Turkey and Thailand: Two elections, different outcomes

One poll remains deadlocked while another has seen the population vote for a change of direction

It’s been a long two decades of dwindling freedoms in Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan. But his control is teetering on a ledge. The election couldn’t have come at a worse time for Erdogan, with his questionable response to the earthquakes and soaring inflation winning him a fresh batch of critics. Last Sunday Turkey headed to the polls. And the winner was… nobody. With neither former Index Tyrant of the Year Erdogan nor opposition leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu reaching the 50% threshold needed to win the presidency, it’s back to the voting booths again.
 
In the week before the election, PEN Norway’s Turkey adviser shared a stack of interviews with Index, which made for sombre bedtime reading. Eleven representatives from the country’s major political parties discussed the state of free expression — or lack thereof — which Jemimah Steinfeld wrote about.
 
In one interview, Zeynep Esmeray Özadikti, who is a candidate for MP from Turkey’s Worker Party, wrote about the silencing of the LGBTQ+ community, hoping that if she as a trans woman is elected, it will be an important step: “In Turkey, the LGBTI+ community cannot use their freedom of expression in any way and are criminalised. Rainbow-themed products are banned, rainbow flags are seized in protests, Pride parades and indoor meetings are banned. Associations and organisations working for LGBTI+ rights are targeted and threatened.”
 
We could fill a whole magazine with stories about Turkey’s rocky relationship with free expression, starting with the repression of LGBTQ+ rights and Kurdish communities, and moving onto the scores of journalists who have been locked up. In our latest issue, our Turkey contributing editor Kaya Genç took a deep dive into one example of a newsroom going against the propaganda-led mainstream, Medyascope. If you want up-to-the-minute news on what’s going on in Turkey, their website is a good place to start (thank goodness for Google translate for those of us who haven’t yet set our Duolingo to Turkish).
 
In the run-up to the election, Turkish youth have been scouring YouTube for information that doesn’t come with a side-helping of propaganda, and the Turkish government has pulled out all the stops in silencing journalists reporting on the earthquakes, rather than focusing on… well… disaster relief. They haven’t shied away from blocking social media platforms either.
 
What happens next is important. If Erdogan wins, what will such a close call do to the state of Turkey’s freedoms? The first-round vote landed at 49.51% for Erdogan and 44.88% for Kılıçdaroğlu, and let’s remember who’s got the media on their side. The second round of voting is set for 28 May, and while Index would absolutely never ever back a specific candidate, we are hoping to see democracy prevail over autocracy.
 
Further east, and another country is undergoing a seismic change at the hands of an election held last Sunday. Where Turkey is in political limbo, Thailand is out the other side. Or is it? The country has had a military-backed government since the 2014 coup, but Sunday’s vote sent Thailand spinning off in a new direction, with the progressive Move Forward Party’s Pita Limjaroenrat likely to take the driving seat of a coalition. The party is breaking Thailand’s big taboo with plans to reform the monarchy, which is all the more poignant considering the democracy protests that started in 2020, when demonstrators asked for exactly that to happen. Under the current lese-majeste law, criticising the monarchy usually comes with a stint behind bars of up to 15 years. Thais asked for democracy. They asked for progression. They asked for the right to insult the king without spending over a decade in jail. And if all goes smoothly from here, that’s exactly what they’ll get.
 
But it is a big “if”. Not only will the House of Representatives (members of which were given their places through Sunday’s election) vote on who will be prime minister, so too will members of the Senate, who were selected by the military. And that’s where the story of Thailand’s democracy could come unstuck.

Turkey’s elections: “No rule of law anymore”

The country’s human rights landscape has disintegrated since Erdogan took over in 2003

Turkish citizens are heading to the polls this Sunday to vote in the most fiercely contested election in years. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who came to power in 2003, is fighting for his political survival amid economic turmoil and wrath over the handling of the February earthquakes. He is being challenged by Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, a retired bureaucrat who is backed by a six-party National Alliance. 

One month before the elections PEN Norway’s Turkey adviser travelled to Istanbul to interview 11 representatives of the major political parties (including Erdogan’s) and question them on issues surrounding free expression in Turkey.

The interviews, which they shared with Index, are a sobering look at how Turkey’s human rights landscape has disintegrated in that time (with the exception of Bülent Turan, from Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, who goes as far as denying that any journalist is in prison because of their work). The testimonies are tied together by common threads – what attacks have happened and how they have happened (very much over time, not linked to just one single moment or one single piece of legislation). The rule of law comes up time and again. “There is no rule of law in Turkey anymore and the independence of the judiciary has been destroyed,” Dr. Canan Kaftancıoğlu, the Istanbul regional chair of the Republican People’s Party, says bluntly.

They are, unsurprisingly, most damning of Erdogan himself. The lawyer Bahadır Erdem, vice chair of the Iyi Party, one of the most important components of the National Alliance, says Turkey is being ruled by “a one-man regime” and this “system has pushed our country into dire straits”.

But the interviews also strike a note of optimism, a sense that all is not lost. Strong grassroots organisations still exist, as lawyer Züleyha Gülüm, MP for the People’s Democratic Party, points out. And these grassroots organisations, combined with an alliance that has come together around a commitment to improve rights, mean that Turkey’s fate could all change this weekend. Bülent Kaya, legal affairs chairman of the Saadet Party, said that if the National Alliance is successful “everyone will breathe a sigh of relief”. Erdem said: “Once we amend the constitution, an independent judiciary will follow. The press will be independent. We will fully implement the freedom of opinion of individuals. People will be completely free both in social media and as an author in the works they create and write, as an artist in the films they shoot, in the works of art they act in, in the works of art they create. This is the sine qua non of democracy. It’s as natural as breathing.”

