27 Oct 2021 | News and features, The climate crisis, Turkey, Volume 50.03 Autumn 2021, Volume 50.03 Autumn 2021 Extras
“Funded by George Soros and the Rockefeller family, Greenpeace organises chaotic events around the world, spearheading protest movements against the construction of the Istanbul Canal,” Yeni Akit, the Turkish government’s favourite far-right newspaper, reported recently.
The artificial sea-level waterway, if it gets built, will connect Marmara with the Black Sea, with an outcome most experts agree will be catastrophic for Istanbul and the Marmara Sea. But Turkey’s Islamist government brands anyone opposing its ecocidal project as traitors and foreign agents.
“Greenpeace issued a statement, ‘No to the Istanbul Canal’, on its website, insistently disseminating the lie that this project will harm the environment,” the pro-government daily warned, calling the canal “the project of the century” and describing criticisms and warnings from activists, experts and scientists as “mere propaganda”.
Attacks on environmental activists have never been greater in Turkey, where laws passed under the state of emergency in 2016 continue to allow Islamists to detain dissidents and NGO workers as “terrorist sympathisers”.
For Özgür Gürbüz, one of Turkey’s most seasoned environmental activists, the atmosphere of 2021 is reminiscent of the early 2000s.
Since the 1990s, Gürbüz has organised petitions against the construction of nuclear plants in Turkey; marched outside embassies to protest against nuclear projects by Chinese, French, Japanese and Russian companies; and once walked, backwards, from Mersin to Akkuyu – a 170km journey – to make his voice heard.
One of Turkey’s first environmental reporters, Gürbüz worked for the liberal Yeni Yüzyıl newspaper in 1996 when he began covering protests against Turkey’s first gold mine in the Anatolian town of Bergama. The Canadian company that operated the mine used cyanide in the extraction process. Villagers who opposed the technique placed ballot boxes in Bergama’s town square and held a vote, using direct democracy to settle the issue. They also travelled to Istanbul and, wearing Asterix and Obelix costumes, walked on the city’s Bosphorus Bridge carrying banners that read: “Hey police, first listen to what we have to say, then you can beat us!”
Gürbüz frequently travelled from Istanbul to Bergama to cover the protests. “Then one day,” he recalled, “a massive conspiracy theory, designed to demonise Bergama’s villagers, emerged.”
A German plot
According to the ultra-nationalist press, tales about cyanide were but a plot devised by a network of German NGOs, spearheaded by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, to bring Turkey to its knees. Ankara’s State Security Court opened a case in 2002, where 15 NGO workers faced spying charges which carried prison sentences of up to 15 years.
Meanwhile, a Turkish mining company called Koza had taken control of Bergama’s mine. Gürbüz smelt a rat. Whenever he called Koza, the company’s press officer asked him: “Do you know what German NGOs had been doing here? Let me send you a cache of information!” But a brief glimpse at the documents showed they contained nothing “but unfounded claims”.
Gürbüz believes Koza had disseminated disinformation to dissuade patriotic Turks who supported the uprising from opposing their takeover. It later transpired that Koza was one of the companies operated by the movement of Fetullah Gülen, the Islamist preacher who allied with president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the 2000s to purge secularists from Turkey’s public sector.
This tactic of criminalising civil society cast a long shadow that continues to this day.
“Sometimes they accuse us of being German spies; other times we’re British collaborators. Countries change; the accusation of being in the pay of foreign powers does not,” Gürbüz said. “But their accusations devastated Bergama villagers. I know them. They love their soil, and all they wanted was to practice agriculture.
“They are patriots, typical Anatolian people who suddenly found themselves on the telly, portrayed as German and British agents. It was impossible for them not to panic.”
For scholars and experts who worked for environmental causes, the prospect of a knock on the door from the security services became a real possibility. “The public broadcaster TRT gave airtime to the disinformation campaign featuring German NGOs. Such speculation exhausted and harmed Turkey’s burgeoning environmental movement,” said Gürbüz.
The spying case that began in 2002 came to nothing. Still, its mentality set the tone for the oppression of green activists over the next two decades, casting doubts on international NGOs just as the climate crisis worsened.
