Zehra Dogan, winner of the 2019 Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Award for Arts, is a Kurdish painter and journalist. She was released from prison on 24 February 2019 after almost 600 days in prison in Turkey, during which she was denied access to materials for her work. She painted with dyes made from crushed fruit and herbs, even blood, and used newspapers and milk cartons as canvases. When she realised her reports from Turkey’s Kurdish region were being ignored by mainstream media, Dogan began painting the destruction in the town of Nusaybin and sharing it on social media. For this she was arrested and imprisoned. During her imprisonment, she refused to be silenced and continued to produce journalism and art. She collected and wrote stories about female political prisoners, reported on human rights abuses in prison, and painted despite the prison administration’s refusal to supply her with art materials.
Dogan also received the 2019 May Chidiac Foundation Award for Exceptional Courage in Journalism. She accepted the prize in Lebanon where she dedicated the prize to the people of Rojava. Dogan also featured at an exhibition at The Drawing Center in New York entitled The Pencil Is a Key by Incarcerated Artists which will feature drawings by incarcerated people from all over the globe. The exhibition will run until 5 January 2020.
Dogan’s first book, Nous aurons aussi de beaux jours – Écrits de prison (We will also have beautiful days – Writings of prison), a collection of her letters from prison during the 600 days she spent in detention, was released on 31 October 2019. From 6 to 23 of November, works by Dogan will go on display at Galerie des Femmes in Paris as part of her exhibition Œuvres Évadées (Escaped Works).
We caught up with Dogan to find out what she has been working on since winning the Index on Censorship award in April 2019.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1574072523308-d110cf72-f9a9-3″ taxonomies=”22555″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”102049″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][vc_column_text]When Turkish forces attacked Kurdish villages in the southeast of the country in 2016 after the collapse of a ceasefire between Ankara and the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) in July 2015, journalist Nurcan Baysal was there to document the human rights violations. The state declared military curfews, cut off electricity and water supplies and then began bombing civilians in their homes.
“The Turkish media say only terrorists were killed in the basements of Cizre, but 54 of them were students from Turkish universities who went there just to show solidarity and tell the Kurdish people ‘we are with you’,” Baysal tells Index on Censorship. “The security forces burnt them alive — they didn’t want them to return.”
Among the dead were Kurdish fighters, but also journalists and civilians, including children. “With the shooting and bombing, it became too dangerous for people to go outside. Some old people died because they didn’t have enough food.”
Baysal, a Kurdish human rights activist and journalist from the Kurdish-majority province of Diyarbakir, says it was too dangerous even to retrieve those killed from the streets. The children of one dead woman tried in vain to keep dogs from her body by throwing rocks.
“People say things in Turkey are bad, and they are right, but they think it’s the same situation all over the country,” Baysal says. “In the southeast, we aren’t just talking about journalists being locked up. Right now in one area, there are 50 dead bodies still on the ground; they are being eaten by animals.”
Baysal’s political awakening came in July 1991 when the tortured body of her neighbour, Vedat Aydin, a prominent human right activist and politician, was found under a bridge after he was been taken into police custody. She then began her career working for the UN Development Programme where she focused on poverty and strengthening women’s organisations in Diyarbakir. During this time she established a number of NGOs focusing on the forced migration of the Kurdish people. Her experience saw her take up an advisory role in the Northern Irish peace process in the late 1990s.
Baysal was back in Ireland in May 2018 to collect an award from the Irish human rights organisation Front Line Defenders, who named her its Global Laureate for Human Rights Defenders at Risk for 2018.
(Photo: Jason Clarke for Front Line Defenders)
“There was a lot of coverage in the Irish papers, which is good because you don’t tend to read much coverage of Kurdish issues elsewhere,” she says. “The international community does not pay attention to the violence against the Kurdish people. The international community is indifferent.”
