Gökhan Biçici is a Turkish reporter and was one of the most active reporters of the 2013 anti-government Gezi Park protests in Istanbul. While covering the protests Biçici was beaten severely by police and then dragged through the streets. Observers in apartments overlooking his arrestcaptured footage of the attack, which quickly went viral.
“The censorship in Turkey is stronger now than ever,” Biçici told Index. “There is no period in history where political power had reached this level of domination over the media. And there is no period in history where disinformation has reached these levels.”
Biçici’s arrest and the Gezi Park protests became a symbol of the state of democracy and free speech in Turkey.
The wave of public engagement was huge, Biçici says, and after the protests were over and people left the streets, he sought to build something more permanent.
“It was necessary to go through the resistance protests and realise the size of the censorship and the imposition of self-censorship and the corruption in the press.”
“In these resistance protests, millions of people went out to the streets. Hundreds of thousands, or even millions, went out to the largest square in Istanbul, Taksim Square, and when they came back home a penguin documentary was on TV instead of the truth,” he said.
“The younger generation was politicised by Gezi. At the same time, their relationship with the social media became politicised, too. All conditions were ready to appear citizen news agency in Turkey.”
Dokuz8Haber aims to be just that.“Dokuz8Haber is a foundation that brings together the journalists and the national reporters of digital activism, in a unified network,” he said.
Launched in March 2015, Dokuz8Haber is a journalism network that gathers various independent citizen journalism outlets to create a common newsroom. Volunteers and citizen journalists send their stories to professional editors, and the news stories are then broadcasted domestically and internationally via Dokuz8Haber. They understand the importance of disseminating news in new, modern ways – using social media, video and live-stream coverage and translation to get information out to the people of Turkey.
They have also organised numerous training programs for potential citizen journalists in all regions in Turkey, to train a network of reporters around the country.
“Freedom of expression is a right we will never give up on,” said Biçici. “It’s an nonnegotiable right and it’s also a pursuit that requires hard work. Personally speaking, it’s what I’ve spent my whole life working on. This is why I chose this career.”
Journalists Erdem Gül and Can Dündar (Photo: Bianet)
On the eve of a trial scheduled to start on March 25, 2016, a coalition of leading international free expression and press freedom groups condemns the criminal case targeting Cumhuriyet journalists Can Dündar and Erdem Gül, and calls on authorities in Turkey to drop all charges against them.
Dündar, editor-in-chief of Cumhuriyet, and Gül, the newspaper’s Ankara representative, face accusations of aiding a terrorist organisation, espionage and disclosure of classified documents for reports in Cumhuriyet claiming that Turkey’s intelligence agency secretly armed Islamist rebel groups in Syria. Although those claims previously had been reported widely by other media outlets in Turkey, a criminal case against Dündar and Gül was initiated after Cumhuriyet published a report on May 29, 2015 that included a video purportedly showing Turkish security forces searching trucks owned by the country’s intelligence agency that were travelling to Syria containing crates of ammunition and weapons.
Dündar and Gül were detained in November 2015 and held for nearly 100 days in Turkey’s Silivri Prison until the country’s Constitutional Court ruled that the journalists’ pre-trial detention violated their human rights. Both journalists were subsequently released pending trial following a criminal court order. Nevertheless, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan vowed that he would neither recognise nor obey the Constitutional Court’s ruling. Moreover, prominent supporters of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) demanded that Dündar and Gül be returned to prison and they called for Turkey’s citizens’ right to turn to the Constitutional Court to redress violations of their human rights to be curtailed.
The persecution of these two journalists – a gross abuse of government authority in clear violation of the right to press freedom – is by no means an isolated case. At least 13 journalists languish behind bars in Turkey in direct retaliation for their work, and recent months have seen the state seizure of opposition media outlets – including the March 2016 takeover of the Zaman newspaper and Cihan News Agency. Recent months have also seen numerous violations of the right to press freedom in Turkey, including, among many others, the continued misuse of defamation and insult law, as well as anti-terrorism law, to target and silence those who publicly express their dissent from government policies.