“Those who environmentalists rattle use whatever tool that comes in handy for them,” Gürbüz said, pointing to Aysin and Ali Ulvi Büyüknohutçu, a couple in their 60s known for their environmental activism in south-west Turkey, who were murdered in 2017. Gürbüz said: “They were trying to defend their environment. They received no funding, and yet the forces opposed to their struggle hired a young man to shoot them with a hunting rifle.”
Gürbüz sees a pattern in these cases where polluters use Turkey’s xenophobic climate to blame NGOs that oppose their ecocidal projects.
“Other tactics include tax controls, sending inspectors to NGOs to intimidate their workers,” he said.
To counter such manoeuvres, Gürbüz believes, journalists must act boldly. “In the past, we used to deal directly with the government because most polluters were public bodies. With the new autocratic regime, things are different. Private company CEOs are friends of newspaper tycoons who have ties to the government. Thanks to these intricate ties, the field for environmental journalism has shrunk.”
Tuna censorship
Gürbüz has suffered numerous instances of censorship. After identifying heavy metals in fish samples from the Marmara Sea, his newspaper refused to print the word “tuna” to avoid angering advertisers. (He published the uncensored version on his blog.) When he travelled to Yatağan to report on the public health implications of a thermic plant, his editor refused to publish the report, fearing that the company behind the project might become the newspaper’s new owner.
“This is why independent media is so crucial for the environmental struggle,” Gürbüz said.
After his reporting career came to an end, he spent a year in China before, on returning to Turkey, entering the NGO world, working for Greenpeace Mediterranean’s energy campaign and moving to the Heinrich Böll Foundation to become project co-ordinator, overseeing which projects to fund. He also worked for WWF Turkey.
Then, in 2013, everything changed with Occupy Gezi, the biggest environmentalist protest in Turkey’s history.
“Thousands of people marched there, and they managed to save the park,” he said. “Honestly, it isn’t easy to see how such events begin and shapeshift. A handful of my friends who were collecting signatures outside Gezi suddenly saw their supporters snowball into thousands after bulldozers entered the park and cops burned their tents.”
As Gezi grew, Turkey’s Islamists once again branded environmental activists as foreign agents funded by “the interest lobby”, a dog-whistle term used to appeal to their antisemitic voters. Pro-government papers identified the German airline company Lufthansa’s jealousy of Istanbul’s planned new airport as the reason behind “the German hand” in protests.
But Gürbüz said: “If you want the agents behind Gezi, why don’t you look at the people who advised the government to build a shopping mall there in the first place? If it weren’t for them, these protests would never have happened.”
And yet their rabid discourse is still with us. Dozens of scientists, environmentalists and scholars have written extensively about the Istanbul Canal’s disastrous effects, and “it would be a strategic mistake for the government to try to present this as another foreign-funded opposition campaign”, Gürbüz said – but that is precisely what is happening. “This discourse is an insult to the mind of this nation.”
Turkey’s Green Party
In 2008, Gürbüz served as a co-founder of Yeşiller (Green Party), the second iteration of a party that originally launched in 1988. The original Yeşiller emerged as a fresh voice in the leftist circles that the 12 September coup in 1980 destroyed.
Koray Doğan Urbarlı, a green activist, has childhood memories of Yeşiller’s early protests. He said: “In 1990, when I was five, Yeşiller held a meeting in Izmir to oppose the construction of the Aliağa Thermal Power Plant. My parents also brought me to the Yatağan protests. I later learned that those were all Yeşiller events.”
In August 2008, Urbarlı attended a meeting organised by Yeşiller. The party was a month old, and it changed his life. Helping found its local Izmir branches, he devoted his life to Yeşiller.
There he also met Emine Özkan. Born in 1993, Özkan had spent her youth in an ultra-conservative family in Eskişehir, specialising in bird migration before starting work for NGOs. Today, Urbarlı and Özkan are spokespeople for Yeşiller’s third iteration.
“There was a straight line between bird preservation and politics,” Özkan said. “I discovered how LGBT rights, children’s rights and disability activism are all connected. Yet, as individuals, there is a limit to what we can achieve. The more we can organise this into a political struggle, the more we can deliver change.”
When she first entered the green struggle, just a few activists in Turkey were aware of the impending climate crisis. “Now, it impacts our lives daily. It adds to other problems: Turkey’s autocratic regime and economic crisis. What we have known and said in the background for years is now coming to the fore,” she said, adding that as authoritarianism increases and trust in the government diminishes, environmental NGOs and the women’s movement are on the rise.