In March 2013 a new peace process began, but by May 2013 Baysal began to see an increase in village guards, paramilitaries hired by the Turkish government to oversee the inhabitants, in half of the areas she works in. “In those villages we were trying to implement a development programme, but I could see something was wrong and I knew what that meant for peace.”
For her work covering what she says aren’t just ordinary human rights violations, but war crimes in Turkey’s southeast, Baysal has endured threats, intimidation, travel bans and worse. Legal cases have been taken against her, two of which have gone to court. “One of these was for reporting on what I witnessed in Cizre, such as the used condoms left by Turkish soldiers which show the horrible things they did there,” she says. “There were other journalists there but they decided not to write about it, and the Turkish media has closed their eyes, so I knew what I had to.”
Her work was on this issue was censored. “In Turkey there is usually a process if you want to censor something, but in this case there was no process, they just did it,” she says.
The court case lasted two years, at the end of which she was given a ten-month prison sentence — one she wouldn’t serve as long as she didn’t re-offend — for “humiliating Turkish security services” with her article and accompanying photographs. She told the judge that she has even worse photographs that she didn’t publish out of respect for the victims.
When Turkey began its military incursion, code-named Operation Olive Branch, into Afrin, Syria, which was under the control of Kurdish YPG forces, in January 2018, Baysal criticised the Turkish government and called for peace in a series of five tweets. Then, on Sunday 21 January 2018, while she was watching a film with her children at her Diyarbakir home, she heard a noise that she couldn’t understand at first. “It took me a moment to realise the noise was coming from my door,” she says. “They tried to break it down, but it was so strong that the wall around it crumbled and in came a 20-man special operations team with masks and Kalashnikovs. I don’t know what they were planning to find in my home, but when they did this they were sending a message and a lot of other people got scared.”
Baysal spent three nights in prison before being bailed following a series of protests, not just locally, but internationally. Three hundred supporters gathered outside the detention centre, she received the support of Kurdish MPs and her case was raised in the European Parliament.
Baysal now awaits trial on charges of “inciting hatred and enmity among the population”. If convicted, she faces up to three years in jail.
A lot of Turkish newspapers now refer to Baysal as a terrorist, she explains. “The word ‘terrorist’ is used so much that right now half the country are terrorists. Academics for Peace? Terrorists. Students? Terrorists. Doctors? Terrorists. Those who use the word ‘peace’? Terrorists.”
“Kurdish society is a colonised society. Two Kurdish wedding singers were put in prison because they were singing Kurdish songs. A student has been imprisoned for whistling in Kurdish. I really don’t know what it means to whistle in Kurdish,” she laughs.
Baysal explains how in many Kurdish areas, Kurdish mayors have been imprisoned, only to be replaced by government-appointed administrators. In one part of Diyarbakir, Kurds had planted flowers in yellow, red and green, the colours of the Kurdish flag. “One day we woke up and they had taken the heads off all the flowers. Why? The administrators said ‘these are the colours of the PKK’.”
In the November 2015 general election in Turkey, the leftist pro-Kurdish HDP surpassed the 10% threshold necessary to win seats in the new parliament. The effect on the peace process was immediate. The Turkish government saw the process as benefitting only the Kurdish parties, not themselves, Baysal says. “If you ask them now, they will say there is peace, and they are only fighting the PKK, but in their eyes you are PKK if you speak in Kurdish.”
Over the last three years, all Kurdish street signs have been replaced with Turkish ones. “They say ‘those Kurdish signs are PKK’,” Baysal explains. And what about Kurdish media? “Well, we don’t have Kurdish media anymore either, they’ve all been closed.”
Various neighbourhoods in the Sur district of Diyarbakır have been demolished as part of an “urban regeneration programme”
Turkey’s Kurds have known war for a long time, but this time it is different. Rather than fighting in the mountains, war has now been brought into the cities. Since 2015, Turkish forces have demolished entire Kurdish towns and cities. “This is what happened in Sur, which today it is a flattened area,” Baysal says. “Sur is a city that’s 7,000 years old. It’s part of the history of humanity, not just the history of Kurdish people. The story of Armenians, Assyrians — and it’s been ruined.”
