Who's Muzzling the Turkish Press?

Journalist Andrew Finkel, who was fired a few weeks ago by Today's Zaman because of a critical column he wrote, has a powerful opinion piece in today's International Herald Tribune about some of the recent troubling trends in the Turkish press. From his column:

Sadly, the most effective censor in Turkey today is the press itself. To adopt a stance critical of current policies is to position oneself in opposition to the government — and editors only do so as a calculated risk. Columns exposing corruption or criticizing the government’s sprawl-inducing environmental policies are simply spiked.

When Turkish newspapers try to speak their mind, they often discover their advertisers dropping out, explaining apologetically that they have “come under pressure.”

The full piece can be found here. A previous post about Finkel's firing and it's implications is here.

[UPDATE -- CNN's Ivan Watson has a new piece out about press issues in Turkey, which can be viewed here.]

Inconvenient Truths

The recent firing by the Today's Zaman newspaper of one of its top columnists, Andrew Finkel, for doing his job -- which is to write smart, questioning pieces that push forward the conversation on important and difficult issues -- should be cause for great concern for anyone who cares about the development of an independent and democratic press in Turkey.

Finkel is one of the smartest observers of Turkish politics, reporting on Turkey long enough to have an insider's deep understanding of what makes the country tick, while at the same time maintaining his outsider's critical distance. It's a combination that provided for frequently memorable and essential columns during his his three-year stint at Today's Zaman -- and which also got him into trouble before. In 1999, Finkel was charged with "insulting state institutions" after writing about some inconvenient truths regarding the Turkish military, which then led to his being fired by his employer, the Sabah newspaper, at the insistence of the country's National Security Council (MGK) .

Although the military wasn't involved this time around, it's clear that Finkel again got canned for writing (or trying to write) about another inconvenient truth. Today's Zaman is supported by the Fethullah Gulen movement, which is currently in the middle of another press-related controversy in Turkey, having to do with the arrest of a journalist who was preparing to publish a book that accuses the movement of having infiltrated the country's security forces. Following the arrest of the journalist, Ahmet Sik, on charges that his book is connected to the Ergenekon coup plot, prosecutors went on an aggressive campaign to confiscate any unpublished versions of the book and even indicated it would be a crime for individuals to be in possession of the manuscript.

Finkel wrote a column in response to these developments, but Today's Zaman refused to run it and then let the columnist go. In the column, which was printed instead in yesterday's Hurriyet Daily News, Finkel takes his (now former) employer and the Gulen movement to task for their response to recent events. From his column:

It was a bit over three years ago that I was recruited to write this column for this newspaper (Today’s Zaman). I remember the conversation well. The editor-in-chief anticipated that I might be hesitant to associate myself with a press group whose prejudices and principles might not always coincide with my own. He explained what I knew already, that the Zaman Group supported and was supported by the Fetullah Gülen Community and that I would have to take that on board. However, he explained the paper's mission was to fight for the democratization of Turkish society – that Turkey was no longer a country which should be ruled by military fiat. He also impressed upon me that he was committed to liberal values and to free discussion. And then, of course, he flattered me by saying that mine was a voice which the target audience of Today’s Zaman would want to hear. What helped me to make up my mind was the presence of columnists whose reputations I respected and whose standard of integrity had got them into trouble in other “corners” of the Turkish media....

....I have already expressed my concern that the fight against anti-democratic forces in Turkey has resorted to self-defeating anti-democratic methods. This in turn has led to a polarization in Turkey. If your side loses power then the natural fear is that they will use your methods against you. In case this sounds like I am speaking in riddles, I am referring to the aggressive prosecution of people who write books. These may be bad books, they may be books which are written with ulterior motives, they may be books which contain assertions which are not true. But at the end of the day, they are books – and there are libel courts – not criminal courts – designed to protect individuals from malicious falsehood. In short, writing a book offensive to the Gülen community is not a crime.

