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Turkey's enlightenment languishes, like the journalists in its prisons
The record number of reporters imprisoned in Turkey threatens to
extinguish the flame of democratic reform
Fiachra Gibbons
Tuesday 13 March 2012 16.39 GMT
A year ago, police burst into the homes of two of Turkey's best
investigative journalists, Nedim Sener and Ahmet Sik, and carted them
off to prison where they remained until last night, charged with
crimes so nebulous even prosecutors can't explain them.
They are not alone. Turkey now holds the world record for locking up
journalists, leaving Iran and China scrabbling in the dust, with by
most reckonings 103 reporters behind bars, as opposed to 42 in Tehran
and 27 in China. More journalists were arrested in Istanbul in one
morning over Christmas than the Chinese managed all year - who says
Europe can no longer compete?
Sik and Sener's dramatic release on bail yesterday after an
international outcry hopefully shows the Turkish authorities are
finally coming to their senses. Both men are nevertheless still
looking at up to 15 years in prison for basically doing their job.
The exact number of journalists in prison awaiting trial is hard to
pin down - estimates range from eight to 122, with 103 being the most
generally accepted - because the charges against them can be kept
secret under Turkey's draconian anti-terrorist laws. The lowest figure
is a provisional one from the New York-based Committee for the
Protection of Journalists, which believes its final verified count may
top 90. Another 30 press workers are in jail, rounded up under laws
drafted by the country's former military rulers and enforced by a
judiciary cut from the same cloth.
Two columnists from the website Oda TV, who had also been held in
solitary confinement in the same prison as Sik and Sener, were also
bailed last night. But as they were hugged and cheered by their
families and supporters, other journalists were still being arrested.
On Saturday night, Ozlem Agus became the 106th journalist to be
jailed, accused of "spreading terrorist propaganda" by breaking the
story of the rape and sexual abuse of minors charged with terrorist
offences held in an adult prison near Adana. Having ignored his
reporting for months, the government was forced to react to the
scandal last week. The price was Agus's freedom. The following day,
another Kurdish reporter was remanded in custody accused of the same
crime.
This has all come amid a blizzard of prosecutions of journalists that
now tops 4,000, the latest brought this weekend by the prime minister
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who claims the independent daily Taraf injured
his dignity by imputing in an editorial that he had become
increasingly "arrogant, uninformed and uninterested" in reform.
So how could a country that is held up as a poster boy for democratic
reform and economic success, the model Muslim democracy for the Arab
spring to follow, go quite so horribly wrong?
The answer, or much of it, lies in that police raid last March on the
homes of Sik and Sener, and shows how Turkey's once reformist
government has succumbed to the same old repressive paranoia of the
military-nationalist establishment it was elected to clear away nearly
10 years ago.
Sik and Sener have spent years winning international awards for
excavating the Turkish "deep state", the shadowy cabals within the
military and civil service who staged four coups in as many decades in
the name of protecting Ataturk's secular legacy, and shackled Turkey
with its present constitution, the most authoritarian this side of
Pyongyang.
Yet they ended up in prison as a part of the 18th wave of arrests into
another putative coup, the so-called Ergenekon conspiracy to overthrow
Erdogan's moderately Islamic AK party government - a plot revealed by
none other than Sik and his colleagues at the Nokta magazine. Sener
had meanwhile exposed staggering official negligence, if not
connivance, in the murder of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant
Dink, and was in the process of linking the killing to Ergenekon. (To
give you an idea of how surreally skewed press freedom in Turkey is,
prosecutors initially demanded Sener serve a longer sentence for
revealing the scandal than the one they demanded for Dink's killers.)
It would be funny if the circumstances of the Dink case were not so
horribly tragic. And then it got even worse. The police began bugging
the two journalists' phones, hoping to piggy-back on their inquiries,
having arrested 700 military figures and other government opponents
over four years with little or nothing to show for it investigating
Ergenekon and another alleged coup plot.
In so doing, they discovered Sik was writing a book on a "second deep
state", one run in opposition to the Kemalist military by police
officers, business leaders and AK party politicians loyal to the
exiled theologian Fethullah Gulen, often hailed as the visionary
behind Turkey's democratic Islamic enlightenment.