Tens of thousands of Kurds have been made homeless by this destruction, with many making their way to other Kurdish towns and cities, while others have set up camp in tents along roads.
In the 1990s, Kurdish people felt that even though they were at war there was always hope, Baysal explains. “With the peace process there was always the belief that things would get better, but today we don’t have hope — no hope at all in the Turkish state.”
“Having seen what has happened in the last three years and how cruel this state can be, I really don’t know what will happen in the future. Everything is unclear. We don’t know tomorrow or even tomorrow morning. This is how we live now.”[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_column_text]
İdris Sayılgan’s father Ramazan, mother Sebiha and sisters Tuğba and İrem pose in the meadow where the family comes the summers to breed their cattle (Credit: Özgün Özçer)
“Don’t forget to take pills for nausea,” says İdris Sayılgan’s younger sister, Tuğba, combining her knowledge as a fifth-year pharmacy student and the innate kindness of a host. Together with a colleague, we were about to take the bumpy road to follow in the jailed Kurdish journalist’s footsteps to his family’s village near the eastern Turkish city of Muş. Sayılgan had spent his summer holidays helping his father, a herdsman or “koçer” in Kurdish (literally meaning “nomad”), breeding cattle and goats. One of many Kurdish reporters imprisoned pending trial, Sayılgan has been behind bars for 21 months on trumped-up charges that have criminalised his journalistic work. His hard-working, close-knit family misses his presence dearly.
Heading south of Muş, to the fertile Zoveser mountains, the serpentine road proves Tuğba’s advice to be valuable. The asphalt pavement gives way to a narrow gravel road as we continue to zig-zag toward the southern flank of Zoveser, bordering Kulp in Diyarbakır province and Sason in Batman – two localities which used to be home to an important Armenian community before the Armenian Genocide in 1915. The many majestic walnut trees surrounding the road are a testament to that bygone era. We are told that they were all planted by Armenians before they fled.
The family village – Heteng to Kurds and İnardi to the Turkish state – witnessed another brutal eviction in more recent times. During the so-called dirty war of the 1990s, the Turkish military gave inhabitants a stark choice: either become village guards, armed and remunerated by the state to inform on the activities of militants belonging to the Kurdish insurrection, or leave. If they dared to refuse, a summary death awaited. İdris was just three-years-old when they came.
Left helpless and scared, many left. The family of Çağdaş Erdoğan, the Turkish photographer hotlisted by the British Journal of Photography who recently spent six months in prison on terror-related charges, was among them. Erdoğan scarcely remembers his childhood before his family moved to the western industrial city of Bursa. As a child, the painfully forced exile produced nightmares. He started imagining stories from patches of memories, believing they were real. Zoveser’s idyllic setting is haunted by the ghosts of a dark history brimming with atrocities.
The family guides the cattle to the pasture. (Credit: Özgün Özçer)
As for İdris’ family, they have stayed in the Muş ever since, coming back only for breeding season. İdris used to accompany his father in guiding their cattle, during which time they would cover the 70 kilometres separating their farm near Muş to Heteng in three days. It’s a distance that we could only cover in two-and-a-half hours by vehicle. Once in Heteng, there’s still another 15 minutes on foot to the small meadow where the Sayılgans have set up camp next to a fresh stream.
İdris’ father, Ramazan Sayılgan, greets us with a warm embrace. He has a gentle look with soft and tired eyes. “Are you hungry?” he asks as we are invited to their tent. His wife, Sebiha, brings us milk and fresh kaymak cheese, a cream obtained from yoghurt, that she made herself, as well as milk. All of the children help the family during the breeding season. Ramazan can’t hide his pride when he recounts how well they are doing in their studies and how gifted they are. Unlike many parents in the region, he strived to send his nine children to school despite his meagre income. The nine brothers and sisters are close and often go the extra mile for each other.
