Fréderike Geerdink

BANS, JAILS AND SHAMELESS LIES

Censorship in Turkey

EvaTasFoundation

Foreword

While writing this booklet, I frequently had to think about my fellow-journalists in Turkey doing their utmost to report on Turkey’s day-to-day reality for the benefit of their readers and viewers. About those staff and freelance journalists working in newsrooms or doing their work with mud on their boots in the cities, towns and villages and in the country’s fields, valleys and mountains. The more I progressed, the more I had the feeling that I was not doing them justice. Are things really as terrible for the media in Turkey as I have described? After all, the newspapers do also carry good articles, and there is an incredible number of journalists who take their calling seriously and would never write up a lie. It is not all bad, is it?

No, things are not all bad. But this booklet is not an exposition of Turkey’s media landscape. It is intended to provide an understanding of the complex topic of the suppression of press freedom in Turkey. By now everyone knows that there are many journalists in Turkey behind bars on account of their work and that President Erdogan has the media in his increasingly tight grip. How has this come about? What are the mechanisms at play in the press and in politics that have reduced journalism to such a miserable condition in a country that many see as democratic after all?

These mechanisms are not discussed that often. Attention to press freedom in Turkey is frequently paid at case level in articles and reports, or, in other words: a case where a journalist, newspaper or TV station has got into difficulties is discussed, and some background is provided. There is no room in most of the articles for the full picture. No wonder, as the full picture is complex and lies deeply anchored in the structures of the Turkish state and business life. This cannot be explained in a paragraph or two. President Erdogan has heaped up restrictions on press freedom to an unheard of level, but he has been able to do that only because the Turkish political system by definition does not provide room for a free press.

The more respect for my fellow journalists who strive to fight against the patterns of restricted journalistic freedom in Turkey every day, using their pens, cameras and microphones, along with all the associated risks. My dear fantastic colleagues, your work is being seen.

Journalists working for newspapers supporting the government did not want to talk to me for this booklet. I have been in touch with Ceren Kenar of Türkiye but despite initial interest in an interview she stopped getting back to me. I emailed Markan Esayan of Yeni Safak but didn’t get a reply. Merve Sebnem of Sabah answered my request but said she didn’t trust me so refused an interview. Kurtulus Tayiz of Aksam said he prefers to express his opinions only in his columns and not in interviews. TheKebabAndCamel.com, a website scrutinizing foreign newspapers over their Turkey coverage to which also pro-government journalists are attached, replied to personal twitter messages but didn’t want to cooperate.

Neither the AKP government of Prime Minister Davutoglu nor a representative of the government or of President Erdogan is quoted directly in this booklet. The Turkish government does not often react favourably to requests for interviews, and comments on topical issues primarily in speeches, during press conferences or at gatherings where only journalists working for the media on the government side are welcome.

Added to this is that I got into difficulties in Turkey because of my work as a journalist. At the beginning of September 2015, I was put on the plane to Amsterdam under police supervision, following nine years as correspondent in Turkey, the last three as the sole foreign journalist in Diyarbakir, the Kurdish city in the south-east. I was detained while doing my work in the Yüksekova district on the Iranian border. I have been banned from entering the country for the time being. According to the Turkish authorities, I represent a threat to national order, security and health. They will not speak to me.

Prime Minister Davutoglu did speak to the Dutch public broadcaster NOS in February 2015. The Turkish prime minister was in the Netherlands (which held the EU presidency from January to June 2016) for discussions on the refugee crisis, and the NOS touched on the issue of press freedom in the interview. Turkey correspondent Lucas Waagmeester suggested to the prime minister that the media in Turkey were under pressure and that he had also heard that Turkish and foreign journalists saw it that way.

