At least eight people were killed and dozens more were injured in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, on Saturday following clashes between authorities and protestors gathered in support of the defeated presidential candidate, Levon Ter-Petrosian.
Two resolutions, one introduced in the House in January and in the Senate in March, seek to recognise the events of 1915 as genocide, but the passage of either could jeopardise the US’s political relationship with Turkey. The resolutions are pending approval from committees in both houses.
Turkey, as an American ally, has allowed the US to use its military bases and has played a significant role in American efforts in Iraq. Both the Bush administration and the Turkish government have condemned the move, and though the resolutions are non-binding, if passed, they could be interpreted by Turkey as acts of hostility.
Turkey, in its quest for EU membership, has denied that what happened between 1915 and 1923 to the country’s Armenian population is genocide. Some things, however, are undisputed: in 1915, during the rule of the Ottoman Empire, authorities forced the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Turkey’s 1.75 million Armenians. The estimated number of Armenians that died ranges between 300,000 and 1.5 million.
The Armenian National Committee of America is one of the most outspoken campaign groups in support of the resolution. ANCA spokeswoman Elizabeth Chouldjian said the issue at hand is a moral one. ‘America needs to be on the right side of the issue,’ she said. ‘Not characterizing genocide as genocide is dangerous. We have to take every precaution to end the cycle of genocide.’
The hope, she said, is that if the US recognises the killings as genocide, Turkey would be forced to take a more open and honest approach in re-examining its history.
‘Recognition is not going to change the facts of what happened, but it can certainly relieve the emotional burden on Armenians and other victims of genocide,’ said Ronald Suny, a professor and historian at the University of Michigan. ‘We think of recognition as the first step of clearing the air and letting historians and politicians deal with the issue.’
But Andrew Finkel, an Istanbul-based journalist, said that the issue of addressing Armenians’ sense of injury and grievance won’t eradicate problems that hinder a discussion from taking place within Turkey. ‘It would provoke a tit-for-tat counter reaction,’ he said.
In fact, he said, a US resolution would make the struggle for human rights and free expression in Turkey more difficult. Within this overtly political debate lies the question of historical accuracy and historians’ and scholars’ ability to have open discourse about contentious issues within the country. Free expression in Turkey is curbed by draconian articles in the country’s penal code, but pressure from the US won’t effect the sort of change that the country needs. ‘The more important resolution is that Turks themselves face up to their history,’ Finkel said.
The Bush administration takes a similar stance. The state department has said the administration doesn’t want to politicise an issue that should be resolved through discussion within Turkey. On 11 April, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Daniel Fried said: ‘The United States doesn’t deny any of the killings. They’re an established historical fact, but historians need to discuss the details of what happened, why it happened, who did what. This needs to happen, and it needs to happen as a process of genuine national reconciliation.’
To date, 38 states in the US and 19 countries worldwide have officially recognised the genocide. The resolution in the House of Representatives is pending a decision from the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, and the resolution in the Senate is pending in the Committee on Foreign Relations.
In the 2024 World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders, Turkey ranked 158th among 180 countries. Just days before the release of this year’s index, 37 journalists remain imprisoned in the country, according to the Media and Law Studies Association (MLSA), an NGO defending freedom of the press in Turkey.
However, evaluating violations of freedom of thought and press solely based on the number of jailed journalists would be insufficient, as pressure on journalism intensifies daily in a number of ways.
Even though the first four months of the year are not yet over, 60 journalists have been detained so far. Among them, 25 have been arrested. These numbers are according to monthly reports from the Kurdish journalist organisation Dicle Firat Journalist Union (DFG). One of those arrested was Joakim Medin, a reporter for Swedish newspaper Dagens ETC.
On 27 March, Medin was taken into custody on charges of “membership in an armed terrorist organisation” and “insulting the president”, and just one day later, he found himself in a Turkish prison cell. On Wednesday this week, he was given an 11-month suspended sentence for “insulting the president”, and remains behind bars while he awaits a trial on the second charge. Additionally, three foreign journalists who entered Turkey for reporting purposes have been deported this year alone, according to DFG.
For some journalists, the repressions have been fatal. Within the first two months of the year, Kurdish journalists Aziz Köylüoğlu and Egît Roj were killed in Turkish drone strikes targeting Syria’s autonomous Rojava region – controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) – and Iraq’s Kurdistan region. Over the past 10 months, seven Kurdish journalists have been killed in Turkish airstrikes (some confirmed, some suspected). Despite the gravity of these killings, the international media have largely ignored what human rights organisations have described as war crimes.
Another journalist arrested this year is Yıldız Tar, editor-in-chief of KaosGL.org, known for reporting on violations against the LGBTQ+ community. Detained in Istanbul on 21 February, Tar spoke to Index on Censorship from prison, via his lawyer.