İdris is the very picture of his father who, although sunburnt, is a little bit darker than him. He inherited the whiteness of his skin from his mother, whom he calls “the most beautiful woman on earth.” With them are the five youngest of the family. Involving herself in the conversation, eight-year-old Hivda sadly notices that she is the only one with olive skin, like her father. Ramazan Sayılgan is quick to comfort her. “You may be darker but you are such a beautiful, dark-skinned girl.” Hivda giggles cheerfully.
They work together and laugh together, but they also suffer together – like that fateful day when the police came for İdris.
A rifle to the head
It was early in the morning on 17 October, 2016, long before sunrise. The whole house was soundly asleep when their door was broken and ten riot police stormed inside.
“They were screaming ‘police, police!’ I told them: ‘Please be quiet, there is nothing in our house,’” Ramazan Sayılgan says, occasionally mixing Kurdish with his broken Turkish. “I was trying to calm them down and avoid trouble. Then I raised my head and saw that five people were on İdris. That’s when they kicked me in the head.”
İdris Sayılgan’s eight-year-old sister Hivda and 12-year-old Yunus. The family guides the cattle to the pasture. (Credit: Özgün Özçer)
İdris tried to escape their clutches but fell to the floor. Police kicked him repeatedly while threatening him. The blows had left him bleeding. “They are killing İdris!” cried his sister İrem, who was 12 at the time. Police told the family to lie on the ground with their hands on their backs. They pointed a rifle at Ramazan and one of the journalist’s younger brothers, Yunus. “They even pointed two rifles at my head. They have no shame,” Yunus, who was ten-years-old at the time of the raid, says.
Normally, all raids should be filmed as a means of preventing abuse. “But they only started filming after they inflicted their brutality,” Ramazansays. Those who inflicted the beatings have enjoyed complete impunity. The family even saw the commander, a bald officer, when they went to vote during Turkey’s recent presidential elections.
In a written defence submitted to the court, İdris said that when he was brought to the hospital for a mandatory medical examination, doctors effectively turned a blind eye to police brutality by refusing to treat his injuries out of fear of repercussions from the police. To add insult to some very real injuries, İdris was transferred to a prison in Trabzon, some 500 kilometres north on the Black Sea coast, even though there is a prison in Muş. The family, who cannot afford a car, can only visit İdris on rare occasions. İdris was subjected to torture and strip searches after being transferred to Trabzon, where he is held in solitary confinement. “What I have been through is enough to prove that my detention is politically motivated,” the journalist has said in his defence statements.
“Journalism changed him”
After high school, İdris decided to abruptly end his studies and began working as a dishwasher. That, however, only lasted three months before he announced to his father that he wanted to prepare for the national university exams. “When he sets his mind on something, he always tries to do his best. He never puts it off. Nothing feels like it’s too much work for him,” his father tells us. “He didn’t study at first, but when he decided to do so, he devoted himself.”
İdris graduated from the journalism department at the Communication Faculty at the University of Mersin. He then returned to Muş and started to work for the pro-Kurdish Dicle News Agency (DİHA), which today operates under the name Mezopotamya Agency after DİHA was shuttered in 2016, and another iteration, Dihaber, in 2017, both on terror-related allegations. İdris was making a name for himself when he was arrested and now faces between seven-and-a-half and 15 years in prison on the charge of “membership in a terrorist organisation”.
“University and journalism changed him,” 18-year-old İsmail says. “He used to be more irritable. He has been much more cheerful since,” says İsmail, who picked up on his brother’s habit of whistling whenever he comes home. “İdris was even whistling in custody – to the extent that the police asked, ‘How can you remain so upbeat?’”
