The International Herald Tribune, France
January 6, 2012 Friday
The muzzle tightens in Turkey
by DAN BILEFSKY and SEBNEM ARSU
ISTANBUL
ABSTRACT
Human rights activists say the government of Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey is repressing freedom of the press through a
mixture of intimidation, arrests and financial machinations.
FULL TEXT
A year ago, the journalist Nedim Sener was investigating a murky
terrorist network that prosecutors maintain was plotting to overthrow
Turkey’s Muslim-inspired government. Today, Mr. Sener stands accused
of being part of that plot, jailed in what human rights groups call a
political purge of the governing party’s critics.
Mr. Sener, who has spent nearly 20 years exposing government
corruption, is among 13 defendants who appeared in state court this
week at the imposing Palace of Justice in Istanbul on a variety of
charges related to abetting a terrorist organization.
The other defendants include the editors of a staunchly secular Web
site critical of the government and Ahmet Sik, a journalist who has
written that an Islamic movement associated with Fethullah Gulen, a
reclusive cleric living in Pennsylvania, has infiltrated Turkish
security forces.
At a time when Washington and Europe are praising Turkey as the model
of Muslim democracy for the Arab world, Turkish human rights advocates
say the crackdown is part of an ominous trend. Most worrying, they
say, are fresh signs that the government of Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan is repressing freedom of the press through a mixture of
intimidation, arrests and financial machinations, including the sale
in 2008 of a leading newspaper and a television station to a company
linked to the prime minister’s son-in-law.
The arrests threaten to darken the image of Mr. Erdogan, who is
lionized in the Middle East as a powerful regional leader who can
stand up to Israel and the West. Widely credited with taming the
Turkish military and forging a religiously conservative government
that marries strong economic growth with democracy and religious
tolerance, he has proved prickly and thin-skinned on more than one
occasion. It is that sensitivity bordering on arrogance, human rights
advocates say, that contributes to his animus against the news media.
There are now 97 members of the news media in jail in Turkey,
including journalists, publishers and distributors, according to the
Turkish Journalists’ Union, a figure that rights groups say exceeds
the number detained in China. The government denies the figure and
insists that with the exception of four cases, those arrested have all
been charged with activities other than reporting.
Last month, the Turkish justice minister, Sadullah Ergin, blamed civic
groups for creating the false impression that there were too many
journalists in jail in Turkey. He said a new plan to enhance freedom
of expression this year would alter perceptions.
In court Wednesday, a defiant Mr. Sener, looking gaunt and pale,
accused the police officials he had investigated of setting him up.
”It has been 11 months that I have not been given the chance to utter
a single word to defend myself,” he said, speaking to friends during
a brief intermission. ”I have been a victim in a revenge operation –
nothing else.”
The European Human Rights Court received nearly 9,000 complaints
against Turkey of breaches of press freedom and freedom of expression
in 2011, compared with 6,500 in 2009. In March, Orhan Pamuk, a Turkish
writer and Nobel laureate, was fined about $3,670 for his statement in
a Swiss newspaper that ”we have killed 30,000 Kurds and one million
Armenians.”
Human rights advocates say they fear that with the Arab Spring lending
new regional influence to Turkey, the United States and Europe are
turning a blind eye to encroaching authoritarianism there. ”Turkey’s
democracy may be a good benchmark when compared with Egypt, Libya or
Syria,” said Hakan Altinay, a senior fellow at the Brookings
Institution, a U.S. research organization. ”But the whole region will
suffer if Turkey is allowed to disregard the values of liberal
democracy.”
Among the most glaring breaches of press freedom, human rights
advocates say, was the arrest of Mr. Sener, 45, a German-born reporter
who was working for the newspaper Milliyet at the time of his arrest.
In 2010 he won the International Press Institute’s World Press Freedom
Hero award for his reporting on the murder of Hrant Dink, a prominent
Turkish-Armenian journalist who was assassinated in Istanbul in 2007.
Mr. Sener said he believed that he was in jail because he dared to
write a book criticizing the Turkish state’s negligence in failing to
prevent Mr. Dink’s murder. His defense team says the prosecution’s
case rests on spurious evidence, including a file bearing his name
that an independent team of computer engineers concluded had been
mysteriously installed by a virus on a computer belonging to OdaTV, an
anti-government Web site. He was held for seven months without
charges. If convicted, he faces up to 15 years in jail.
”Nedim Sener is being accused on the basis of rumors and fantasies,”
said his lawyer, Yucel Dosemeci. ”He is being targeted to create a
culture of fear.”
In late December, Turkey drew fresh criticism after the police
detained at least 38 people, many of them journalists, saying they had
possible links to a Kurdish separatist group. But critics say dozens
have been arrested whose only offense was to have expressed general
support for the rights of Kurds, a long-oppressed minority here.
Over the past year, the government has been arresting prominent
critics like Mr. Sener, as well as dozens of current and former
military personnel, intellectuals and politicians who have been linked
to what officials say was a plot to overthrow the government by an
organization called Ergenekon.
Four years into the investigation, no one among the more than 300
suspects charged in the case has been convicted, even though courts
have heard more than 8,000 pages worth of indictments, many of them
based on transcripts of surreptitiously recorded private telephone
conversations.
Advocates for press freedom say that the government has also moved to
mute opposition by using punitive finesand by intimidating the
ownership of leading media companies.
In a celebrated case in 2009, the Dogan media group, a large
conglomerate, was saddled with a $2.5 billion fine by the Tax Ministry
for unpaid taxes. Dogan officials say privately that the real reason
was that its publications had given prominent attention to a series of
corruption scandals involving senior government officials.
The European Union has expressed concerns about the chilling effect of
the fine, which was negotiated down to about $621 million, officials
familiar with the case say, as part of a tax amnesty issued last year.
Now, some journalists who work for the Dogan group say there is an
unwritten rule not to criticize the governing party. Mr. Erdogan, who
has previously called on his supporters to boycott the Dogan group,
strongly denied any political motives behind the fine.
After Mr. Erdogan swept to power in 2002, human rights activists
initially lauded him for expanding free speech. But after an
unsuccessful attempt by the secular opposition to ban Mr. Erdogan’s
party in 2008, critics say, Mr. Erdogan embarked on a systematic
campaign to silence his opponents.
They say the curbs on press freedom also reflect the fact that Turkey
no longer feels obligated to adhere to Western norms at a time when it
is playing the role of regional leader and its talks on joining the
European Union are in disarray.
Mr. Sener and Mr. Sik were defiant in March as police officers took
them into custody at their homes before television cameras. ”Whoever
touches it gets burned!” Mr. Sik shouted, referring to the Gulen
movement, whose members, analysts say, have infiltrated the highest
levels of the country’s police and judiciary.
In March, the unpublished manuscript of Mr. Sik’s book on the
movement, ”The Army of the Imam,” was confiscated by police
officers. But the police were unable to stop its publication on the
Internet, where at least 20,000 users downloaded it.
While the Internet has become the main weapon against censorship, more
than 15,000 Web sites have been blocked by the state, according to
engelliweb.com, which tracks restricted pages. For more than two years
until last autumn, YouTube was banned on the grounds that some videos
on the site were insulting to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of
modern Turkey.
The monitoring agency last summer called on Web sites to ban 138
words, including ”animal,” ”erotic” and ”zoo” in English and
”fat,” ”blonde” and ”skirt” in Turkish. It is a tribute to
Turkey’s still vibrant media culture that the prohibition inspired an
online competition to create the best short story out of the banned
words.
From: Baghdasarian