Members of the coalition accordingly urge Turkish authorities to drop all charges against Dündar and Gül, and to free all other journalists currently detained in connection with their journalism or the opinions they have expressed. The coalition further renews its previous call on lawmakers in Turkey to take steps to reverse the country’s trend toward authoritarianism, and its call on governments of democratic countries to pressure the Turkish government to end its crackdown on independent media and to meet its human rights commitments under both domestic and international law.
– The International Press Institute (IPI)
– The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)
– Reporters Without Borders (RSF)
– The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ)
– ARTICLE 19
– Index on Censorship
– The Ethical Journalism Network (EJN)
– PEN International
– The South East Europe Media Organisation (SEEMO)
The increasingly autocratic government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, president of Turkey, has clamped down on press freedom and opposing political viewpoints. Index on Censorship has condemned the ongoing attack on freedom of expression and, through its project Mapping Media Freedom, monitored the growing threats to the media. Below is a roundup of our recent reporting on media violations in Turkey.
Below is a roundup of our recent reporting on the ongoing media freedom crisis in Turkey.
Letter: EU must not ignore collapse of media freedom in Turkey
Press freedom and media organisations wrote to Donald Tusk, president of the European Council ahead of the meeting between EU leaders and Ahmet Davutoğlu, prime minister of Turkey, to express their concern over the collapse of media freedom in Turkey. Read the full letter
Turkish court orders seizure of Zaman news group
The seizure of Turkey’s biggest opposition newspaper is the latest move against press freedom in the country. Since the election of Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in 2014, the increasingly autocratic politician has waged an ongoing war with voices critical of his government. Read the full article
Zaman: The murder of a newspaper
On Friday night, security forces stormed Zaman, the widest-circulating Turkish newspaper. Though many Turkish news outlets studiously avoided covering the raids, the screens of international news channels were full of images of Turkish police using tear gas and water cannon against protestors trying to protect their paper. Particularly striking were the injuries to young women wearing Islamic headgear, the very segment of the community, which the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) once vowed to defend. Read the full article
Turkey: A long line of press freedom violations
Turkey’s government and courts have demonstrated their unwillingness to adhere to basic values on press freedom and media pluralism. From judicial harassment and seizing media companies to silencing Kurdish and critical media, Turkey’s government has been used by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to silence critical voices in the country. Read the full article
Zaman’s censored writers The following columns were submitted to and rejected by the new management of the seized Zaman and Today’s Zaman.
Yavuz Baydar: Bid farewell to journalism, and lose Turkey
Following the presidential attacks on Turkey’s top judicial body, the Constitutional Court, stemming from its pro-freedom ruling over the case of Can Dündar and Erdem Gül of Cumhuriyet, and the unplugging two opposition channels from Türksat satellite, the dramatic seizure of Zaman and this newspaper, Today’s Zaman, both highly influential in their own ways, is one of the final nails in the coffin of journalism in Turkey. Read the full column
Nicole Pope: A lack of free media allows Turkish authorities to control the narrative
How do you write a column for a newspaper that still exists nominally but has been taken over by trustees appointed by an “independent” court? Such are the dilemmas in a country where democratic standards are slipping rapidly. No journalism school or manual of ethical journalism prepares one for such a situation. Read the full column
Suat Kınıklıoğlu: Europa Europa
Turks who are putting up a brave fight confronting the authoritarianism in this country every day are simply aghast at the show put on in Brussels. Turkey’s democrats have been thoroughly exposed to the crude pragmatism of the EU. Read the full column
Doğu Ergil: Turkey, the humanitarian crisis and erratic responses
The numerical figures of the reality of Syrian refugees in Turkey are as follows: 2.2 million of the 4.3 million displaced Syrians who have been registered as persons of concern by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) currently reside in Turkey. There is an estimated 400,000 who have settled in various parts of Turkey relying on their own financial resources. The total number of Syrian refugees in Turkey is higher than the entire population of six of the EU’s 28 member states. Read the full column
This column was originally submitted to Today’s Zaman, but was rejected by the new management. Doğu Ergil is a Turkish sociologist, political scientist and academic, and was a columnist for Today’s Zaman.
