24 Dec 2025 | Europe and Central Asia, News, Turkey
When I met Can Dündar in London, he was in a jovial mood. His book, I met my killer (Ich traf meinen Mörder) had been published in Germany to much acclaim.
When we met, Dündar had just flown in from Berlin to London to present the Index Arts Award to Mohamed Tadjadit, a slam poet imprisoned in Algeria for reciting his poets during the Hirak protests. Dündar is a friend of Index on Censorship and was one of the judges for the 2025 Freedom of Expression Awards.
Dündar, a dapper man in his early 60s, is a fearless journalist, once the editor of Turkey’s largest newspaper Cumhuriyet. But he’s now in exile. He was enjoying the anonymity of London when I saw him. Dündar has lived in Berlin since 2016, and he is sometimes attacked in the capital’s street verbally by Turks who want to prove their loyalty to the regime. They film themselves while doing it, so that they can post videos on social media. But as Dündar explains, he would rather be in Germany because he also enjoys huge support and it’s a place he’s given a serious hearing.
People in Germany care about Turkey precisely because of the large Turkish diaspora (the biggest in the world) who first came over in the 1950s as Gastarbeiter. Increasingly Turkish-Germans are in positions of influence in politics, business and the arts.
Dündar’s new book describes in vivid detail the kind of mafia state Turkey has become – it’s more Godfather than Le Carré. In it, Dündar tells the story of how he uncovered the full extent of Erdoğan’s ties with organised crime.
Dündar had to leave Turkey for good after being jailed for his journalism and then attacked in a botched assassination attempt on a square outside the Istanbul Palace of Justice while his case was being heard. He was only saved because of the quick-thinking of his wife Dilek who took hold of the collar of the killer’s shirt when she saw him point a gun at close range towards her husband.
He landed in trouble with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government because he published a story the Turkish authorities would far rather had never come to light – that the Turkish secret services were smuggling arms and rocket launchers, under the guise of humanitarian aid across the border to IS and other extremist groups in Syria during the war there in 2015.
It all began when lorries carrying arms were stopped by local police and prosecutors near the Syrian border. Excited that they had uncovered an illegal gun-running operation, they filmed the search and the arms they found (thousands of mortars and tens of thousands of machine gun rounds). An accompanying secret service man was hauled out of the lorry and handcuffed on the ground. There then ensued a huge battle between Turkey’s various police and secret services forces – and an intervention by the government’s justice minister who knew about the illegal arms delivery and ordered it to continue. The saga is all described in gripping detail in the book.
Dündar’s newspaper was passed the video footage and he ran the story despite knowing he would be prosecuted. Dündar spent three months in jail and later a court sentenced him to 27 years in absentia. But the government decided that a jail term was not enough. They needed to silence him forever and officials asked their links in the underworld to murder him.
It was at the end of 2020 after four and a half years in Germany when Dündar received a letter from a man in jail in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The man wrote: “I was given the contract to kill you. Now I’m prepared to tell you everything I know.” The man’s name was Serkan Kurtulus.
In the end Kurtulus had refused to carry out the hit and it was another man who did it. But Kurtulus was able to tell him who had ordered the job, and the deep connections between the government and Turkish organised crime. Kurtulus had also been on the gun-running trips to Syria. He told Dündar he didn’t want to be deported back to Istanbul and thought that getting his story out would give him some sort of protection. As Dündar writes he was put in the uncomfortable position of being able to potentially save his would-be killer’s life.
I Met My Killer also includes three other interviews Dündar carried out with repentant whistleblowers. One man who ran a gun-running business described how, in the two and a half years up to August 2015 enough weapons were sent over the border to Syria by the Turkish government to arm 100,000 men. His business bought them in Serbia, Croatia and Bulgaria and transported them to IS and others with the support of government officials and the Turkish secret service.
I talk to Dündar later over email when I’ve read the book in German and ask what the reaction in Turkey has been to the revelations about the links between the government and organised crime and just the sheer numbers of weapons that went to jihadists in Syria.
“The aspect of the matter is even more frightening that the scandal itself: there is complete silence. It is as if these things never happened, even discussed. It is impossible for my book to be published in Turkey. Those who write about the subject are punished. Fear grows like a veil over the truth,” Dündar told me.
And in Europe and the EU?
“Nothing so far…. Apart from the astonished looks of readers in the German cities I visited for the readings. I have not seen any reactions yet.”
Dündar is convinced the Americans and Europeans knew what was happening and didn’t do anything about it, either because it wasn’t in their interests or they were powerless to do so.
We talk about journalism. There are far fewer journalists in jail now than there used to be, Dündar says, because the independent press has gone out of business. People like him are in exile and others have simply chosen different jobs. Those that remain are afraid. A colleague lives with a little bag packed by the door, awaiting the day that he will be picked up by the police. I say it reminds me of Julian Barnes novel The Noise of Time about Shostakovich waiting to be arrested by Stalin’s secret agents.