It may be in bad taste, it might be off beam. It might every bit as nonsensical as the conspiracy theories that fill the shelves of Turkish book stores. But it might not. And until we actually read it we cannot know. More to the point, we can only question the motives of those who don’t want us to read it. It blackens the names of the censors, increases the credibility of a book which no one has even read. It’s also extremely foolish because in an age of Internet, you can’t actually stop people from whispering your backs. The point about the ostrich with its head in the sand is that it only fools itself.

However, I write this in the interests of defending the good name of this newspaper, with whom I have been associated since the first copy appeared on the stands. Having started the dialogue, it cannot stop.

(The full column can be found here. And some thoughts from Jenny White here.)

Finkel's firing strikes me as a very bad omen for which direction the political discussion in Turkey may be heading and for the health of the Turkish press. It's also a troubling development for Today's Zaman (and its Turkish-language sister paper, Zaman), which has become an increasingly blunt instrument in recent months, frequently resorting to the the same questionable journalistic tactics that it had long criticized its rivals for using. As one of two English-language papers in Turkey and because many of its writers represent a Gulen perspective, the newspaper remains a valuable resource and an important read. But after Finkel's firing, it is a much diminished publication. Finkel in many ways embodied Today's Zaman's mandate, and was then fired for fulfilling that mandate. The question, then, is: has the paper's mandate changed?

"I do not doubt that the current Turkish government, like those that preceded it, uses both carrot and baseball bat to get the media on its side," Finkel wrote in a September, 2009 column on press issues that seems particularly relevant today. "Yet even were the elected government to value a free and vital press (and there are days when this appears to be the case), the question remains whether the press itself is prepared for the role."

[UPDATE -- Today's Zaman editor-in-chief Bulent Kenes has penned a column explaining why his paper let Finkel go. While Finkel was one of the first journalists that he thought about hiring when he launched the paper, Kenes says that something (or, as he sees it, someone) has now "changed."

"So what is it that has changed?" he writes. "What has changed is that some of our writers have come under the influence of the strong and dark propaganda that is at play and have started to stagger. Unfortunately I feel the same way about Finkel, who I know does not have ill intentions in any way."

That certainly seems to clear things up, doesn't it?]

A Boycott for Mr. Naipaul

What is it about Turks and winners of the Nobel prize for literature? Their own home-grown one, Orhan Pamuk, has more-or-less been hounded out of the country for alleged insults against the nation. And now V.S. Naipaul, the Trinidad-born 2001 winner of the prize, has been forced to cancel a speech he was to make in Turkey because of an uproar over alleged insults he made against Islam.

The story's background, via the Wall Street Journal:

Nobel Prize-winning author Sir V.S. Naipaul has pulled out of a writers' conference in Istanbul that starts Thursday, pressured by religious conservative media in Turkey that objected to statements he has made on Islam.

The move sparked two Turkish authors to pull out of the event, its organizers said Wednesday.

Mr. Naipaul, author of some 30 books, had been due to give the opening speech at the European Parliament of Writers, a literary event organized here to mark Istanbul's status as a European Capital of Culture this year.

For the past week, however, religious conservative Turkish newspapers, including Yeni Safak and Zaman, have been campaigning against the decision to honor Mr. Naipaul, a 78-year-old Trinidadian of Indian origin. While some Turkish authors supported his right to attend the conference, defending him on grounds of free speech, others said they would boycott the event if he attended.

"How can our writers bear to sit by the same table with Naipaul, who has seen Muslims worthy of so many insults?" wrote poet and Zaman columnist Hilmi Yavuz, who initiated the planned boycott last week and described Mr. Naipaul as "an enemy of Islam" and "a colonialist."

Is it me, or is there an ill wind of intolerance blowing through Turkey these days? From television stations being fined for what guests said during debates, to ministers suing columnists for perceived insults and armed gangs attacking art gallery openings, there seems to be a worrying trend developing here.

The great irony regarding the scratched Naipaul visit was that the cantankerous author was actually in Istanbul this past July and not a peep was heard. At that time, he came as a key speaker in something called "Istancool," an arts and culture festival sponsored by Turkish Airlines and the Turkish Ministry of Tourism. Four months later, Istanbul doesn't seem so cool, at least not on the cultural front.