The numerical figures of the reality of Syrian refugees in Turkey is as follows: 2.2 million of the 4.3 million displaced Syrians who have been registered as persons of concern by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) currently reside in Turkey. There is an estimated 0.4 million who have settled in various parts of Turkey relying on their own financial resources. The total number of Syrian refugees in Turkey is higher than the entire population of six of the EU’s 28 member states.
What truly scares Europe in terms a massive influx of “others” who can neither be assimilated nor accommodated is not sufficiently evaluated in Turkey. This is due to two factors. First the incumbent government wanted to win the hearts and minds of the Syrian asylum seekers fleeing from a tyrant who they believed would quickly wither away.
The return of the displaced people with gratitude and love for Turkey and its leadership would boost Ankara’s desire to shape the future of Syria and the Levant. Hence their warm welcome was accompanied by thoughts of temporary duress with large dividends to follow.
Secondly, the people of Turkey were influenced by the rekindled ideological rhetoric of Islamic brotherhood/solidarity and reclaiming the old territories of the Ottoman past. However, as years passed and the calculations over Syria changed, the permanence of Syrian refugees became apparent just as the realisation of the magnitude of humanitarian, social, economic and security challenges.
The big question is whether Turkey alone can bear the burden of hosting more than 2.5 million refugees without outside/international aid and support. Here comes the EU threatened by an unprecedented influx that it can neither accommodate nor assimilate. Neither Turkey’s capabilities nor Europe’s political stance have been amenable to a sustainable management of the current refugee crisis.
Consequently, this week necessity brought Turkish and EU leaderships to work out a sustainable process whereby Turkey will build the capacity to host most of the Syrian refugees and Europe will take in a limited number of them through a gradual filtering system. In return, the EU will help Turkey to carry the burden of hosting millions of refugees.
Another matter of bargaining was the lifting of visa requirement for Turkish citizens in the Schengen area. Indeed the Turkish leadership feel discriminated against on this issue when compared with other EU applicant countries (i.e., Western Balkan countries) or with third countries concerning the restrictive EU visa policy. They have concrete expectations from Brussels in this respect.
In fact, a political deal was reached in 2012 for the readmission into Turkey of third-country irregular migrants who enter the EU via Turkey in return for visa liberalisation for Turks traveling to the EU. This agreement is of great sentimentality in the overall EU-Turkey relationship given the fact that the latter’s membership seems to be farfetched.
These issues were the issues discussed by the Turkish prime minister and accompanying officials with EU representatives in Brussels this week. So far information obtained indicates that any passage of refugees further west from the Balkan countries they have reached will be obstructed. This means the so called “the Balkan corridor” will be closed.
Already a series of countries on the route have prevented the entry of migrants of Middle Eastern origin. Brussels does not want individual initiative by member states. Otherwise the crisis cannot be handled effectively. For example Macedonia allows only a limited number of refugees from Greece each day. This leads to a swelling of the number of refugees on the border towns of Greece like Idomeni, where nearly 10,000 wait on. The EU promised 700 million euros to Greece in relief.
What the EU wants is for Turkey to readmit those refugees who are not given legal rights of entry. As German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said, the 3 billion euros earmarked for Turkey can be used to build schools for refugee children and development of employment opportunities for the adults. But these piecemeal and incomplete initiatives are no panacea for either Turkey or the humanitarian crisis born out of the dismal conditions of the Middle East.
First of all given the conditions in the Middle East, namely Syria and Iraq, the return of the displaced people is not a possibility in the short term or even the medium term. Secondly, without peace and stability in the home countries, more asylum seekers will be knocking on the doors of Turkey and Europe.
So it is the mutual responsibility of mankind to end the root causes of the ongoing conflicts and stop the misery of their fellow men and women. We will see if humanity, especially “civilised countries,” will show this acumen and conscientious behavior.
Zaman’s censored writers