Within hours of the bombing–in a busy shopping area in Reyhanli, the temporary home of thousands of Syrian refugees–police in Hatay, Istanbul, and Ankara visited newsrooms and presented the court order to media managers to ensure they heed to it. The order banned “every type of voice and visual recording, feeds, print and visual media [records], and data on the Internet” about the Reyhanli incident. The order also banned sharing of information about “the event scene, the dead and the wounded at the event scene, and the contents of the event.”
Öğret, Özgür. “News blackout deepens Turkey press freedom doubts.” CPJ Blog, May 17, 2013.
Although the ban was recently lifted, readers who click on the above URL will find a damning story about the character of President Erdogan’s autocracy.
Although a party to NATO security arrangements, a Turkish state evaluated today on its anti-democratic and authoritarian drift would seem a far cry from any European open society.
The good news here may be hinted at by this partial quotation from the same piece: ” . . . but a court in Hatay lifted the ban, just like the Reyhanli court had imposed it.”
In President Erdogan’s Turkey, the autocrat has yet to get a free ride.
Take a look with me at another article posted earlier this year, this one by Al Jazeera:
“There was no [physical] torture but without [a real] reason to be arrested, it was torture to be treated like a terrorist. Everyone is looking at you like you’re a monster,” Zarakolu told Al Jazeera from a café near his home in Istanbul.
The speaker authored articles and published books by Kurdish and Armenian writers of their audiences.
The article will go on to note that Turkish authorities believe they have cause in that the journalists swept into its prisons may have additional roles in illegal organizations, and in this day of “advocacy journalism”, that may be true. Still, it may be too easy to turn the intellectual adversaries of the state into alleged terrorists and thereby remove a part of their ideas and observations from public view.
Measuring strictly in terms of imprisonments, Turkey—a longtime American ally, member of NATO, and showcase Muslim democracy—appears to be the most repressive country in the world.
According to the Journalists Union of Turkey, ninety-four reporters are currently imprisoned for doing their jobs.
Filkins, Dexter. “Turkey’s Jailed Journalists.” The New Yorker, March 9, 2012.
Filkins, whom I consider a journalist’s journalist — truly, the best of the best — goes on to note in The New Yorker piece that “. . . more than seven hundred people have been arrested, including members of paliament, army officers, university rectors, the heads of aid organizations, and the owners of television networks” since Erdogan’s rise to power in 2007.
Turkey’s “journalism watch” story, as bad as it may be, stretches across and more deeply into the nation’s education, information, and military communities, effectively transforming Filkin’s noted “showcase Muslim democracy”) toward the too familiar “Muslim dictatorship”.
However, as noted, Erdogan’s efforts toward consolidating his power and controlling the intellectual experience of his countrymen are not unbounded, unnoticed, or without impedance.
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