The Gulen movement - a kind of sufi freemasons where secrecy and jobs
for the boys are squared by good works and the common goal of a Turkey
guided by a revived, scientific Islam - owns the country's biggest
selling newspaper, Zaman, controls hundreds of Jesuit-style schools
turning out its new, religiously minded elite and various charities
and TV channels.
Suddenly, Sik the man who stymied the nascent military coup against
the government was accused of being part of it. Police not only seized
his unfinished manuscript on the Gulen movement, The Army of the Imam,
they destroyed it, and began a paperchase to destroy any other copies
that might exist.
Gulen may preach openness and tolerance of other faiths, but the
movement run in his name is a model of opacity - understandably so
given the history of repression of similar dervish orders by the old,
rigidly Kemalist elite. Sadly, however, the new observant elite appear
to have inherited their secular predecessors' love of conspiracy, as
well as their fearsome arsenal of repressive laws. None of which bodes
well for justice and transparency in the new Turkey Gulen and his
millions of followers want to create, particularly when the prime
minister and AK party luminaries brand journalists who criticise them
as "criminals and terrorists".
Turkey is a much freer country today than the day the AK party came to
power, and much of that is also due to the Gulen movement. But it is a
funny kind of freedom, one where the internet is tracked and
restricted and where freedom of speech comes at a price. Turkey stands
proud again on the world stage as a major player and model to the
Muslim world, yet at home no one risks being entirely open, nor
entirely honest.
In this atmosphere, with renewed violence and repression in the
Kurdish south-east, chest-beating nationalism, and such public tension
between the devout and the secular that MPs cannot debate an education
bill without two mass brawls in a week, a new constitution to replace
the old military one is finally being broached. Erdogan, the rock on
which hopes of reform once rested, has entered his third term in power
ill and ill-tempered, his absolute majority in parliament fighting
yesterday's sectarian battles. The Turkish enlightenment may not yet
be completely dead, but its flame is fading, locked away in the jails
where so many journalists are now being held.
Turkey's enlightenment languishes, like the journalists in its prisons
The record number of reporters imprisoned in Turkey threatens to
extinguish the flame of democratic reform
Fiachra Gibbons
Tuesday 13 March 2012 16.39 GMT
A year ago, police burst into the homes of two of Turkey's best
investigative journalists, Nedim Sener and Ahmet Sik, and carted them
off to prison where they remained until last night, charged with
crimes so nebulous even prosecutors can't explain them.
They are not alone. Turkey now holds the world record for locking up
journalists, leaving Iran and China scrabbling in the dust, with by
most reckonings 103 reporters behind bars, as opposed to 42 in Tehran
and 27 in China. More journalists were arrested in Istanbul in one
morning over Christmas than the Chinese managed all year - who says
Europe can no longer compete?
Sik and Sener's dramatic release on bail yesterday after an
international outcry hopefully shows the Turkish authorities are
finally coming to their senses. Both men are nevertheless still
looking at up to 15 years in prison for basically doing their job.
The exact number of journalists in prison awaiting trial is hard to
pin down - estimates range from eight to 122, with 103 being the most
generally accepted - because the charges against them can be kept
secret under Turkey's draconian anti-terrorist laws. The lowest figure
is a provisional one from the New York-based Committee for the
Protection of Journalists, which believes its final verified count may
top 90. Another 30 press workers are in jail, rounded up under laws
drafted by the country's former military rulers and enforced by a
judiciary cut from the same cloth.
Two columnists from the website Oda TV, who had also been held in
solitary confinement in the same prison as Sik and Sener, were also
bailed last night. But as they were hugged and cheered by their
families and supporters, other journalists were still being arrested.
On Saturday night, Ozlem Agus became the 106th journalist to be
jailed, accused of "spreading terrorist propaganda" by breaking the
story of the rape and sexual abuse of minors charged with terrorist
offences held in an adult prison near Adana. Having ignored his
reporting for months, the government was forced to react to the
scandal last week. The price was Agus's freedom. The following day,
another Kurdish reporter was remanded in custody accused of the same
crime.