Tar said that the judiciary is criminalising journalistic work, and that interviews with women’s rights defenders and LGBTQ+ activists are treated as criminal evidence.
“For a long time now, the judiciary has failed to define journalism as an activity tied to the public’s right to be informed,” Tar wrote to Index. “Instead, it is framed within a security-focused paradigm. Unfortunately, we cannot talk about an independent judiciary in Turkey. The political power’s anti-LGBTI+ stance also influences the judiciary.”
With World Press Freedom Day in mind, Tar said: “We have no choice but to defend journalism. Journalism is not only journalists’ concern. When we are imprisoned, both the public’s right to information and our mission to be the voice of the voiceless are violated. The oppression and injustices remain unheard. All institutions must act accordingly to this reality.”
Beyond the record number of imprisoned journalists, detentions have become almost systematic in Turkey. Many detained journalists are released under judicial control measures such as regular reporting to the police, travel bans or house arrest. These increasingly common practices not only function as punitive measures but also significantly hinder journalistic work. Measures that should be exceptional have become the norm. For example, a single social media post may result in house arrest, and criticising the government might be enough to trigger a travel ban.
One of the many journalists who has been detained multiple times is Kurdish reporter Erdoğan Alayumat. With several lawsuits and investigations pending, Alayumat is under judicial control and must go to the police headquarters to give his signature weekly in Istanbul.
Speaking to Index, Alayumat said: “If you’re Kurdish and critical, journalism in Turkey becomes nearly impossible. I was arrested in 2017 and spent one year in prison. I was acquitted of all charges. Then, I was arrested again last year and later released. How easy do you think it is to work under the shadow of ongoing trials and investigations?”
Alayumat explained that judicial control functions as punishment, even without a trial.
“Living under judicial control is very difficult. Dozens of journalists are in prison, but hundreds more are forced to live under such restrictions. I couldn’t leave Istanbul for a long time because I wasn’t allowed to leave the city. This made it impossible to do my job. I also have a travel ban, and no one knows when it will be lifted. Going to the police station every week is exhausting – especially when you have to face the same officers who raided your home and detained you violently,” he said.
He added that this situation has had a severe psychological and economic toll and that journalists in Turkey continue their work at a great cost.
Last year, 36 journalists were sentenced and 53 acquitted in Turkey, and these trials resulted in nearly 100 years of cumulative prison sentences.
In addition to grotesque judicial repression, journalists in Turkey also face police violence. Especially during street protests and public demonstrations, journalists documenting police aggression often become victims of it themselves.
Following the arrest of Istanbul Metropolitan mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu in March, several journalists covering mass protests in Istanbul were injured due to police violence. One of them was İlke TV reporter Eylül Deniz Yaşar.
Speaking to Index, Yaşar recounted both her own and her colleagues’ experiences of police brutality.
“While documenting the police’s disproportionate response to protesters, we were physically assaulted. One officer sprayed tear gas directly into my eye at close range. I couldn’t open my eye for half an hour, and my vision remained blurry for hours. I feared permanent damage. Another journalist’s nose was broken. Someone else suffered head trauma. I’m not even counting verbal abuse and harassment,” she said.
She believes the police are now trying to build a “new press regime” in Turkey.
“Police are becoming the architects of this regime. They want to decide where, what and how we film. It’s getting harder to go out in the field,” she said. “I’m one of many journalists frequently detained. My home has been raided twice – home raids have become routine.”
Yaşar added that the repression journalists face in Turkey reminds them of “World War documentaries”.
“Like the terrifying scenes from those times. It feels like we’re living in a dystopian horror film,” she explained.
As Erdoğan’s regime seeks to suffocate journalism with both judicial stick and police baton, critical journalists in Turkey continue to resist – armed with the power of the camera and the pen, at great personal sacrifice.
Hybrid regimes, illiberal democracies, democraship, democratura: these are all slightly terrifying new terms for governments drifting towards authoritarianism around the globe. We have been used to seeing the world through the binary geopolitics of the more-or-less democratic free world on one side, and the straightforward dictatorship on the other. But what is Hungary under Viktor Orbán? Or Narendra Modi’s India? And, as the world comes to terms with the reality of President Trump’s second term, will America itself become a hybrid regime dominated by tech oligarchs and America First loyalists?
