7 Mar 2016 | Europe and Central Asia, Mapping Media Freedom, News and features, Turkey
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.
The seizure of a news organisation by placing it into court-appointed administration is not trivial. The Zaman group employs some two thousand people, runs a nationwide network of correspondents and puts out an English language daily, Today’s Zaman, which has an international following on the web. It is impossible to imagine a court in any country with the slightest pretension of being democratic acting with such impunity.
The final headline of the independent version of Zaman was that there could be no legal basis for the takeover. Indeed, Article 30 of the Turkish Constitution reads: “A printing house and its annexes, duly established as a press enterprise under law, and press equipment shall not be seized, confiscated, or barred from operation on the grounds of having been used in a crime.” (As amended on May 7, 2004; Act No. 5170)”
It is no secret that Zaman demonstrated fidelity to the movement associated with the exiled cleric, Fethullah Gülen. The paper once supported the rise of AKP but in recent years has been a bitter critic. The legal document, which placed Zaman’s parent company into court-appointed administration, relies on the testimony of an anonymous witness who maintains that the editorial policy was dictated by what it calls the Fethullah Terror Organisation (FETÖ in its Turkish acronym). This in turn is guilty of conspiring with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). It is enough to point out that the existence of FETÖ is at best hearsay, at worst the invention of subeditors in the pro-government press – never mind that Zaman itself once took a more hawkish line towards the PKK than the government itself.
According to reports reaching P24, the prosecutor struggled to find a court which would accede to his request. The Zaman building is in the Bakırköy province of Istanbul and comes under its jurisdiction. However, the request in the Bakırköy court was refused. Finally another, more friendly court acceded to the prosecutor’s demand, even though it is dubious whether it had the competence to do so.
The paper may not be guilty of treason but is has been guilty of apostasy – of having turned its back on AKP and President Tayyip Erdoğan in particular. Since then the two have been in mortal combat. Loyalists to the Gülen movement and the Zaman group in particular pursued corruption allegations against leading government officials in December 2013.
By forcing Zaman’s takeover the government lays itself open to universal condemnation. Turkey, once a proud EU applicant, now plumbs the lower depths of global rankings of transparency and free expression. Sadder still, this does not seem to trouble it a jot.
“The timing is a slap in the face,” according to a diplomat quoted in The Financial Times. “The seizure came during a visit to Istanbul by Donald Tusk, the European Council president, and two days before Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, is to see Ahmet Davutoğlu, the Turkish premier,” the paper points out. Turkey now calibrates its place in the world not as a democratic standard bearer in a troubled part of the globe but as a buffer zone between Fortress Europe and a tide of Syrian refugees. This, it believes, gives it licence to get away with the murder of a newspaper.
In Turkey all eyes, government and opposition, are on the EU to see if Brussels is prepared to put expediency above principle and if European pubic opinion is prepared to see Ankara give up all pretence of democratic governance in exchange for grudging cooperation on Syria.
It is not just the timing of the EU summit, which is significant. The Constitutional Court recently gave the presidential office a swift kick in the shins with the release from pre-trial detention of the editor-in-chief of Cumhuriyet newspaper along with his Ankara bureau chief. The high court ruled that the charges against them – that printing stories in a newspaper could correspond to treason – were essentially absurd. Since then, newspapers and ministers loyal to the president have been braying for the judges’ blood. The president himself has said he would neither respect nor abide by the high court’s decision and now appears even more determined to draft a new constitution which would allow him to do exactly that.
Not everyone in AKP supports this autocratic trend. There is a small wave of discontent from the old guard who believe a constitution that concentrates even greater powers in presidential hands is a dangerous step. These homegrown dissidents took quiet satisfaction in the court’s defence of Cumhuriyet. So one can see the raid against Zaman as the president re-asserting his authority against these pockets of resistance to one-man rule.
Turkey’s 1982 Constitution was prepared under conditions of martial law. It attempted to dictate a society in which the rights of citizen were subservient to the needs of the state. This rendered it anachronistic before the ink on the Official Gazette was dry. It has constantly been rewritten and there have been consistent demands that it be replaced.
Yet no one, not even in their wildest babblings, ever claimed the current Constitution was insufficiently authoritarian, or that it ceded too little power to the arbitrary whim of government, or that it failed to enshrine the Machiavellian principle that “might makes right”.
No one, that is, until now. As the ink on the printing presses of Turkey’s independent media run dry so too do hopes for the country’s future.
See also:
Statement: Index condemns seizure of Zaman
Sign our petition: End Turkey’s crackdown on press freedom
Letter: Writers and artists condemn seizure of Zaman news group
Reaction: Turkish court orders seizure of Zaman news group
Originally posted on Platform 24.