Davutoglu answered: ‘What did you experience? Was there any pressure on you? Whenever I ask any journalist ‘Did you face any problem?’ they always say ‘My colleagues did’. But I want to see someone who had really a problem of freedom of press in Turkey. Look, it is very clear. Turkey is a democratic country. Rule of law is there. Like in the Netherlands, like in all European countries. Last year you observed there were two general elections in Turkey. And I am sure you will admit that during these elections there has been heavy criticism against the government by the opposition, and also by newspapers, and other media. And four out of five of the highest circulation newspapers were not supportive of the government. And in the biggest circulation newspapers, on TV and everywhere, there was freedom of expression, freedom of the press. And this has been observed by international observers as well. So there has not been any limitation regarding freedom of expression.’

Judge for yourself.

Fréderike Geerdink

Leiden, March 2016

CHAPTER 1

Can Dündar: ‘Nobody wants the media to be calm and objective any more’

Security is tight at the entrance to the newspaper Cumhuriyet. A high fence, a guardhouse at the gate in the fence, another guardhouse at the entrance to the building, a bag check just inside the hallway. The office of Can Dündar, one of Turkey’s best known journalists and Cumhuriyet’s current editor, is on the top floor. Does he have his own personal security? ‘That has been offered to me, but I declined,’ he says. ‘I have to be protected not by the state, but from the state.’

It is mid-August 2015 and the large TV on the wall of Dündar’s office is on with the sound turned off. Coalition talks launched following the 7 June elections are on the point of ending without an outcome, and Dündar keeps one eye on the screen. Nevertheless, the news does not appear to distract him from what he has to say. Expressing himself tersely and pointedly, he says: ‘I do not feel like a journalist any more. As a journalist you follow up on a story, you maintain a wide network, and you write a balanced article. But we no longer have any links to the ruling party, the AKP. The AKP wants to get rid of Cumhuriyet, and we want to get rid of the AKP. It’s war, and in a war journalism cannot be done properly.’

The war between the AKP and Cumhuriyet (which means ‘Republic’) broke out in earnest at the end of May 2015. The newspaper had got hold of video footage showing trucks from Turkey’s intelligence service MIT on their way to the Syrian border. These trucks had previously, in early 2014, been in the news when the military police stopped and searched them at the behest of a public prosecutor. The AKP government rapidly intervened, and the trucks were allowed to proceed, with the result that rumours that they were involved in transporting weapons remained unconfirmed. Tayyip Erdogan, still prime minister of Turkey at the start of 2014, swore that they were transporting aid intended for Turkmen living in Syria, an ethnic group closely related to the Turks.

Cumhuriyet’s scoop put paid to that story. The images revealed that under the packages of plasters and boxes of bandages and medicines there was something completely different hidden: artillery shells, mortar bombs and ammunition for automatic weapons.

The newspaper published the images online and carried photographs in the print edition under the headline: Look, the weapons that Erdogan said did not exist.

Erdogan pulled out all the stops to limit the damage. Through the courts – he has the judiciary fully under his control – he imposed a ban on publishing the images and access to the websites showing the images was blocked. And he vowed: ‘Those responsible for making the news public will pay a high price.’ In response to this, the newspaper’s journalists published a front page showing the photographs and signatures of the editorial staff, along with the declaration that they all took responsibility for the scoop and wished to be pursued legally along with their editor.

The state prosecutors focussed on two editors, editor-in-chief Can Dündar and Erdem Gül, the head of Cumhuriyet’s bureau in the capital Ankara. In the end, the two were detained on 26 November 2015 and at the time of writing were still being held under suspicion of espionage and publishing state secrets.

Can Dündar and Erdem Gül were released in the very early hours of Friday 26 February 2016. Turkey’s Constitutional Court had ruled that their detention was violating their rights. The court case against them continues. President Erdogan has stated that he does not accept nor respect the Court’s ruling.

During the interview three months before their arrest, Dündar showed the front pages: the one with the scoop and the one showing the editorial staff taking joint responsibility for the revelations. Dündar: ‘Actually, I hate the fact that we have ended up in this war. It’s an unequal struggle as well. But I’m not giving up; we have to assert the power of journalism. I have to fight, with my pen.’

