanefi Avci
claimed supporters of Gulen had infiltrated the Turkish police force.
He also accused the “Gulenists” of illegally tapping telephones. A
month after the book was published, police arrested Avci. He now
stands accused of being a member of a leftist terrorist organization,
a charge Avci denies.
Gulen’s supporters deny claims that it is dangerous to criticize the
movement in print.
“This is a smokescreen campaign and this is also a psychological war,”
said Professor Ihsan Yilmaz, a political scientist at the
Gulen-operated Fatih University in Istanbul.
Faruk Mercan, one of Gulen’s biographers, pointed out that other
authors have written dozens of other critical books about the
reclusive evangelist without facing prosecution. And he argued that
the media had often worked in close collaboration with the Turkish
military, when it overthrew four elected governments in coups over the
last 60 years.
“When you look at Turkish history you can see there are very famous
Turkish journalists involved in military coups,” Mercan said. “Now is
the time for post-modern coups in which un-armed forces like the media
or civil society organizations are basically fulfilling a similar
task.”
After dominating Turkish politics for decades, the military and its
allies in secularist political parties have has been in retreat. Since
his Justice and Development Party swept to power in 2002, Turkey’s
fiery prime minister has repeatedly defeated his secularist opponents
both at the ballot boxes and in the courts. Initially, Erdogan made
joining the European Union a top national priority.
“I thought that Turkey was becoming a more liberal place,” said Andrew
Finkel, a Canadian journalist who has lived and worked for years in
Turkey. “I thought that if you dismantle the military apparatus…
that the country would be freer.”
Finkel, a free-lance contributor to CNN, had to defend himself in
Turkish courts in 1999 and faced a possible six-year jail sentence,
after he was accused of “insulting the military” in an article he
wrote. More than a decade later, Finkel said he ran afoul of the new
powers-that-be that govern Turkey.
After spending the last four years writing a column for the
Gulen-owned Today’s Zaman, Finkel was fired last month.
He claimed he lost his job because of his last, unpublished column
written in defense of the jailed journalists.
“I was criticizing my own newspaper for not being vocal enough in the
defense of freedom of expression. I felt we should be doing more about
people seizing books, about being more tolerant even if those books
were against us,” Finkel said.
The editor of Today’s Zaman denied these accusations.
“No newspaper is obligated to work with all of its writers until the
end of time,” wrote Bulent Kenes in an editorial last month. “What has
changed is that some of our writers have come under the influence of
the strong and dark propaganda that is at play and have started to
stagger. Unfortunately, I feel the same way about Finkel.”
The stark polarization of Turkish politics and media is likely to get
worse in the final weeks before parliamentary elections on June 12.
Polls predict Erdogan will win a third term in office. This week, on
World Press Freedom Day, Turkish journalists made another appeal to
Erdogan, to better protect a fundamental democratic right.
From: A. Papazian