After two executive editors of Turkey’s Taraf newspaper resigned last month the media furore that followed was so intense that there was hardly a conversation between Turkish journalists in the ensuing days that didn’t include the word “Taraf” in it.

Indeed, since the furore, the newspaper’s circulation has grown from 50 thousand copies to 65 thousand a day.

The paper was established in November 2007 and was initially edited by a trio of authors and journalists: Ahmet Altan, a popular novelist, columnist and public intellectual stood alongside Alev Er, whose stature among journalists may be said to equal that of Alan Rusbridger in England. Yasemin Çongar, previously the Washington correspondent of the mainstream Milliyet came to Istanbul to contribute to the project and helped hire journalists.

Alev Ar had resigned from the paper in 2009 but it was Ahmet Altan and Yasemin Çongar’s resignations last month that created the real controversy. Altan said he wanted to write his new novel and that his resignation was planned before he even began working for Taraf. No explanation was offered for Çongar’s resignation.

In its five years, Taraf has divided opinion between those who praise its courage and integrity, and others who find grave fault with Taraf’s machinations.

The main theme of Taraf’s journalism had been its ardent anti-militarism — something welcomed by many of those placed in the opposite ends of the political spectrum. In an era where generals rebuked, sued and criminalised journalists who dared question issues sensitive to the General Staff, and Kurdish, Islamist and leftist newspapers, and news magazines could be closed in the course of a few days, simply because an official had filed a complaint, Taraf was seen as a welcome voice among establishment newspapers which largely succumbed to the militarist line.

Indeed, part of the motivation behind the foundation of Taraf may be said to be the publication of the so-called “coup diaries” of a retired marine corps general by Nokta magazine, where the later-imprisoned journalist Ahmet Şık worked as a reporter. The general who was claimed to have written the diary, called Nokta’s cover story a fabrication; according to his defence team Nokta had collaborated in a conspiracy against Turkish military.

Fourteen days after it ran the story, the police raided Nokta’s offices, confiscating all its computers. On 19 April 2007, merely a fortnight after it published the diaries, the final issue of Nokta was published.

The last editor of Nokta was Alper Görmüş who was imprisoned for his journalistic work in 1995. Görmüş later became a contributor at Taraf, where he has had a column since the paper’s inception. When I asked him whether Taraf had contributed to the extension of freedom of expression in Turkey, he said the paper was a living example of “how it is impossible to achieve freedom of expression without a fight.”

Görmüş praised Altan and Çongar’s journalism and said theirs was an example of journalistic courage which brought an end to the conformity among many high profile figures in the Turkish media. “Five years ago there was a consensus among journalists that certain stories were not allowed to be reported. This confederacy of silence created a comfortable setting for journalists who didn’t do their job properly,” he said. According to Görmüş, it is the task of the journalist to expose secrets, and state secrets for that matter.

“Many writers feared the might of authorities and so they imposed self-censorship,” he said. “So, when Taraf exposed state secrets, its editor Altan was quickly labeled as a ‘traitor’ in mainstream media.”

When I spoke to Taraf columnist Yıldıray Oğur, previously an editor at the newspaper, he mostly agreed with Görmüş’s views. He described Taraf as Turkey’s first truly liberal newspaper. “In its five year long history, the contributors of the paper had included liberals, Islamists, socialists, social democrats, Kurds, headscarved women, Armenians, Jews, Greeks, Americans, Germans, theologians, transvestites and an eighteen year old girl. This is something unprecedented in the history of Turkish journalism,” he said.

However, not everyone is a Taraf fan. Esra Arsan, an associate professor of journalism at Istanbul’s Bilgi University, said Taraf’s initial support for freedom of expression had waned in time. Arsan said the paper remained silent when court cases following Nokta’s and Taraf’s exposés of coup diaries extended to journalists and media workers. “When you look at how they behaved when Ahmet Şık and Nedim Şener were arrested, it must be said Taraf has a regrettable record,” she said. “They didn’t sufficiently criticize the government when it arrested journalists en masse. Instead they went along with the argument that problems about due process of law were an extension of Turkey’s law system. They published transcripts which were illegally obtained by the police, which is not ethical.”

According to Arsan, Taraf should have been more careful in its exposés of secrets, especially in cases when the material used in its pages violated privacy of the accused individuals. She also said Taraf contributed to the legitimisation of abuses of individual freedoms because it collaborated with state prosecutors and police officers while reporting on the coup cases.

Lately it wasn’t only the generals implicated in the coup trials who found fault with Taraf’s editorial line: prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan himself became the focus of Taraf’s intense criticism. In his daily articles, Altan portrayed Erdoğan as a figure similar to Vladimir Putin.