Born in 1961, Dündar began his journalistic career in 1979, while he was still studying, at the magazine Yanki, which no longer exists. The following year, on 12 September 1980, a military coup was carried out, and the press, which had been reasonably free until then, was subjected to close controls. Yanki, Dündar relates, had good connections with the army and was not targeted: ‘And I was just a student and starting out as a journalist, so they were not going for me. But a lot of other media were banned, and many journalists were detained.’ He recalls that at the time the army disseminated telexes to the media with binding instructions on what had to be published and more particularly what could not. Dündar: ‘If you wrote the wrong thing, they came to confiscate that issue of the newspaper, or they closed it down completely.’

He decided that he no longer wanted to work in this way, resigned and concentrated on his studies, for a time at the London School of Journalism and at the Political Science faculty at a university in Ankara. Only afterwards, in 1988, did he return to journalism, working for TV and various magazines.

Referring to journalism in the years before the coup, he says: ‘At the time, Turkey was ruled mostly by coalition governments, which automatically meant that no one party ever had too much power or was able to apply severe pressure on the press. Moreover, the constitution from the 1960s was still in force, which stipulated unambiguously that the press was free.’

The constitution introduced by the military in 1982 put an end to press freedom, and that constitution, while frequently amended, is still in force. Since then basic freedoms have been restricted with a whole series of provisions and exceptions that also undermine press freedom. Article 28 of the Turkish constitution says: ‘The press is free and shall not be censored.’ This is followed by a whole series of reasons why press freedom may indeed be restricted, namely if national and public safety and public order are at stake, or the basic characteristics of the republic and the indivisible integrity of the state and its borders are under threat. Press freedom may also be restricted if a crime or the publication of state secrets may thereby be prevented, if the reputation or the rights and private sphere of others are thereby protected, if professional secrets as described under the law are endangered, and if the proper functioning of the courts is under threat. Away with freedom of the press.

_ ‘The men of the AKP have become the generals’

‘The strict censorship after the coup lasted for three years,’ Dündar says. ‘The censorship under the AKP government has now lasted 13 years.’ Although he would be the last to say that the press was free again after 1983. It was not, and many journalists paid the price with their lives, mainly Kurdish journalists working for banned Kurdish media, but also for instance investigative journalist Ugur Mumcu of Cumhuriyet, who was murdered in Ankara in 1993 (see page XX). ‘During those years journalists paid a heavier price, now the pressure is much broader than at that time. Every journalist is subject to it now, every newspaper is under pressure. Many of my colleagues have bid farewell to journalism, or they have gone to work for government newspapers so as to have the pressure lifted. Eighty per cent of the media are under the direct control of the government.’

Many liberals in Turkey were full of hope when the AKP came to power 13 years ago. The AKP appeared to be pro-reform and determined on EU membership, and therefore on democratisation. Dündar: ‘I did not share that hope. I believe in the separation of powers, but in Turkey this is not entrenched in the system. If a country is not ruled in accordance with democratic principles and has no tradition of civil participation, then it is dangerous if only one party is in power. This single party wants to get everything under its control: police, army, universities, the justice system and the press.’

The AKP dealt with the army’s power in the first years of its rule – something that was seen by many as a victory for democracy. Dündar: ‘But now the men of the AKP have become the generals. The repression is the same.’

Dündar believes that every sentence written in Cumhuriyet is closely examined by the public prosecutors: ‘And that results in three or four new charges every week. Don’t ask me how many court cases are now pending against Cumhuriyet. I wouldn’t be able to tell you. Whenever I have to appear in court yet again to explain that an article really is journalism, I hear from the prosecutors that they see it as defamation of the president. So it continues, and all these cases drag on for years.’ Most of the cases concern the MIT trucks and allegations of corruption levelled at many senior AKP officials, including Erdogan himself. Articles on the Kurdish question also cause difficulties for the newspaper, and there is a case pending because Cumhuriyet dared to publish the Charlie Hebdo cartoon of the prophet Mohammed.

