ERDOGAN’S ASSAULT ON THE PRESS
It is a terrible irony, said Amberin Zaman in Al Monitor (Washington DC), that 24 July – celebrated by Turkish journalists as the day press censorship was first lifted in Turkey – should now prove to be a landmark day in President Erdogan’s campaign to reimpose it. This 24 July marked the start of the trial, on “outlandish” terror-related charges, of 17 journalists and managers of the celebrated newspaper Cumhuriyet, Turkey’s last remaining opposition daily. The defendants are accused of supporting pro-kurdish terrorists and/or of backing the movement led by the preacher Fethullah Gülen, which the government says was complicit in last year’s abortive coup. This is just the latest episode in Erdogan’s persecution of journalists. At least 150 are behind bars, a higher number than in any other country – although, of course, he insists they aren’t journalists, but “murderers, fraudsters, thieves and child molesters”.
It’s bizarre to see Cumhuriyet accused of involvement with terrorism, said Serkan Demirtas in Hürriyet (Istanbul), as it has always strongly denounced it. Indeed, the paper’s loyalty to secular, democratic values has made it the target of terror attacks. The notion that it’s in cahoots with the Gülenist movement is equally fatuous. Soon after Erdogan’s AKP won power in 2002, its columnist Kadri Gürsel, now on trial, warned of the danger posed by Gülenist infiltration of the judiciary. Another of the accused is Ahmet Sik, a well-known investigative journalist who wrote a book exposing the pernicious nature of Gülenist influence. Police stumbled upon the book manuscript during a raid in 2011, said Cumhuriyet journalist Mine Kirikkanat in La Croix (Paris), and as Erdogan and Gülen were at that time firm pals, Sik was sent to jail. But in 2013, when the AKP broke with the Gülenists, he was cleared and his book published. So why on Earth is he now accused of being a Gülen follower? “Kafka himself couldn’t have dreamed this up.” It makes Turkey look like a “banana republic”.
By coaxing businessmen to buy up news outlets in exchange for juicy government contracts, Erdogan has effectively “bought” more than two-thirds of Turkey’s media, said Aydin Engin in Libération (Paris). So Turkey now has to put up with what Turks call “penguin” media, a reference to the occasion during the 2013 Gezi Park protests when a TV station ran a film about penguins instead of reporting police violence. Cumhuriyet has been the exception as it’s managed by the journalists themselves. But it seems to have come to the end of the road.