October 12th, 2011
An appeals court in
Armenia has
upheld a libel ruling against a daily newspaper. The family of former President Robert Kocharian, took the newspaper Zhamanak to court in December, following its publication of a series of articles, linking Kocharian’s wife, Bella, with major trade in medicines and claiming that their older son, Sedrak, owns diamond mines in India, and had defrauded an Armenian businessman. The pro-opposition newspaper was ordered to pay 3m drams ($8,000) in damages.
March 21st, 2011
On Thursday, Armenian officials
refused to allow four journalists entry to the country. The reporters work for Finnish public broadcaster YLE. Two are from Estonia, one is Finnish and the other is Lithuanian. They were
denied visas by the immigration authorities at the Zvarnots international airport, and
forced to leave the country. They were offered no explanation.
January 19th, 2011
Censorship in Turkey is largely motivated by deep-rooted nationalism. Jennifer Amur explains the issues
(more…)
January 19th, 2011
On the anniversary of the death of Hrant Dink, David Judson reflects on the difficulties facing Turkey’s journalists
(more…)
October 19th, 2010
Microsoft is
extending its program of giving free software licences to non-profit organisations. The initiative was first applied to Russia, after it was discovered that authorities were using software piracy inquiries as a method of suppressing independent media outlets and advocacy groups. The program will now include 500,000 NGOs in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, China, Malaysia, and Vietnam. Prior to the announcement NGOs could only obtain a free licence if they were aware of the program and followed the necessary procedure. According to
Microsoft’s official blog announcement, the unilateral licence will last until 2012.
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Tags: Tags: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, censorship, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, Microsoft, ngo, Russia, software, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam,
June 8th, 2010
A pro-opposition journalist
arrested and detained on 2 June has been released. Ani Gevorgian was covering a sit-in for the daily national newspaper Haykakan Zhanamak when police clashed with protesters and arrested 17 people. Police allege she struck a police officer. However, other journalists maintain that Gevorgian’s reports on local police had angered authorities. A
video of the protests appears to show Gevorgian photographing arrests, before being detained herself. Gevorgian
face charges of assaulting law-enforcement personnel and hooliganism.
April 20th, 2010
The investigation into alleged police involvement in the assassination of Turkish-Armenian journalist
Hrant Dink is to be
reopened.
Dink was the editor of Agos, a bilingual newspaper which challenged the official Turkish version of the 1915 Armenian genocide, which holds that hundreds of thousands of Armenians perished because of hunger and suffering in World War One. He was murdered in 2007 by Ogün Samast. During the trial, concerns were raised over photos which showed Samast posing with Istanbul police officers. In October 2008, the officers were acquitted. At the time the court claimed that it could no “solid and convincing evidence” to convict them. The Provincial Administration Board has now decided that the investigation can take into consideration evidence relating to four police officers, former Police Chief İbrahim Pala, Chief Inspectors Volkan Altınbulak and İbrahim Şevki Eldivan and police officers Bahadır Tekin and Özcan Özkan, although four other officers involved in the case will not be investigated.
March 8th, 2010
How do the Turk’s view Congress’s resolution? Jennifer Amur examines the outrage and anger
A relatively minor victory in the US Congress for Armenians who claim that 1.5 million of their ancestors were killed by the Ottoman Empire in 1915 triggered indignant headlines across Turkish media Friday.
For years, Armenia and the Armenian diaspora have been lobbying Washington to recognise the deaths as genocide, a move they believe will force Turkey into recognising the massacre and, some say, paying reparations with money and land in eastern Anatolia.
The panel vote by the Committee on Foreign Affairs has few if any practical implications, but it caused a backlash from Turkey, which said the result dealt a deathblow to its ongoing normalization process with Armenia.
Turkish newspaper headlines after the vote reflected a predictable outrage; Turkey has long denied that genocide occurred, arguing instead that both Turks and Armenians were killed in civil strife during the last days of the Ottoman Empire.
Daily Hürriyet, one of the country’s largest newspapers, led with news that Turkey recalled its ambassador for consultations immediately after the vote. Before the vote, the Turkish foreign ministry had warned that everything was “on the table,” including recalling the ambassador and cutting back in Afghanistan.
Ambassador Namık Tan’s recall made headlines in several of the country’s dailies, but Milliyet went further, with views from experts who compared the situation to Russia’s recognition of the genocide.
After Russia recognised the genocide in the 1990s, Turkey continued to develop bilateral relations, and ties grew in the following years. The experts in the Milliyet story asked why the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, couldn’t respond similarly to the United States, which often cites Turkey, a NATO member, as an important ally in the Middle East. The US maintains an Air Force base in a Turkish city near Iraq, and Turkey has mediated peace talks between Syria and Israel.
Daily Vatan took a different approach, focusing instead on committee Chairman Howard Berman, who was very vocal in his support for the resolution, and his influence on the vote. The story alleged that the chairman ruled to extend the voting time in order to sway the result.
Other newspapers blamed the result on the Obama administration, which just a few minutes before the session advised the panel to take no action on the resolution. Several dailies asserted the administration was too late and too weak in its opposition.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Friday that the vote was not aligned with the administration’s policy of not intervening in the countries’ negotiations. Part of the plan to establish diplomatic ties is the creation of an expert commission to investigate the genocide claims, but this and several other parts of plan have been criticized by those who say impartiality by “experts” endorsed by either country on this issue is next to impossible.
Jennifer Amur is a Web editor at the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review in Istanbul