Is there still good journalism in Turkey? ‘No,’ answers Dündar, without having to think. ‘Even Cumhuriyet can no longer do that. Even we are unable to publish any balanced stories. All journalism has become political instead of social. And it couldn’t be otherwise in the current climate. Once a society is as polarised as Turkey is at the moment, your readers expect you to take a stand. Nobody wants the media to be calm and objective any more. Citizens are scarcely able to demonstrate any more, there are no functioning associations to take their part, freedoms are increasingly restricted, so if there is a newspaper that says Erdogan must go, that is what you want.’

So that is what he does, and he continues: ‘The government has deprived us of our objectivity. That is the point where the political conflict starts. As an editor and as a journalist you have to be brave to stick to it, or rich, ready for a fight or ready to be locked up in prison.’

Asked whether Cumhuriyet will still exist in six months’ time or could possibly be banned, Can Dündar shrugs his shoulders. ‘There will probably be fresh elections, and a lot will depend on them,’ he says. ‘Will the AKP be in power on its own again, or will they still have to look seriously for a coalition partner?’

Suddenly he gets up to turn up the TV’s sound. Prime Minister Davutoglu is giving a press conference to say that the coalition negotiations have finally broken down. There will be fresh elections that are later set down for 1 November 2015. The interview is over, as he has to go back to work. Dündar’s secretary takes a photograph of him and the writer, who is herself under surveillance for ‘making propaganda for a terrorist organisation’ and who later posts the photograph on Twitter. Over the following days various pro-government newspapers pick up the photograph, adding inflammatory, offensive captions on ‘spies’, ‘terrorists’ and ‘provocation’. That is how things are.

_ Terrorists, spies and traitors

There was widespread condemnation directed at the Turkish government when the well known journalist and editor of the independent newspaper Cumhuriyet, Can Dündar, and the head of Cumhuriyet’s Ankara bureau, Erdem Gül, were detained at the end of November 2015 and taken a few days later to the prison in Silivri, to the west of Istanbul. Fifteen Turkish and international press organisations demanded the two be released immediately. The European Commission termed the arrests ‘disturbing’ and made clear it was closely following developments in Turkey. Newspapers all over the world wrote about the case and published editorials on press freedom. Twitter and Facebook exploded with indignation and rage.

It needs to be said out loud, because keeping silent is not an option, but of course it makes no difference. According to the Turkish government, the issue with Dündar and Gül is not one of journalism, but of terrorism, espionage and treason. When Erdogan threatened immediately following Cumhuriyet’s scoop that those publishing the story would pay a high price, he also mentioned the word ‘spies’. So if you count the journalists in Turkish prisons, then for President Erdogan, Dündar and Gül do not count.

If you count the journalists in captivity, then according to the AKP government’s criteria, you end up with zero in any case. At the end of December 2015 Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said in response to questions on detained journalists: ‘At the moment there are journalists in prison in Turkey. But if you look at the charges laid against those remanded in custody, it turns out that they are not being prosecuted on account of their work as journalists. The convicted journalists too have not been convicted on account of their work. The crimes attributed to them are of another order. No single journalist is being prosecuted in Turkey for their work. In the case of the persons you referred to as well, there are other charges laid.’ The latter was aimed at Can Dündar and Erdem Gül, about whom one journalist asked a specific question.

For example, the journalist who has been in prison longest, Hatice Duman, was convicted of ‘activities against the state’, in other words: terrorism. The fact that she never picked up a weapon, but was only editor of the magazine Atilim (Leap) up until her imprisonment in 2003, is not a factor in the Turkish political and legal system.

The same applies to Seyithan Akyüz, a reporter at the Kurdish language newspaper Azadiya Welat, who was locked up for the same offence in 2009. Mehmet Baransu, a journalist for the newspaper Taraf and co-responsible for reporting on ultimately unproven plans to mount a coup against the AKP government, is in jail for ‘setting up a criminal organisation’ and ‘acquiring, publishing and destroying documents related to the security of the state’.

According to the letter of the law, Justice Minister Bozdag may be right, but it is precisely the laws that are the problem. The law on terrorism, often used against journalists, is so vague that any activity could fall under it, including writing a piece. So, whatever international journalist associations, human rights organisations and EU politicians might say, Turkey reacts or declines to do so, or says that no journalists are involved, but rather common criminals or terrorists. So then what’s left to discuss?