At a recent conference in Warsaw held by the Eurozine, a network of cultural and political publications, Tomáš Hučko from the Bratislava-based magazine Kapitál Noviny, told the dispiriting story of his country’s slide towards populist authoritarianism. The Slovak National Party, led by ultranationalist Prime Minister Robert Fico, drove a coach and horses through media and cultural institutions, he explained, beginning with the Culture Ministry itself. Fico then changed the law to take direct control of public radio and TV. The heads of the Slovak Fund for the Promotion of the Arts, National Theatre, National Gallery and National Library were all fired and replaced with party loyalists. A “culture strike” was met with further attacks on activists and critics of the government. “There were constant attacks on the journalists by the Prime Minister including suing several writers,” said Hučko.
Fellow panellist Mustafa Ünlü, from the Platform 24 (P24) media platform in Turkey spoke of a similar pattern in his country, where President Erdoğan’s government has withdrawn licences from independent broadcasters.
It is tempting to suggest that these illiberal democracies are a passing political trend. But the problem, according to several Eurozine delegates, was that such regimes have a tendency to hollow out the institutions and leave them with scars so deep that they are difficult to heal. Agnieszka Wiśniewska from Poland’s Krytyka Polityczna, a network of Polish intellectuals, sounded a note of extreme caution from her country’s eight years of rule under the Catholic-aligned ultra-right Law and Justice Party. Although the party was beaten by Donald Tusk’s centrist Civic Coalition in last year’s elections, the damage to democracy has been done. “There is the possibility of reversing the decline,” said Wiśniewska. “But the state media was turned into propaganda media.” In part, she blamed the complacency of politicians such as Tusk himself: “Liberals didn’t care enough,” she said.
Writing on contemporary hybrid regimes in New Eastern Europe, an English-language magazine which is part of the Eurozine network, the Italian political scientist Leonardo Morlino identifies a key moment in July 2014 when the Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán began using the expression “illiberal democracy”.
He later clarified what he meant by this: that Christian values and the Hungarian nation should take precedence over traditional liberal concern for individual rights. For Morlino, however, Hungary is not the only model of hybrid regime. He provides an exhaustive list of countries in Latin America (Bolivia, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico and Paraguay) with “active, territorially widespread criminal organisations, high levels of corruption and the inadequate development of effective public institutions” where democracy is seriously weakened. Meanwhile, in Eastern and Central Europe he recognises that Russian influence has created the conditions for hybrid regimes in Armenia, Georgia, Moldova and even Ukraine.
The term “democratura” comes from the French “démocrature” and combines the concepts of democracy and dictatorship. In English this is sometimes translated as “Potemkin democracy”, which in turns comes from the phrase “Potemkin village”, meaning an impressive facade used to hide an undesirable reality. This is named after Catherine the Great’s lover Grigory Potemkin, who built fake show villages along the route taken by the Russian Empress as she travelled the country.
It is tempting to suggest Donald Trump is about to usher in an American Democratura, but none of these concepts map neatly onto the likely political context post-2025. The USA cannot be easily compared to the fragile democracies of the former Soviet Union, nor is it equivalent to the corrupt hybrid regimes of Latin America. It is true that Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon liked to talk about “illiberal democracy” but more as a provocation than a programme for government.
And yet, there is an anti-democratic tone to the language used by Trump’s supporters. In the BBC series on US conspiratorial ideology, The Coming Storm, reporter Gabriel Gatehouse noticed the increasing prevalence of the right-wing proposition that the USA is a “constitutional republic”, not a democracy. This line of thinking can be traced back to an American ultra-individualist thinker, Dan Smoot, whose influential 1966 broadcast on the subject can still be found on YouTube. Smoot was an FBI agent and fierce anti-Communist who believed a liberal elite was running America as he explained in his 1962 book, The Invisible Government, which “exposed” the allegedly socialist Council on Foreign Relations.
Such rhetoric is familiar from the recent election campaign, which saw Donald Trump attacking Kamala Harris as a secret socialist and pledging to take revenge on the “deep state”.
But there are worrying signs that Republicans under Trump will be working from an authoritarian playbook. As The Guardian and others reported this week, an attempt to pass legislation targeting American non-profits deemed to be supporting “terrorism” has just been narrowly blocked. Similar laws have already been passed in Modi’s India and Putin’s Russia.
Trump has consistently attacked critical media as purveyors of fake news. He has suggested that NBC News should be investigated for treason and that ABC News and CBS News should have their broadcast licences taken away. He has also said he would bring the independent regulator, the Federal Communications Commission, under direct Presidential Control. In one of his more bizarre statements, he said he wouldn’t mind an assassin shooting through the “fake news” while making an attempt on his life.
Whether a Trump administration emboldened by the scale of the Republican victory will seriously embark on a project to dismantle American democracy is yet to be seen. The signs that the President has authoritarian proclivities are clear and he has made his intentions towards the mainstream media explicit. Hybrid democracy may not quite be the correct terminology here. We may need a whole new lexicon to describe what is about to happen.