“These days, oppressed people channel all their political frustrations via the green movement,” said Urbarlı, who accepts that talking critically about ecological issues is easier than in other fields in Turkey, such as those of minority or LGBT rights.
“In the past, we were seen as marginal figures; now what we say plays a crucial part in political debates.”
It’s little wonder Yeşiller is receiving the government’s cold shoulder. Despite submitting all the required documents on 21 September 2020, it has received no word from the Interior Ministry, which refuses to acknowledge it as a political party. “They neither deny nor affirm us. This violates our civil rights,” the co-founders said.
Turkey’s constitution clarifies that no one has the power to prevent a party’s foundation, and yet the government has “placed Yeşiller in limbo”.
Despite state muzzling, Yeşiller is hopeful for the future. “Looking at Occupy Gezi eight years on, we can see that the principles we held dear during the foundation of Yeşiller in 2008 were realised in the form of peaceful resistance, with demands for local democracy and gender equality,” Urbarlı said. “Gezi helped disseminate green ideas to bigger crowds, and it enlightens our ideas to this day.”
But the government’s xenophobic discourse has proved to be similarly resistant. When wildfires broke out in the country’s forests in late July, a social media campaign targeted Yeşiller after the party’s Twitter account pointed to climate change as the cause of the fires.
Pro-government newspapers said “Kurdish terrorists” were behind the fires; one journalist blamed the planting of “traitorous” pine trees as part of the Marshall Plan in the 1950s, calling it a sinister plan devised by “US imperialism” to burn Turkey to the ground with help from its “traitorous” local collaborators. The post was shared and liked by thousands.
“These conspiracy theories make people feel safe,” Özkan said. “This is the difficulty of environmental politics today. Despite these lynching attempts, we have to continue telling the truth.”
Urbarlı envisages a future in which the party can serve in a coalition government, anticipated to be formed after the general elections that are scheduled for 2023.
“It’s easy to be an environmentalist when you’re in the opposition,” he said, highlighting the example of Erdoğan, the Istanbul Canal’s architect, who used to conduct press conferences with Yeşiller to defend freedom of expression decades ago when he was the Istanbul head of the Islamist Welfare Party.
“Such is the difference between being in opposition and power, and it is a lesson we should learn from.”
29 Sep 2021 | Afghanistan, Americas, Artistic Freedom Commentary and Reports, Asia and Pacific, Australia, Burma, Cuba, Ecuador, Europe and Central Asia, Israel, Lukashenko letters, Magazine, Magazine Contents, Middle East and North Africa, Religion and Culture, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Uganda, United Kingdom, United States, Volume 50.03 Autumn 2021, Volume 50.03 Autumn 2021 Extras

The Autumn issue of Index magazine focuses on the struggle for environmental justice by indigenous campaigners. Anticipating the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), in Glasgow, in November, we’ve chosen to give voice to people who are constantly ignored in these discussions.
Writer Emily Brown talks to Yvonne Weldon, the first aboriginal mayoral candidate for Sydney, who is determined to fight for a green economy. Kaya Genç investigates the conspiracy theories and threats concerning green campaigners in Turkey, while Issa Sikiti da Silva reveals the openly hostile conditions that environmental activists have been through in Uganda.
Going to South America, Beth Pitts interviews two indigenous activists in Ecuador on declining populations and which methods they’ve been adopting to save their culture against the global giants extracting their resources.
Cover of Index on Censorship Autumn 2021 (50-3)[/caption]
A climate of fear, by Martin Bright: Climate change is an era-defining issue. We must be able to speak out about it.
The Index: Free expression around the world today: the inspiring voices, the people who have been imprisoned and the trends, legislation and technology which are causing concern.
Pile-ons and censorship, by Maya Forstater: Maya Forstater was at the heart of an employment tribunal with significant ramifications. Read her response the Index’s last issue which discussed her case.
The West is frightened of confronting the bully, by John Sweeney: Meet Bill Browder. The political activist and financier most hated by Putin and the Kremlin.
An impossible choice, by Ruchi Kumar: The rapid advance of Taliban forces in Afghanistan has left little to no hope for journalists.
Words under fire, by Rachael Jolley: When oppressive regimes target free speech, libraries are usually top of their lists.