Sebihan Sayılgan, İdris’ mother, who he calls “the most beautiful woman on earth”. (Credit: Özgün Özçer)
Tuğba remembers endless conversations at nights when İdris would recite poems by Ahmed Arif, a poet from Diyarbakır who was partly Kurdish. Yunus, meanwhile, complains that he only received İdris’ latest letter a full six weeks after it was sent. As for little Hivda, she whispers to us that she just sent him a poem she wrote.
Ramazan adds that İdris is loved by everyone who knows him. At 58, Ramazan continues to work hard but the family faces many adversities. Another son, 21-year-old Mehmet, has also been behind bars for two years. The eldest brother, Ebubekir, who became a math teacher, has been dismissed from the civil service for being a member of the progressive teachers’ union Eğitim-Sen. Ebubekir was well-known for improving the grades of all the students in his classes, but now that he has been forced out of his job, he has gone to Istanbul in an attempt to make ends meet. He will join them a week later to help them during the breeding season.
Since the state of emergency was imposed two years ago, village guards have become ever more self-assured. Like sheriffs in the wild west, they make their own rules. The Sayılgan family, who couldn’t come to the village for two years out of fear following the declaration of a state of emergency, alerts us that village guards often tip off authorities when they see strangers. “The driver of the shuttle is also a village guard,” we are warned. Indeed, we had already introduced ourselves to him as İdris’ friends from university, omitting to reveal our profession. During our trip back, we would tell him of our plans to catch a bus to Van when our real intention was to go north to Varto instead.
İdris Sayılgan’s 18-year-old İsmail who guided us to the meadow, with Hivda and Yunus in the background. (Credit: Özgün Özçer)
Unlike most Kurdish provinces, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), well supported by the conservative voters, won the municipality of Muş in local elections, meaning the government hasn’t appointed trustees to force out elected Kurdish mayors as it has done in other Kurdish areas where it has lost. Police, accordingly, are extremely comfortable. The city abounds with plainclothes police and informants. No precaution is too little. Varto, a town with a majority of Alevis – who are a dissident religious minority with liberal and progressive beliefs – looks like a safer option to spend the night.
I get a sense of how hard it must be for a local Kurdish reporter to work in Muş. It means working behind the adversary’s lines while still living in one’s hometown. It also means never letting your guard down.
We take leave from the family, expressing our hope that İdris will be released at his next hearing on 5 October. “In three months and two days,” his father quickly notes. October will mark two years without his son – two years that a modest but resilient family has endeavoured to fight against state-sponsored injustice with goodwill and affection.
İdris Sayılgan’s father Ramazan, mother Sebiha and sisters Tuğba and İrem pose next to the tent where the family stays. (Credit: Özgün Özçer)
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]The undersigned international press freedom groups call on Turkish authorities to immediately release the 12 printworkers and staff arrested on 28 March at the premises and print works of the newspaper Özgürlükçü Demokrasi and the further 15 staff taken into custody after home raids on the morning of 29 March 2018. Authorities must also restore control over the paper and its premises to the rightful owners.
The below-named organizations also denounce the fact that lawyers acting for those arrested have been denied contact with prosecutors or access to any written documentation in relation to the raids.
Two officials purporting to be from the Savings Deposit Insurance Fund (TMSF) are in place at the print works and premises of Özgürlükçü Demokrasi, a pro-Kurdish daily, and claim to be holding the sites until they receive further instructions. For its part, the TMSF, now part of the Ministry of Finance’s Directorate of National Estates and formerly an independent banking watchdog under the auspices of the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey, has denied having received instructions to seize the newspaper’s assets.
According to lawyers acting for the detained printworkers and Özgürlükçü Demokrasi’s principal signatory İhsan Yaşar and Kasım Zengin the owner of Gün Printing Advertising Film and Publishing Inc, where the newspaper is printed, a press crimes investigation into the paper was opened on February 7. This was followed by a separate counter-terrorism investigation that began on March 23. It is believed that both investigations, of which no written notification has been made to the paper, are in relation to Özgürlükçü Demokrasi’s coverage of Turkey’s incursion into Afrin, northern Syria.