This has all come amid a blizzard of prosecutions of journalists that
now tops 4,000, the latest brought this weekend by the prime minister
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who claims the independent daily Taraf injured
his dignity by imputing in an editorial that he had become
increasingly "arrogant, uninformed and uninterested" in reform.
So how could a country that is held up as a poster boy for democratic
reform and economic success, the model Muslim democracy for the Arab
spring to follow, go quite so horribly wrong?
The answer, or much of it, lies in that police raid last March on the
homes of Sik and Sener, and shows how Turkey's once reformist
government has succumbed to the same old repressive paranoia of the
military-nationalist establishment it was elected to clear away nearly
10 years ago.
Sik and Sener have spent years winning international awards for
excavating the Turkish "deep state", the shadowy cabals within the
military and civil service who staged four coups in as many decades in
the name of protecting Ataturk's secular legacy, and shackled Turkey
with its present constitution, the most authoritarian this side of
Pyongyang.
Yet they ended up in prison as a part of the 18th wave of arrests into
another putative coup, the so-called Ergenekon conspiracy to overthrow
Erdogan's moderately Islamic AK party government - a plot revealed by
none other than Sik and his colleagues at the Nokta magazine. Sener
had meanwhile exposed staggering official negligence, if not
connivance, in the murder of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant
Dink, and was in the process of linking the killing to Ergenekon. (To
give you an idea of how surreally skewed press freedom in Turkey is,
prosecutors initially demanded Sener serve a longer sentence for
revealing the scandal than the one they demanded for Dink's killers.)
It would be funny if the circumstances of the Dink case were not so
horribly tragic. And then it got even worse. The police began bugging
the two journalists' phones, hoping to piggy-back on their inquiries,
having arrested 700 military figures and other government opponents
over four years with little or nothing to show for it investigating
Ergenekon and another alleged coup plot.
In so doing, they discovered Sik was writing a book on a "second deep
state", one run in opposition to the Kemalist military by police
officers, business leaders and AK party politicians loyal to the
exiled theologian Fethullah Gulen, often hailed as the visionary
behind Turkey's democratic Islamic enlightenment.
The Gulen movement - a kind of sufi freemasons where secrecy and jobs
for the boys are squared by good works and the common goal of a Turkey
guided by a revived, scientific Islam - owns the country's biggest
selling newspaper, Zaman, controls hundreds of Jesuit-style schools
turning out its new, religiously minded elite and various charities
and TV channels.
Suddenly, Sik the man who stymied the nascent military coup against
the government was accused of being part of it. Police not only seized
his unfinished manuscript on the Gulen movement, The Army of the Imam,
they destroyed it, and began a paperchase to destroy any other copies
that might exist.
Gulen may preach openness and tolerance of other faiths, but the
movement run in his name is a model of opacity - understandably so
given the history of repression of similar dervish orders by the old,
rigidly Kemalist elite. Sadly, however, the new observant elite appear
to have inherited their secular predecessors' love of conspiracy, as
well as their fearsome arsenal of repressive laws. None of which bodes
well for justice and transparency in the new Turkey Gulen and his
millions of followers want to create, particularly when the prime
minister and AK party luminaries brand journalists who criticise them
as "criminals and terrorists".
Turkey is a much freer country today than the day the AK party came to
power, and much of that is also due to the Gulen movement. But it is a
funny kind of freedom, one where the internet is tracked and
restricted and where freedom of speech comes at a price. Turkey stands
proud again on the world stage as a major player and model to the
Muslim world, yet at home no one risks being entirely open, nor
entirely honest.
In this atmosphere, with renewed violence and repression in the
Kurdish south-east, chest-beating nationalism, and such public tension
between the devout and the secular that MPs cannot debate an education
bill without two mass brawls in a week, a new constitution to replace
the old military one is finally being broached. Erdogan, the rock on
which hopes of reform once rested, has entered his third term in power
ill and ill-tempered, his absolute majority in parliament fighting
yesterday's sectarian battles. The Turkish enlightenment may not yet
be completely dead, but its flame is fading, locked away in the jails
where so many journalists are now being held.