Letters from Lukashenka’s prisoners, by Maria Kalesnikava, Volha Takarchuk, Aliaksandr Vasilevich and Maxim Znak: Standing up to Europe’s last dictator lands you in jail. Read the heartbreaking testimony of the detained activists.
Bad blood, by Kelly Duda: How did an Arkansas blood scandal have reverberations around the world?
Welcome to hell, by Benjamin Lynch: Yangon’s Insein prison is where Myanmar’s dissidents are locked up. One photojournalist tells us of his time there.
Cartoon, by Ben Jennings: Are balanced debates really balanced? Ask Satan.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”Special Report” font_container=”tag:h2|font_size:22|text_align:left”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]

Credit: Xinhua/Alamy Live News
It’s not easy being green, by Kaya Genç: The Turkish government is fighting environmental protests with conspiracy theories.
It’s in our nature to fight, by Beth Pitts: The indigenous people of Ecuador are fighting for their future.
Respect for tradition, by Emily Brown: Australia has a history of “selective listening” when it comes to First Nations voices. But Aboriginal campaigners stand ready to share traditional knowledge.
The write way to fight, by Liz Jensen: Extinction Rebellion’s literary wing show that words remain our primary tool for protests.
Change in the pipeline? By Bridget Byrne: Indigenous American’s water is at risk. People are responding.
The rape of Uganda, by Issa Sikiti da Silva: Uganda’s natural resources continue to be plundered.Cigar smoke and mirrors, by James Bloodworth: Cuba’s propaganda must not blight our perception of it.
Denialism is not protected speech, by Oz Katerji: Should challenging facts be protected speech?
Permissible weapons, by Peter Hitchens: Peter Hitchens responds to Nerma Jelacic on her claims for disinformation in Syria.
No winners in Israel’s Ice Cream War, by Jo-Ann Mort: Is the boycott against Israel achieving anything?
Better out than in? By Mark Glanville: Can the ancient Euripides play The Bacchae explain hooliganism on the terraces?
Russia’s Greatest Export: Hostility to the free press, by Mikhail Khordokovsky: A billionaire exile tells us how Russia leads the way in the tactics employed to silence journalists.
Remembering Peter R de Vries, by Frederike Geeerdink: Read about the Dutch journalist gunned down for doing his job.
A right royal minefield, by John Lloyd: Whenever one of the Royal Family are interviewed, it seems to cause more problems.
A bulletin of frustration, by Ruth Smeeth: Climate change affects us all and we must fight for the voices being silenced by it.
Credit: Gregory Maassen/Alamy[/caption]
The man who blew up America, by David Grundy: Poet, playwright, activist and critic Amiri Baraka remains a controversial figure seven years after his death.
Suffering in silence, by Benjamin Lynch and Dr Parwana Fayyaz The award-winning poetry that reminds us of the values of free thought and how crucial it is for Afghan women.
Heart and Sole, by Mark Frary and Katja Oskamp: A fascinating extract gives us an insight into the bland lives of some of those who did not welcome the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Secret Agenda, by Martin Bright: Reforms to the UK’s Official Secret Act could create a chilling effect for journalists reporting on information in the public interest.
24 Sep 2021 | Bosnia, China, News and features, Turkey, Volume 50.03 Autumn 2021 Extras
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”117556″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][vc_column_text]Almost three decades ago, some three million books and countless artefacts went up in flames when Sarajevo’s National and University Library – inside the Vijecnica (city hall) – was burned to the ground. The destruction of the Vijecnica at the beginning of the war was a symbol for one of the aggressor’s main objectives – silencing the soul of the city and crushing the cultural identity of an entire society.”
So said Dunja Mijatović, the current Council of Europe commissioner for human rights, who was born in Sarajevo when it was part of Yugoslavia.
Just weeks before the anniversary of the burning of the library on 25 August 1992, Mijatović spoke to Index about its symbolism and what its destruction was meant to achieve.
She quoted Heinrich Heine’s play, Almansor: “Where they burn books they will also, in the end, burn people.”
Libraries and archives have been targets for centuries, and the reason is always the same: it’s about taking away knowledge and stifling free thinking.
Libraries are, and have always been, symbols of freedom – the freedom to think and learn and find documents and books to debate and discuss.
Throughout history, when authoritarians take power and seek to control thought and behaviour, they either lock up libraries or destroy the manuscripts and books inside them.