As the sole remaining Kurdish daily newspaper in Istanbul, Özgürlükçü Demokrasi is vital in maintaining the extremely fragile access to information that is not controlled by the state. Following the closure of other pro-Kurdish newspapers and television stations such as Azadiya Welat, IMC TV and Hayatın Sesi in 2016, Özgürlükçü Demokrasi is one of the last sources of pro-Kurdish daily printed news in Turkey.
“The Turkish authorities must halt their sustained repression of Kurdish culture and language. We are highly alarmed by the onslaught on Kurdish and pro-Kurdish media outlets and journalists that has intensified dramatically since the crackdown on freedom of expression since the attempted coup of July 2016, and now reached a new low point with this takeover of Özgürlükçü Demokrasi,” said Carles Torner, Executive Director of Pen International.
We, the signatories of this statement, strongly condemn the takeover of Özgürlükçü Demokrasi, which has taken place without any legal justification or documentation. We reject the denial of information and prosecutorial access to lawyers acting for Özgürlükçü Demokrasi’s arrested staff members.
“The government’s takeover of Özgürlükçü Demokrasi is extremely concerning,” said Joy Hyvarinen, head of advocacy at Index on Censorship, “We urge European and other governments to condemn the obliteration of free media in Turkey.”
We call for the release of the arrested staff members and printworkers and official confirmation from the TMSF of the legal status of the alleged acquisition of Engin Publishing Print Inc. — and the Gün Printing Advertising Film and Publishing Inc.
Katie Morris, Head of Europe and Central Asia Programme at Article 19 said: “The takeover of Özgürlükçü Demokrasi restricts the space for freedom of expression even further in Turkey and curtails the right of the public to access information on issues of public interest, particularly in relation to the on-going conflict in the South East of the country. We call for the authorities to cease harassing this newspaper and restore much-needed media freedom in Turkey.”
The takeover of one of the last remaining opposition newspapers follows the acquisition last week of Turkey’s largest media organization and newspaper distributor, Doğan Group, by Turkish conglomerate Demirören, whose media outlets are known for taking a pro-government stance. In the week prior to the purchase, an internet streaming bill was passed granting the Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK) sweeping powers to monitor, license and block online streaming channels and news providers.
“This latest act against freedom press confirms that Erdogan wants to repress any free voice in Turkey. A firm position in Europe is needed to make pressure the Turkish government to restore the rule of law as soon as possible with the cessation of the state of emergency,” said Antonella Napoli member of Articolo 21 and coordinator of Free Turkey Media in Italy.
International Press Institute (IPI)’s Turkey Advocacy Coordinator Caroline Stockford said, “IPI strongly condemns yesterday’s raid and the government’s tactic of shutting down Özgürlükçü Demokrasi in an apparently illegal manner in order to silence dissenting voices in the run-up to the presidential elections. Despite the opportunity presenting itself at this week’s Varna summit, Europe failed again to strongly condemn Turkey’s repression of free media and free speech.”
The peoples of Turkey have a right to access informative opposition reporting in order to form a balanced opinion, especially in the lead up to an election. We call on Turkey to respect the human right to freedom of expression and to refrain from its practice of stifling all opposition media and to release the Özgürlükçü Demokrasi workers from detention.
We, the undersigned, call on European newspapers and governments to make clear statements to Turkey that access to balanced, critical reporting is essential to democracy and that the freedom of the press must be respected and maintained.
International Press Institute (IPI)
Pen International
European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF)
The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ)
Association of European Journalists (AEJ)
Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF)
Article 19
Norwegian Pen
Index on Censorship
English Pen
Articolo 21
Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)
Pen Belgium/Flanders
Wales Pen Cymru
Pen Germany
Pen Club Français
Pen Suisse Romand[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1522334755757-294591af-d9eb-2″ taxonomies=”1743″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
