TRADITION STILL ALIVE IN THE TURKISH PRESS
By Ayse Gunaaysu
HYE-TERT
Aug 19 2008
Turkey
Over the past two years, the Armenian Weekly has published dozens of
interviews with and articles written by Turkish dissident scholars,
journalists, and human rights activists in an effort to provide
a first-hand account of political and civil society developments
in Turkey.
Starting this week, and for the first time in the history of
post-genocide Armenian print media, we take another major step in that
vein: An Istanbul-based Turkish journalist and human rights activist
starts a column in the Weekly.
The bi-weekly column, titled "Letters from Istanbul," will deal
with Turkish political and social issues, in general. The columnist,
Ayse Gunaysu, is a familiar name to the readers of the Weekly. She
contributed articles to the April 24 special publications in 2007
and 2008.
Gunaysu is a professional translator and human rights advocate. She
has been a member of the Committee Against Racism and Discrimination
of the Human Rights Association of Turkey (Istanbul branch) since 1995,
and was a columnist in a pro-Kurdish daily from 2005-07.
The Weekly welcomes her to the long and distinguished list of
columnists in its 75-year history. We appreciate her courage in
accepting our invitation to regularly contribute to the Weekly.
Below is Gunaysu’s first column (next link on front page).
A Tradition Still Alive in the Turkish Press
By Ayse Gunaaysu
It’s not the first time that a mainstream newspaper in Turkey features
a highly provocative front page headline making an unfounded accusation
that would obviously incite public hatred and animosity towards the
"other."
I’m talking about Hurriyet, one of the biggest circulation newspapers
in Turkey. It’s front page headline on Aug. 3 named the PKK–the
outlawed Kurdish armed organization–as the perpetrator of the July 28
bombing in Istanbul that killed 17 people. The news item reported in
detail how one of the nine suspects detained–the "bomber"–entered
Turkey illegally and how he watched, in cold blood, people dye in
the explosion.
What the readers of Hurriyet–whose logo reads "Turkey belongs
to Turks"–couldn’t learn from their newspaper was that, after
a thorough police and then public prosecutor’s interrogation, the
court had detained the suspects not on charges related to the July 28
bombing but because they were members of an outlawed organisation. The
court ruling for the arrest of the suspects had made no mention of the
bombing at all. This was because there was practically no evidence to
accuse any of the nine persons taken in custody of being the bomber or
being linked in any way with the bombing. The daily Taraf, interviewing
the family and the employer of the suspect, reported in its Aug. 5
issue that the alleged bomber did not enter Turkey illegally, but was,
in fact, a textile worker working uninterruptedly in the same factory
for the past seven years and living with his family.
On the same page, next to this news item, Ahmet Altan, son of the
legendary Labour Party member of the Turkish parliament in the 1960’s,
starts his column by saying that the fundamental aim of justice
is not to catch a criminal but to protect the innocent. Justice,
he continues, catches and punishes the criminal for the sake of
protecting the innocent. And the biggest fear of justice is to punish
an innocent. With his usual forceful style, he uses "is" instead of
"should be," just to underline that using the format "should be"
is not enough in formulating such a vital principle and that this
should be an axiom, a categorical, rather than a conditional rule.
However, despite the fact that the court ruling is open to all,
the Minister of Interior and other government spokespersons declared
the suspect as the bomber, without making any reference to Taraf’s
counter-arguments.
Several newspapers, including Taraf and Radikal, reported that
the PKK had disowned the bombing and condemned it. The group’s
spokesperson had clearly stated that the bombing had nothing to do
with the "Kurdish liberation movement," and that they were against
the killing of civilians and believed this looked like one of the
secret operations staged many times in the past.
Hurriyet’s headline and the provocative report supporting the
Minister’s statement is not just an example of poor reporting
practice. This is a country where the ongoing armed clashes for the
past 30 years has triggered, every now and then, mass aggressions
on Kurdish immigrants trying to make a living in the cities far away
from their war-stricken home villages. Several times in the outskirts
of big cities, Kurdish laborers working at terribly low wages without
any social security have been the target of lynch attempts following
rumors that they were linked with the PKK. The buildings of the DTP,
the Kurdish party represented in parliament with 17 deputies, have
at times been attacked by ultra-nationalists, and several years ago a
bus carrying DTP members was destroyed by stone-throwing mobs yelling
anti-Kurdish slogans in Gebze, a district of Istanbul, leaving dozens
of people injured. More recently, a conference hall where the DTP held
a meeting was blockaded for hours by thousands of people, with police
doing nothing about it, and a DTP member dying of a heart attack in
the process. In other words, Hurriyet knew very well that such an
accusation, proven to be unfounded by the court ruling, carried the
potential of triggering a new surge of anti-Kurdish sentiment among
ultra-nationalists.
But, yes, this is not the first time. For decades, semi-official
Turkish newspapers provoked hatred towards the "enemies of the
nation"–sometimes the "communists," many times the "disloyal
minorities," and frequently the "Kurdish separatists." Throughout many
tragic events in the history of Turkey, not to mention the minor ones,
headlines in newspapers have served as a catalyst in stirring frantic
masses to action.
Turkish readers were introduced to the history press’s role in various
incidents of ethnic and religious mass aggression towards non-Muslims
in Rifat Bali’s book Cumhuriyet Yillarinda Turkiye Yahudileri: Bir
Turklestirme Seruveni, roughly translated to Jews of Turkey in the
Republican Period: A Story of Turkification (Iletisim, 1999).
I’m not even talking about the ultra-nationalist and ultra-Islamist
newspapers’ routine hate speech here, but the practice of one of
the biggest dailies in Turkey. The routine hate speech in extremist
publications includes open insults aimed at Armenians, Jews, and
Kurds and personal attacks on religious leaders of minorities. But
while there are laws protecting Turkishness from being insulted,
there are none that protect non-Turks from insult in Turkey.
These are the days when, for the first time in this country’s history,
a legal case is under way against figures who were pointed out by
human rights advocates for years as having dark ties with the "special
war machine" within the state, what is known in Turkey as the "deep
state." These are the times when the DTP, the independent Istanbul
deputy Ufuk Uras, and various other opposition circles are calling for
a deeper investigation that would pave the way for some kind of partial
catharsis and a much better democracy, rather than a superficial
washing of the hands of the most visible criminals already known very
well by some. In the midst of such unpredictability, some people–like
the editors of Hurriyet–further blur the public’s perception by means
of unfounded accusations against the nation’s hate figures such as
the PKK and the Kurds. After all, inciting hatred and animosity is
the best, most efficient, and most sustainable means of manipulation.