Sunday’s Zaman, Turkey
May 16 2010
Defending freedom of the individual and freedom of the press
ANDREW FINKEL [email protected] Columnists
ErtuÄ?rul Ã-zkök, the former editor-in-chief and now columnist of the
Hürriyet newspaper, has called me personally to account in what is on
the surface a peculiar piece. He likens the DoÄ?an organization he
works for to the far-right, Holocaust-denying, anti-immigrant,
anti-gay, anti-everything party in France, the National Front. And he
seems to take pride in comparing his own employer to the
ultra-conservative head of that party, Jean-Marie Le Pen. At least
that is the curlicue logic of his argument, and far be it from me to
rescue him from his own eloquence.
It all has to do with Al Capone.
But let’s step back many months to when the brouhaha all started. I
was commenting in this column on an editorial in The New York Times
which accused the Turkish government of unbecoming conduct. The paper
rushed to the side of the DoÄ?an Media Group and said that the outsize
tax bill which its parent company faced was a clear attempt to
interfere with press freedom. I certainly did not argue with the
assumption that the fine was politically motivated. However, I said
that the DoÄ?an group would be far more worthy of sympathy if it used
the power of its media more responsibly and if it had not been so
cavalier about other people’s rights of expression.
You don’t have to look very far to find a telephone directory’s worth
of examples. I myself interviewed Aydın DoÄ?an for Time magazine (with
Ã-zkök in the room) when he said he felt no obligation to oppose a law
proposed by the then-Ecevit government. That law, vetoed by the
president, was a devil’s pact which allowed the government more
control over the press and Internet but allowed the DoÄ?an group to
control a greater share of broadcast media. That the DoÄ?an group has
used their media might to enjoy a non-media commercial advantage is
not something even Mr. Ã-zkök disputes. When an (illegal) wiretap
revealed the Hürriyet editor demanding a large incentive package for a
cardboard box factory, Mr. Ã-zkök asked what the fuss was all about. He
wore two hats, one as editor-in-chief, the other as officer of a DoÄ?an
company.
When I asked Mr. DoÄ?an about the frequent accusations that his
newspaper seemed to make their front pages available to a `deep
state,’ he seemed to shrug his shoulders, which I interpreted at the
time to suggest that even he couldn’t entirely control what was
printed. Emre Uslu, a columnist for this newspaper, recently recalled
an incident in which not Hürriyet but the DoÄ?an-owned Milliyet helped
scupper reconciliation talks between Ankara and the Iraqi Kurdish
administration in 2004. It did so by reporting over three days an
entirely bogus story which cited a (fictional) meeting in the State
Department where how the Justice and Development Party (AK Party)
would almost certainly quiescence if the Kurds in Iraq annexed the
city of Kirkuk was purportedly discussed. Even more alarming, Milliyet
had a readers’ representative at the time who came to the conclusion
that his paper had been manipulated. When he tried to print even a
limited retraction, he was immediately dismissed from his job. I don’t
think anyone can hold Hürriyet responsible for pulling the trigger
that killed Armenian newspaper editor Hrant Dink or issuing death
threats against Orhan Pamuk. However, I would not describe as
`responsible’ the reporting which led to both men going on trial and
which resulted in such an atmosphere of hate.
Going back a decade
To set the record straight, I have to report my own family’s battle
with Hürriyet, which occurred over a decade ago. My wife was mortified
when she opened the paper one day to read the entirely fabricated
story that she had been apprehended stealing from state archives. She
is a respected Ottoman historian and if that libel had been allowed to
stand unchallenged, it would have ruined her career. I can only
speculate on Hürriyet’s motives for running such a piece. It followed
hard on the heels of attacks against my own reporting for CNN on
Abdullah Ã-calan’s flight to Italy. My wife wrote to the CEO of
Hürriyet asking `woman to woman’ for some understanding of the
circumstances which her paper had put her and to request an apology
that would set the record straight. Instead she received a very long
letter from Hürriyet’s chief columnist Oktay EkÅ?i accusing her of
behaving with the imperial arrogance of the British occupiers of
Ä°stanbul. That Mr. EkÅ?i is the chairman of the Turkish Press Council
was snide insult to a very real sense of injury. In the end she
cleared her name in front of a Turkish judge, who awarded her modest
civil damages.