The same applies to the hundreds of legal cases against the media and journalists. Perhaps even thousands – no one knows precisely how many there are, as it is simply impossible to keep track. Lawyers working for the independent newspapers Taraf and Cumhuriyet have their work cut out dealing with all the legal cases properly, launching appeals against convictions in time, appearing in court to defend their clients against one absurd charge after another.

Apart from newspapers, individual journalists are charged as well. And once the public prosecutor has you in his sights, whether or not at the behest of President Erdogan, it normally does not stop at one case: there are journalists who do not even know how many cases are currently pending against them and who simply shrug their shoulders in utter impotence.

Many of the cases lead to suspended sentences. Engage in propaganda for a terrorist organisation just once more, comment on a case currently before the courts once more, publish secret documents once more, and you go to prison or have to pay a large fine. The classic way of course of forcing journalists to censor themselves.

_ The AKP’s mouthpiece

But prosecuting and locking up journalists costs time and money and also draws attention, and so the government has increasingly resorted to having reporters and particularly columnists fired. At the end of 2014, the CHP opposition party brought out a voluminous report on this entitled ‘Journalists whose pen has been broken’ (‘Kalemi kiralan gazeteciler’ in Turkish). The CHP estimated that, in the 12 years that the AKP had then been in power, as many as 1,863 journalists had been fired or forced to resign for political reasons.

The peak occurred around the Gezi protests that erupted in Istanbul, Ankara and other cities in the spring of 2013, initially against the demolition of Gezi, a small park in the heart of Istanbul, but by degrees against the increasingly authoritarian policies of Erdogan, prime minister at the time: in the two months following the start of the protests at the end of May 2013, 22 journalists were fired and 37 forced to resign, according to figures from Turkey’s journalists’ trade union, the TGS.

Dismissals of this order do not go unnoticed, but the international community worries about them much less. International journalists’ organizations focus primarily on journalists who have been imprisoned, and for human rights organizations journalists who have been fired often do not fall within their mandate at all. The EU does not get excited about dismissals, and the international media devote at best a small report on their inside pages to dismissed fellow journalists whom hardly anyone outside Turkey knows.

Something that has also not been as extreme as it is now is the number of newspapers falling directly under the government’s control. The most striking example is the daily Sabah, effectively the AKP’s mouthpiece. This newspaper was established in 1985 and was long seen as quality-wise not bad, but it was taken over by the government in 2007, officially because the regulations had not been adhered to during a previous takeover in 2001. Ownership of Sabah was passed to a company of which Erdogan’s son-in-law, Berat Albayrak, was a director. In 2013 Sabah was bought by the Kalyon Group, a company big in project development and construction that has close links to the AKP government. So close, that it was awarded the contract for the construction of Istanbul’s third airport and made large profits from constructing Istanbul’s metrobus system.

Sabah has for long not been anything like a ‘newspaper’. For the Kalyon Group, Sabah is merely an instrument for currying favour with the government and the president as far as possible and securing large construction contracts as a result.

And Sabah is not the only one. There is now an entire series of newspapers, all in the hands of major companies that are also engaged in construction, telecoms, industry and infrastructure, cosying up to the government too closely to be able to earn the hallmark ‘journalism’. Frequently they all carry precisely the same lurid front page headline in the morning, either setting the government in a good light or maligning the opposition.

Are there still journalists in Turkey, and independent newspapers? Yes, there are. But their scope of action is diminishing by the day. The pressure on those taking their calling seriously is huge: dismissal, prosecution or being imprisoned hang like a sword of Damocles over their heads every day.

At the beginning of December 2015, Bülent Kenes, the editor of Today’s Zaman, the English edition of the Turkish daily Zaman, resigned because in his own words he was no longer able to work under all the pressure that was being applied to him and his newspaper. He had been editor since the newspaper was set up in January 2007. On resigning he said: ‘I tried my hardest to do my work to the best of my ability, in order to maintain the newspaper’s integrity and to resist all the pressure from the government as far as possible.’ He continues to work for the newspaper as a columnist.