Below we share one of the interviews in full, a powerful testimony from Zeynep Esmeray Özadikti, a trans woman who is candidate for MP from Turkey’s Worker Party. She outlines the immense struggles faced by those who are LGBTQI and by women. 

Turkey’s devastating earthquake is no excuse to grab rights

As I write, over 20,000 people have now been confirmed dead in the aftermath of earthquakes in Turkey and Syria. Hundreds of thousands of people are missing, buildings are unsafe, what limited public infrastructure that has survived is completely overwhelmed and it’s cold. Freezing cold. The survivors, who in too many cases have lost everything, are too scared to enter buildings for fear of aftershocks and too cold to sleep in tents – so at night they walk to try and keep warm, clutching their loved ones to them.

Our news is filled with these images, these stories of heartbreak and death. And most importantly the personal stories behind the headlines. The sheer scale of the devastation is too much to comprehend and yet we have to. This disaster requires a global response, it tests our humanity and our commitment to each other – wherever we live.

Which is why a free media is so important, why journalists are not a hindrance to rescue efforts but part of those efforts and why this is a time to protect everyone’s access to media sources – not restrict them.

The journalists who are reporting from the disaster are chronicling the devastation in real time. Without fear, they are telling the stories that we need to hear and the world needs to see in order to mobilise the help that they need.

The same journalists will be those who ask the questions of authorities in Turkey and Syria as to why in the initial days after the earthquake, help was not immediately forthcoming for every community.

But a disaster of this nature, in the hands of governments who lean towards authoritarianism, becomes an opportunity for oppression.

Already, the Turkish Parliament has authorised a state of emergency in 10 Turkish provinces. Under the Turkish constitution, a state of emergency provides for the suspension of basic rights and freedoms. Initially, the new powers granted to President Erdogan will last for just three months but as a difficult set of elections approaches for Erdogan, time will tell how soon he returns those rights and freedoms we all seek to protect. The Turkish government also imposed a temporary Twitter shutdown after criticism of its repsonse.

While the world now watches on as help and aid arrives in Turkey, it will soon cease to be a feature of the nightly news and it is in those moments when the global attention is elsewhere that emergency powers for a disaster become desirable tools for control.

The rebuilding of Turkey will be a truly international endeavour, but as well as replacing the lost buildings and homes, the freedoms and rights which have been suspended also need to be returned and media freedom needs to be reinstated with immediate effect.

The shock waves from Turkey’s Twitter restriction

Monday’s devastating earthquakes in Turkey have led to the loss of thousands of lives but one of the government’s responses to the disaster is troubling. At midday on Wednesday, Twitter was restricted in Turkey.  The quake caused a number online connectivity issues, but this was not the reason that users couldn’t get onto Twitter. It was a direct response to political criticism.

This is according to Alp Toker, founder and director of NetBlocks, which tracks cybersecurity and digital governance.

“Up until Wednesday, we were tracking connectivity issues in real time, on the ground,” Toker told Index, describing regions in southern and central Turkey that have been laid waste by earthquakes. Knowing which regions are offline and have infrastructure impact, is useful for rescue operations, he explained.

“Suddenly, on Wednesday afternoon, we observed filtering of Twitter — which was unexpected — and we were able to verify that this was unrelated to the connectivity issues happening in the south, and that this was targeted censorship of Twitter.”

NetBlocks uses the same techniques that they developed to track internet shutdowns, validating and reporting in real time. It verified the information through its monitoring network, checking the connections, the ability to connect, and looking at the underlying reasons for the service not working. On closer inspection, they discovered that the filter had been applied at ISP (internet service provider) level using an advanced technique that’s been deployed before in Turkey, preventing users from accessing Twitter. This is the 20th such incident that NetBlocks has tracked in Turkey since 2015.

“These mass censorship incidents happen after political scandals, they happen after terrorist attacks, they happen in a variety of circumstances — also during military operations in the south — but it’s the first time that they’ve been applied in the aftermath of a natural disaster,” Toker said.

Turkey’s government has faced intense criticism following the earthquake. Some of those critics, including journalists and academics, have been detained and arrested.

“It was intentional mass censorship applied at a time when people are really using Twitter and relying on it to seek help, and to ask for equipment supplies, but also to get in touch with loved ones and see if friends and family are okay. The idea that such a vital tool would be withheld is shocking,” Toker said. “There are reports that people under the rubble use Twitter to connect with the outside world. So it’s literally a lifeline in that context.”

When phone lines are overloaded, he said, using Twitter to reach out for help makes sense.

“All of these use cases have been an absolute reminder that freedom of expression, the right to impart knowledge, is more vital than ever in a crisis and must not be curtailed.”

By midnight, 12 hours later, the restriction was lifted. It came following an outcry, and NetBlocks’s role in validating and reporting the restriction.

What very nearly happened, Toker said, was an internet freedom protest outside the IT Ministry’s office in response to the restriction. Twitter was back before the planned protest took place.

The restoration of Twitter might seem like a success story, but it came at a price. While people were fruitlessly refreshing their timelines, something else was happening.

“Turkish authorities had a meeting with the head of policy at Twitter,” Toker said. “They pressured Twitter into complying more thoroughly with their own takedown demands in future, and they spoke about what the Turkish State perceives as disinformation, but which many others perceive as legitimate free speech and criticism.”

Toker said that Elon Musk’s company is once again in the fray of the Turkish filtering and censorship regime. And as the disaster response continues in the wake of the earthquake, criticism will continue on and offline.

“The big question now is whether Turkey is going to increase its demands for censorship of individual posts from Twitter, and whether Twitter is going to comply with that,” he said. “If Twitter does comply, it’s going to be the first time the company has really engaged in that level of censorship since Elon Musk’s takeover.”

If Twitter complies with Turkey, he said, the door might also be cracked open for censorship demands from other countries.