The Serbian forces who burned the Sarajevo library were seeking to obliterate evidence of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s existence as a successful multicultural and multi-ethnic state. The documents they burned told a different history from the one that the army leaders wanted to portray.
Omar Mohammed, who reported as Mosul Eye on the Isis occupation of his city in Iraq, risked his life to blog anonymously about the occupiers’ wish to destroy books as well as to execute people as they sought to repress the population.
Mohammed told Index that it was not just the university library that was destroyed in Mosul, but it was the one that was reported on the most.
Many other libraries, even private collections, were wiped out. “The only possible reason is because knowledge is power,” he said. “Once you prevent people from accessing knowledge then you will have full control over them.”
Like many other scholars who have delved into the history of libraries, Mohammed understands that it is not about the buildings themselves.
“They don’t want people to have this access because they know if people write the history, it will be completely different from the one they wanted it to be,” he said.
Targeting libraries sends out a powerful message to scholars, historians and scientists, he added.
“When they see that such people are able to totally target the libraries, that they are literally able to destroy everything, it’s a manifestation of brutality.”
Today, Richard Ovenden, the most senior librarian at the Bodleian libraries at the University of Oxford, is worried about libraries in Turkey being closed under pressure from the government of president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
According to some sources, at least 188 libraries were closed there between 2002 and 2020.
Ovenden’s book, Burning the Books, looks at the history of the intentional destruction of knowledge. He was recently contacted by a Turkish student, who said: “I’ve just read your book and I want you to know how bad it is in Turkey, because libraries are being destroyed. And all the things that you write about are true in Turkey today.”
Ovenden said: “There is an absolutely authoritarian control over knowledge. Attacks on knowledge are being exercised by the authoritarian leader of Turkey right now. It is the ability for the population to generate their own ideas and to come up with their own thoughts that some governments, some authoritarian powers, some dictators and rulers do not like.”
When dictatorships seek to establish that certain minorities don’t exist, or haven’t lived somewhere, getting rid of the documentary evidence is very convenient.
Archives that establish the existence of Uighurs in China and Muslims in parts of India also look like targets.
Ovenden feels that what is fantastically important about libraries is that they “preserve the past thoughts and ideas of human beings so they’re parts of that evidence base”.
He added: “They’re also disseminating institutions [where] you can borrow the books, you can come and take those ideas away and write other books about them, or pamphlets, or newspaper articles, or whatever it is.”
Governments around the world are failing to protect libraries as a resource, sometimes by withdrawing or drastically reducing funding.
In the UK, almost 800 libraries closed between 2010 and 2019, and a major campaign kicked off in Australia this year to save the national archives.
Michelle Arrow, professor of history at Macquarie University in Sydney, argued in April that if funding cuts were not reversed, irreplaceable audio-visual collections would fall apart. After a public campaign, the national government has delivered some extra funding, but this has not solved all the archives’ problems.
She told Index that with a reduction in staff of almost 25% since 2013, more staff would be needed to deal with the large backlog of requests to view archived material.
She said the archives contained “unique records, and they touch almost every Australian: it is a democratic archive, a collection of ordinary people’s records, rather than famous or renowned Australians”.
While some countries are seeing numerous library closures due to financial or other threats, there are new defenders coming to light. In the coastal city of Santa Cruz in California, there’s a massive investment in upgrades to current libraries, and new ones are opening over the next two years.
Santa Cruz mayor Donna Meyers told Index: “In California, we just tend to believe in public institutions. We believe that public education, public libraries, all of that, lead to a better community, lead to a more informed society.”
Santa Cruz residents passed a special tax – by 78% of the vote – to pay for investment in the libraries which, Meyers says, is a sign of how committed the community is to libraries being around for future generations.
Back in Sarajevo, Mijatović can see the new library that rose from the ashes of the Vijecnica from her terrace.
She said: “One hopes that the soul and the people of Sarajevo will recover and that new generations will hopefully enjoy this magnificent symbol of Sarajevo and, more importantly, live in peace.”
Library destruction in recent history
1914: German troops destroy the library of the Catholic University of Louvain
1939: The Great Talmudic Library in Lublin is destroyed by the Nazis
1966-76: Chairman Mao destroys libraries across China as part of the Cultural Revolution
1976-79: The Khmer Rouge deliberately destroy libraries across Cambodia, including the Phnom Penh national library
2013: Islamic troops set fire to the library in Timbuktu, Mali
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