One imprisoned journalist who has fascinated Dündar is Fatih Altaylı. He is no friend though, because Altaylı was once a loyal supporter of the Erdoğan regime, even prepared to change polling number for Erdoğan when he was prime minister to make him look more popular. But Altaylı became disillusioned and compared Erdoğan and his cronies to Ottoman Sultans, reminding them of the fate of Sultans (murdered and plotted against). The regime was not impressed.
“It’s symbolic that someone, even someone who supported Erdoğan once upon a time, could be a target,” Dündar told Index
The police arrested Altaylı, but he continued to report from Istanbul’s Marmara prison where he was being held, because he had access to prominent people who were in the cells with him: judges, lawyers, opposition politicians. His colleagues broadcast his YouTube channel but with an empty chair, where he used to sit, and a narrator reading out his investigations. Unfortunately, now the authorities have silenced him completely and his reports from prison are no longer broadcast.
Dündar is currently working on another documentary with Germany’s international news service Deutsche Welle, about the academic and judicial system in the USA and why it has suddenly been put at risk.
“It’s like the re-release of a film we saw 20 years ago in Turkey… It sounds strange, but I am as a Turkish exile meeting with ‘American exiles’. The country which was a [safe] harbour for exiles until now has suddenly started sending its own exiles. The political epidemic is spreading round he world”.
Finally we talk more about the situation in Turkey itself: the opposition mayor of Istanbul who has been locked up since March and has now been sentenced to more than 2,000 years in prison. Dündar laughs at how ridiculous this. The mayor is in prison because he would be the likely successful challenger to Erdoğan in upcoming presidential elections.
And as for Turkey, has he learnt more about his home country after writing his book? “I knew about the intelligence services collaboration with the mafia, but I saw more clearly that the government had transformed power into a mafia state.”
Dündar is looking for an English publisher of Ich traf meinen Mörder. I hope he finds one. The story is a shocking one, and the English-speaking world should take note.
17 Dec 2024 | Afghanistan, Argentina, Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Georgia, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Magazine Contents, Music, Nigeria, Palestine, Russia, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States, Volume 53.04 Winter 2024
Contents
19 Dec 2023 | Germany, Israel, News, Palestine, Russia, United States
The rules on what we can and cannot say have exponentially increased since Hamas’ attack in Israel in October and Israel’s response. Just ask Masha Gessen. Over the last few days the Russian-American writer has found themselves at the centre of a controversy over an award they were due to receive.
It was a play of two acts. Act one, disinformation. The well-respected site LitHub ran an article with the heading “Masha Gessen’s Hannah Arendt Prize has been canceled because of their essay on Gaza.” The problem was it hadn’t been cancelled. Gessen pointed that out, saying they had only been approached by one journalist and that as a result “inaccuracies pile up”. LitHub had to issue what every editor dreads – a correction.
The reality – act two – was more prosaic. The main sponsor withdrew their support of the ceremony. It still went ahead, just at a different venue, on a different day. This past weekend Gessen received the Hannah Arendt prize for political thought for their work documenting Russian war crimes. It was a slimmed-down event; Gessen had a police escort.
Even in the absence of more in-your-face censorship, this still feels very problematic, part of a broader ecosystem in which people are punished in some way for what they say. And all of this because of a few lines in a New Yorker article in which Gessen compared Gaza to Nazi-era ghettos.
I should state here, for whatever relevance it holds, that I am Jewish. My family tree lost most of its branches because of the Holocaust. I’m sensitive to both inaccurate comparisons with the Holocaust and to Jewish suffering and prejudice writ large. Like myself, Gessen was born into a Jewish family and is a descendent of those murdered in the Holocaust. Their piece was not, as the furore would have made me assume, a 3000-word smear piece on Israel. Instead it was a thoughtful response to Germany’s Holocaust memory, which criticised Israeli policy at points – as we all do. Gessen’s words were precise, measured, balanced. The root of the controversy was when Gessen says “the ghetto [Gaza] is being liquidated”, a part that is far from throwaway and instead accompanied by caveats and qualifications. That it could cause such outrage exemplifies everything wrong with how we are approaching conversations right now. We simply can’t handle views that we find confronting or upsetting. Our instinct is to silence and to over-correct.
We’re ending 2023 in a bad place. In every region of the world democracies are under attack, as a Freedom House report concluded. Argentina has elected a foul-mouthed president who denies the number of disappeared from the previous dictatorship. Donald Trump could be president in the USA again in 2024, even if from a jail cell, and he’s already threatened his critics. In once liberal Hong Kong Jimmy Lai, a pro-democracy activist and publisher, is on the stand in what could be best labelled a show trial. Russian troops are far from losing in Ukraine. And all the while countries like Germany, which are meant to promote free speech, are getting in tangles over anything they think could remotely be perceived as antisemitic. It’s a very bad place indeed.