7 Dec 2012 | Turkey
In Turkey, television drama is big business. A handful of big-budget productions attract millions of viewers every week, both at home and abroad. According to Abdullah Çelik, the head of property rights department in the culture ministry, more than 65 million dollars were received from foreign television companies in acquisitions of TV dramas, with more than ten thousand hours of screen time exported overseas. Such costly, and bankable, television productions thrived over the last decade, partly thanks to the entrepreneurial spirit that came with the governing AK Party’s policies of economic liberalisation.
But according to Turkish prime minister and leader of the AK Party, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the industry’s success story has a sinister undercurrent that needs looking into. Erdoğan believes that one particular show is toying with the national values of Turkey’s Ottoman past. “We alerted the authorities on this and we are waiting for the judicial decision on it,” he said during a public speech last month. “Those who toy with these values should be taught a lesson within the premises of law.”
Erdogan was referencing The Magnificent Century, a show that is currently the biggest production television drama in Turkey. The latest season of the series had a production budget of over three million liras with an all-star cast featuring some of Turkey’s most famous actors. Last month, the Turkish edition of GQ magazine honoured the show’s producer and two of its leading actors in its Men of the Year event.
The Magnificent Century, which first aired in January 2011, has long been subject to controversy and Erdogan’s pointed comments about its “false depiction” of the private lives of Ottoman rulers was but the latest, and probably the most high-profile, example of complaints about the show. Every episode of the drama series narrates another chapter in the life of Suleiman the Magnificent, the longest reigning sultan and caliph of the Ottoman Empire, acknowledged by historians as one of its most successful rulers.
Although many people I talked to about the issue seemed to share Erdoğan’s complaints about the show’s historical inaccuracies, none of them agreed with the idea of taking any form of legal action against it. In fact, even the descendants of the Ottoman empire are against such a move. In an interview with Vatan newspaper, Prince Şehzade Orhan Osmanoğlu, a descendant of the last Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II, said their family wouldn’t take legal action against the programme because it was not “a documentary but a work of fiction.” However Osmanoğlu added that his family was very disturbed by scenes which depict the harem, resulting in some of the juiciest moments of the show. Osmanoğlu said they would go to court if his ancestors were portrayed as figures involved in immoral acts, including having extra-marital affairs and fathering illegitimate children.
The centerpiece of Erdoğan’s complaint was that while most of Suleiman’s life had been spent on horseback and in battle fields, the show had continually depicted him in the middle of sexual intrigues taking place in the harem. When I asked Sonat Bahar, who writes a weekly column on Turkish television series for the popular Sabah newspaper, about her take on the issue she said production conditions of the show might be dictating this choice.
“Shooting battle scenes is costly, that’s why they can’t do it,” she said. “The real problem is the discrepancy between the show’s title which claims portraying magnificence and the limited view of the emperor’s life presented to us. I would rather they named the show Roxelana.” Roxelana, Hürrem Sultan’s name before she married Suleiman, is widely agreed to be the central figure in the series, and it is her charming and often times deceitful depiction that draw many to their television sets.
Although critics and historians acknowledge problems with the show’s historical approach, more worrying is the preparation of a new bill presented to the parliament last week, introducing fines for television producers who “misrepresent” historical figures.
“This show begins with a disclaimer that says its characters were ‘inspired’ by historical figures,” a popular television blogger who writes under the pseudonym Ranini told me. She said such bills, if they become law, would ignore the fact that those series were, after all, intended as entertainment. “If people really want to learn about real lives of Ottoman rulers, then they should read books, instead of watching these soap operas,” she said.
This is a point shared by Ümit Ünal, one of Turkey’s most successful film directors and scriptwriters. “This is just a harmless soap opera, nothing more,” he said. “Like many television series, it intermingles a set of complex love affairs with a faux-historical decor. It is a highly commercial work. I can understand why prime minister is angry about it but I am also at a loss to understand the new standards of censorship in this country.”
According to Ünal, all Turkish artists are born with the knowledge that their works will be subject to political restrictions, which leads to the graver problem of self-censorship. “If a Turkish artist comes to tell you he doesn’t apply self-censorship in his work, then he is lying,” he said. “When the field of artistic freedoms get even smaller, how can we, as storytellers, produce works without being subject to the wrath of politicians afterwards?”
Kaya Genç is a journalist and novelist
20 Oct 2011 | Europe and Central Asia, Index Index, minipost
A Turkish man could face two years in prison for comments made about Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan on his Facebook page. A public prosecutor in Ankara is calling for the man’s imprisonment based on insulting Erdogan, along with some of his cabinet members and ministers from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). The man is being charge under Article 301 of Turkey’s Criminal Code.
1 Jul 2009 | Index Index, minipost
A UK artist, Michael Dickinson who was cleared in September of mocking Turkey’s prime minister by portraying him as a dog in a piece of artwork has fled the country after hearing his acquittal has been overturned. Read more here