All this explains my inability, hard as I try, to shed even crocodile
tears for the dilemma in which the DoÄ?an group now finds itself. As I
wrote last September:
`I concur with the Times that it is wrong for the Turkish government
to enlist the tax authorities to wage political battles. And I feel
concern for the future of some excellent colleagues in the DoÄ?an media
outlets who are loyal to the integrity of their profession and whose
only interest is finding enough space to do their jobs properly. But I
share the widely held distaste for a newspaper group that has
pioneered a style of journalism that has been damaging to Turkish
democracy and which is more concerned about narrow interest than free
discourse.’
A small observation
At that point, I recalled how the US federal prosecutors tried Al
Capone on charges of tax evasion when they couldn’t make a case for
racketeering. It is an observation that might still be wandering
around cyber space unattended, had it not been for the fact that the
prime minister made a very similar observation a few days later in an
interview with the Wall Street Journal. I have, in this column,
criticized the prime minister’s intemperate use of language — and I
suppose that criticism holds true even when he appears to be
paraphrasing words I have used myself. I am certainly not going to try
to read the prime minister’s mind nor interpret what he meant. I can
only explain myself, which is what Ã-zkök in his recent column has
asked me to do.
He does so in a very peculiar context.
Mr. Ã-zkök cites another DoÄ?an columnist and jurist, Rıza Türmen, who
has also leapt to his employer’s defense. Both refer to a 2007
European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) refusal to overturn a ruling of
a French court. The case concerned a novel called `Le Procès de
Jean-Marie Le Pen.’ The plot was inspired by the actual murders
committed by National Front militants against two men of North African
descent and held Le Pen ultimately accountable for those crimes. A
vote for the National Front was no better than a vote for Al Capone.
Le Pen successfully sued both the author and (a point Mr. Ã-zkök gets
wrong) the publisher of Libération newspaper, which had reprinted the
offending passages to protest the lower court’s ruling.
Mr. Ã-zkök evokes the authority of the ECtHR to denounce the Turkish
prime minister and the commentator who put words in his mouth. `To use
the term `Al Capone’ even against a politician accused of racism has
been ruled defamatory by the ECtHR. ¦ So much for Western standards of
journalism,’ he writes. Where, he adds, do I stand now?
Well, for a start, if you read Mr. Ã-zkök’s article, you would think
that the ECtHR regards any comparison of anything or anyone to Capone
to be a violation of individual liberties. But that’s just bananas.
Take a look at the Strasbourg court’s ruling. For a start, the court
ruled on four passages from the book deemed defamatory (and I quote):
1. that Mr. Le Pen led `a gang of killers’ and that those `people [who
voted for him] would have voted for Al Capone too’
2. that the Front National used violence against anyone who left the party
3. that behind each of Mr. Le Pen’s assertions `loomed the spectre of
the worst abominations of the history of mankind’
4. that he was a `vampire’ who thrived on the `bitterness of his
electorate, but sometimes also on their blood, like the blood of his
enemies’ and that he was a liar who used defamation against his
opponents to deflect accusations away from himself.
This is very different matter from pointing out the irony that both a
Turkish newspaper proprietor and Al Capone faced cases for income tax
evasion. In fact, it is chalk and cheese.
It is worth noting that some judges absented themselves from the
Strasbourg verdict, which maintained that since the book was a work of
fiction, the author was entitled to exercise artistic expression. But
let’s take the matter one step further. You are a newspaper man in a
country which has a poor record of defending freedoms of the press.
You live in a country where a Noble Prize-winning novelist has been
put on trial and where another novelist has been tried for sentiments
expressed by a character in her novel. You live in a country whose
citizens face discrimination from the European far right because of
their religion and the color of their passport. You live in a country
where there have been frequent prosecutions of writers of books and
newspapers. One of the methods of defending the freedom of publication
has been for those concerned to put their names down as publishers of
anthologies of `banned’ articles in the hopes of swamping the courts
and making it impossible for them to pursue violations of freedom of
speech. Where do your responsibilities and your instincts lie?
Would you defend a novelist who attacked (in however unseemly and
hyperbolic fashion) a racist and crypto-fascistic party and show some
solidarity with a fellow newspaper which stood up for his right to
speak? Perhaps not, if you were truly concerned about the equality of
every individual before the law. Or would you rejoice that the courts
had managed to silence an over-excited critic? I don’t blame Mr. Ã-zkök
for standing by his proprietor nor for feeling angry that the tax
authorities have been unjust. But he does so as an executive defending
his company, not as a committed journalist desperate about the truth.
16.05.2010