Of course we didn’t arrive at the Gessen moment overnight. Our inability to move an inch from whatever camp we’ve pitched our flag has been going on for some time, with Israel-Palestine and other conflicts and ways we identify.
But staying with Israel-Palestine, who exactly does it benefit? Our fear that some language might be labelled antisemitic means we’re looking in the wrong direction. Attacks on Jews are rising around the world. In Germany itself, the far-right AfD party won its first mayoral victory at the weekend. Anti-Muslim crimes are surging too. There are plenty of real, ugly attacks that we need to tackle. It’s just they’re not coming from Gessen or the New Yorker. To suggest as such distracts.
If the goal is to lessen hatred, to create more tolerant societies, the approach of trying to block out speech we don’t like doesn’t work, not least because the instinct itself is authoritarian. Pro-Palestinian voices are being silenced, as are Jewish ones. It’s minorities who always lose out.
In Gessen’s acceptance speech for the award, which was not their original one, they spoke of the power of comparisons: “Comparison is the way we know the world. And yet we make rules about things that cannot be compared to each other,” they said, adding that the Holocaust has been put in a place where it is seen as an exception, unlike anything else, beyond likening. Gessen was clearly not going to be silenced. Instead they chose the moment to pause and reflect, to open up a conversation about how language is used and to challenge the rules around speech that we’ve currently been told to obey. There are lessons to be learnt here as we head into 2024.
7 Dec 2023 | Chile, News, United States
It is oddly appropriate that Henry Kissinger should have died in the year that commemorates the 50th anniversary of the 1973 military coup in Chile — the cataclysmic overthrow of its democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, and the end of a fleeting attempt to create a socialist society without resorting to violence, a first in the history of revolutions.
As national security advisor to President Nixon, Kissinger ferociously opposed Allende and destabilized the Chilean government by every means possible. He considered that, were Chile’s peaceful movement for social and economic justice to succeed, American hegemony would suffer. He feared that the example might spread and affect the world balance of power.
And Kissinger not only fostered the ousting of a democratically elected foreign leader, he subsequently supported the murderous regime of General Augusto Pinochet, even as the dictatorship was massively violating the human rights of Chile’s citizens, most egregiously in the cruel and terrifying practice of “disappearing” opponents.
It is these desaparecidos whom I think about now, as Kissinger is feted by a shameless bipartisan Washington elite. All these years after the coup in Chile, 1,162 men and women are still unaccounted for. The contrast is telling and significant: Kissinger will have a memorable, almost regal, funeral, while the victims of his policies have yet to find a small place on Earth where they can be buried.
If my first thoughts, when I heard the news about Kissinger’s death, were filled with memories of my missing Chilean compatriots — several of them had been dear friends — soon enough a flood of other casualties came to mind: the countless dead, wounded and disappeared in Vietnam and Cambodia, in East Timor and Cyprus, Uruguay and Argentina. The Kurds Kissinger betrayed; the apartheid regime in South Africa he bolstered; the Bangladeshi dead he belittled.
I always dreamed that a day would come when Kissinger would stand in a court of law and answer for his crimes.
It almost happened. In May 2001, Kissinger was sojourning at the Ritz Hotel in Paris when he was summoned to appear before French Judge Roger Le Loire as a witness in the case of five French nationals who had been disappeared during the Pinochet dictatorship. Rather than take that occasion to explain himself and vindicate his reputation, Kissinger immediately fled France.
Nor was Paris the only city in which he was pursued. Spanish Judge Baltazar Garzón unsuccessfully requested that Interpol detain the former U.S. secretary of State to answer questions in the ongoing trial of Pinochet for human rights violations (the general was arrested in London but finally remanded to Chile, where he died, never convicted, in 2006).
Nor did Kissinger deign to respond to Argentine Judge Rodolfo Corral about the infamous and lethal U.S.-backed Operation Condor in Latin America, or to Chilean Judge Juan Guzmán about the murder of American citizen Charles Horman in the days just after the coup (a case that inspired the Costa Gavras film “Missing”).
And yet I nursed the impossible dream: Kissinger in the dock. Kissinger held accountable for so much suffering. A dream that vanished with his death.
The more reason for that trial to happen in the court of public opinion. The disappeared of Chile, the forgotten dead of all those nations Kissinger devastated with his “realpolitik,” are crying out for justice.
I do not wish that Kissinger may rest in peace. I hope, on the contrary, that the ghosts of those multitudes he damaged beyond repair will trouble his memory and haunt his history.
Whether that happens depends, of course, on us, the living, on the willingness of humanity, amid the din and deluge of praise and eulogies, to listen to the hushed, receding voices of Kissinger’s victims and vow never to forget.
This article was originally published by the LA Times and republished here with permission