Kenes gave up after receiving a suspended 21 month jail sentence on being convicted of defaming President Erdogan on Twitter (in 14 tweets that did not so much as contain the president’s name) and facing a whole series of cases initiated by Erdogan, Prime Minister Davutoglu and other government members, and after he had been detained between 10 and 14 October. All the cases concerned his work as a journalist.

Without detracting in any way from Kenes’ personal decision to call it a day, many journalists refuse to allow themselves to be intimidated. This emerged for instance from the words of Vildan Atmaca, a reporter for the Jinha news agency, which focuses its reporting primarily on Kurdish women. On release in December 2015 after being remanded in custody for 46 days, she said: ‘I do not feel intimidated by what I have been through, and I will continue to describe the violations of rights and other problems that people experience.’ She was detained along with a colleague in the eastern province of Van and accused of ‘propaganda for a terrorist organisation’ and of ‘defaming President Erdogan’.

_ Outside the lines drawn by the state

If Turkey remains totally deaf to criticism of the increasing lack of press freedom and, all things considered, the freedom of the press is restricted more every day, what would make a real difference in changing the situation for the better?

Would it help if President Erdogan disappeared from the scene? After all, he is the one who imposes his will on the legal system, he is the one who determines which journalists are fired, detained or maligned, behind the scenes and sometimes out in the open, he is the one who has an increasing number of newspapers and TV channels in his iron grip. Conditions have never been as dire for the freedom of the press in Turkey as they are now.

The statistics show this too, by the way. In the Press Freedom Index of Freedom House Turkey has been listed as ‘not free’ since 2013, dropping from ‘partly free’ in the three years prior to that. In the Press Freedom Index from Reporters Without Borders, Turkey has dropped steadily from place 100 (of 180) in 2002 (the first year the Index was published) to place 149 in 2015.

Nevertheless, simply to state that the end of Erdogan’s dominance will set the press free would bypass the deeper truths of the media landscape and Turkish law. Erdogan may have propelled the suppression of free journalism to an unheard of level, but to do this he is making use of existing systems, the existing dynamics in the media, the existing legal system and the existing constitution.

Irrespective of the government that was in power before the AKP, the press has not been free in the past. Dozens of journalists were murdered in the 1990s, for decades the army had the main say in reporting on state matters in the broadest sense of the term, newspapers and TV channels have never had the chance to operate outside the lines drawn by the state.

There is no reason to believe that things will be different if the AKP government were to vacate the field in favour of a government under the leadership of the parties now in opposition. On the contrary, polarisation in Turkey has reached such a pitch that rejection, and even hatred, of the AKP and Erdogan is now so intense that it could be pay-back time once one of the established opposition parties takes over the reins. Who will guarantee that those now using their pens or cameras to defend Erdogan through thick and thin will not be detained in their turn and locked up for ‘supporting a coup’, for ‘supporting terrorism’ or for ‘membership of a criminal organisation’? No one.

The laws, and above all the mentality, that make it possible to muzzle journalists lie deeply entrenched in the Turkish political system. Just as the AKP is, and just as the old and established political parties, the CHP (the largest opposition party, the Republican People’s Party) and the MHP (the ultra-nationalist Nationalist Action Party) are. The AKP, the CHP and the MHP are similar to each other. They are established on the principles of the republic as it was founded in 1923, including the indivisible unity of the state, including the fundamental principle that every Turkish citizen is a Turk, including the deeply rooted fear that the outside world and the enemies within are always out to weaken and divide Turkey. The laws that the AKP is currently using against journalists are part of that system and of that package of values. Any party that does away with these laws is basically undermining the foundations of the state. Inconceivable. And the use, more precisely the misuse, of these political laws for political advantage? Too tempting, too effective not to be used. Too accepted by Turkish society as well.

For that reason, the underlying dynamic will have to be tackled in order for the press to be truly free. The dynamic of the ownership of media concerns, that of the legal framework in which Turkish journalism has to operate, and even the foundations of the Republic of Turkey as presently constituted.