Altan’s criticisms were so passionately written and so hectoring in their tone, that when he announced his resignation, saying he wanted to write a new novel, there were articles in the Turkish press that argued Erdogan had lost his greatest, and most talented, critic.

Amberin Zaman, The Economist’s Turkey correspondent, wrote a eulogy for Taraf where she claimed Altan’s pieces had functioned as a lightning rod for other writers who found it much easier to write articles critical of Erdogan after Altan led the way.

“From now on, the most minuscule of criticisms against the state will be problematic,” she wrote.

But according to Oğur, after Taraf’s five year long history of journalism, it is no longer possible for either politicians or generals, to be immune from the scrutiny of the press. “Taraf had torn apart the curtain which protected the state apparatus,” he said. “And there is no turning back.”

Kaya Genç is a journalist and novelist

The post The trouble with Taraf appeared first on Index on Censorship.

The literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin would be less cheerful to witness a practice like this — how can you work “polyphony” and “unfinalizability”, as an artist, when you are not allowed to create Forsterian, “round characters”, one may ask. Instead, under laws that make it very hard for Turkish authors to compose “proper” let alone experimental pieces of fiction, what you get (in Bakhtin’s terminology) is a “synthesised” discourse where “mutual addressivity” and “mutual engagement” are but distant dreams.

Let’s be clear about this: This is not a intellectual exercise in literary theory. Turkish author Mehmet Güler has very recently received a prison sentence for producing propaganda for Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in his novel Ölümden Zor Kararlar (“Decisions Harder Than Death”). For anyone familiar with Don Quixote, it was also ironic to see Güler’s photograph in Turkish Daily News; for the interview he is seated just behind a table in a cafe, decorated with windmills on its walls. So one may ask whether it is possible that he may be an incarnation of Cervantes or even, tragically, the knight of the sorrowful countenance? The Ottoman navy had crippled the left arm of Cervantes; the Turkish government is more civilised — it sentenced Güler to 15 months in prison.

Adding insult to injury is the fact that Kurdistan Workers Party, the terrorist organisation Turkey is fighting against and for whom Güler is accused of propagating, is slowly fading from the Turkish political scene, increasingly losing its legitimacy as a political force in the country for the attacks they have organised against innocent Turkish soldiers who were tragic casulties of a conflict beyond their control (military service is compulsory in Turkey). In a recent televised interview, Chief of General Staff İlker Başbuğ clearly expressed how, after more than 30,000 fatalities, the fight against the PKK continues. But is this the right way to struggle against the PKK? By imprisoning polyphony, a novelist or a short story writer?

The 29-year-old journalist İrfan Aktan, who worked as a reporter at large for Newsweek’s Turkish edition, had been sentenced to 15 months in prison merely for using a quote from a PKK militant. Ferhat Tunç, a popular musician and political figure in Turkey, faces up to 15 years in prison for comments he made during a concert. When we compare these three cases, Tunç seems to have given the greatest offence — perhaps the legislators believe, à la Nietzsche, that music is the greatest art form. Perhaps journalistic reportage and fiction are not as effective. It is a matter of taste, of course.

Mehmet Güler is not the first author to face legal action for a character in a work of fiction. In 2006 the popular Turkish novelist Elif Şafak was tried for her novel, The Bastard of Istanbul, where she allegedly propagated the Armenian claims of genocide (she was later acquitted from the charges). I was also kindly invited to the prosecutor’s office a few years ago to explain the “rationale” behind my short story, “The Most Surprising Fantasies and Wishes of an Occidentalist”, where a fictitious admirer of the British Imperialism would be happy to see Turkey transformed into an exact copy of Britain. At times, this character finds himself wishing “with profound sorrow” that “those respectable members of the House of Lords with their constant and colorful wags and crowns on their heads” ruled the Turks. When I explained, in a scholarly rhetoric, that this narrator had a simply ironic function, the prosecutor, fed up with thousands of cases about books and articles and poems and booklets brought to him by anonymous persons, gave a sigh of relief and that was the end of that. For all this, I find fault with the current government, headed by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan rather than the prosecutors who are simply executing the legislation composed by the parliment.

The fault is always with the rulers and not with the millions of everymen in this country. Last year I served as a librarian in the Turkish Gendarmerie for my military service. The most popular book in this little library, a favorite among my fellow gendarmes, was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. “Now, this is not very different from a solider’s life, is it?” a friend commented after reading the book. Perhaps it is a similar transcendence of the boundaries of the fiction form that leads the lawmakers to create legislation that charge novelists and poets. It should be illegal to prosecute poems. It should be illegal to imprison novelists. Or else, Cervantes will still be roaring at all this and the joke will be on us.

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