Turkey is trying to position Istanbul as a global capital of, among other things, culture. The Naipaul affair is a sign that, at least for now, the internal forces and contradictions that continue to tug at the Turkish sense of self-identity will prevent the city from playing that role. Indeed, as Sameer Rahim, the Daily Telegraph's assistant books editor, wrote in a column about the affair, Naipaul's writing probably has a lot to offer Turkey:

Naipaul, like Turkey, contains unfathomable contradictions. (He does, after all, have a Pakistani wife.) Those Turks who opposed his entry might do well to ignore his provocations and read his powerful novels of inbetweeness.

A very interesting 2005 New York Times profile of Naipaul, meanwhile, sheds more light on his complicated and sometimes problematic approach to Islam, but also shows that the author and the two books about his travels in parts of the Muslim world, which have been the source for some of the criticism leveled against Naipaul, might also have something to say for today's Turkey. From the article:

The books raise but don't necessarily answer deep and vexing questions: Is secularism a precondition of tolerance? Does one necessarily have to abandon one's individual cultural and religious identity to become part of the West? Why do people willingly choose lives that restrict their intellectual freedom?

Turkey's Internet Laws "Under Surveillance"

Reporters Without Borders has just issued its latest list of "Internet Enemies," looking at countries where online activity is monitored, restricted or punished. This year, RSF has designated Turkey as a country "Under Surveillance" -- joining Russia and Belarus, among others. As mentioned in these previous posts here, here and here, Turkey has some very strong -- and misguided -- internet censorship laws, which allow both the courts and the government to block access to websites (the ongoing ban on YouTube in the country the most famous example).

You can read RSF's report on Turkey here.

Death By Taxes

Is the Turkish government trying to break the back of the media group that has served as its most vocal opposition by slapping it with a whopping $2.5 billion tax penalty? I’m not an accountant, but there certainly seems to be something suspicious about the record-breaking fine levied on the Dogan Media Group, which publishes several powerful newspapers (Hurriyet, Milliyet and Radikal among them) and owns CNN-Turk, the Turkish-language version of CNN, among other channels. The penalty (which equals the entire value of the company) comes on the heels of a $500 million tax fine issued against Dogan a few months ago. According to Turkish tax officials, Dogan has engaged in deceptive practices and has failed to pay tax on income earned through the sale of a company and through the transfer of shares between companies within the group itself. According to the Dogan Group, everything has been above board and the government, through its taxmen, is out to get it by twisting the country’s financial rules to suit its purposes.

First, the background: Over the last few years, the Dogan group’s media outlets have emerged as perhaps the most vocal critics of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). At one point, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan even called for his supporters to boycott the group’s publications. Interestingly, relations between the AKP and the media group turned especially sour after some of the Dogan publications aggressively reported on the gross financial misdeeds committed by the German branch of a Turkish Islamic charity with close ties to the AKP leadership.

So, is the Turkish government involved in a Putin-esque attempt to silence one of its critics, as part of a larger plan to create compliant media? That’s certainly the view of the people working for the Dogan Group. In a column in Milliyet, Fikret Bila, the newspapers’s Ankara representative and one of Turkey’s leading veteran journalists, says this:

This never, ever seen arbitrary tax penalty is beyond imagination. Without any legal ground, such a practice could not be welcomed anywhere in the world. It was not even seen during the Ottoman Sultanate. Even sultans did not exploit state authority so much.

These two consecutive tax levies are nothing but “tax terror” against the company owner, Aydın Doğan. Motives are not only picking up back-taxes. This is obvious. They are not only additional income for the Treasury. That’s for sure. But it is rather confiscation of Doğan companies. These two fines clearly show that the purpose is Mr. Doğan’s bankruptcy.

What is saddening here is that tax officials committed misconduct. Unfortunately tax officials vulnerable to such temptations are casting shadows over this well-respected duty.

The Doğan Group will soon be asked to return all its assets to the state due to such astronomically high tax fines levied by the said tax officials. This is obviously a confiscation process, not just tax penalties.

The government, in its defense, says the massive fine is simply the result of tax inspectors doing their job.

There really are no clear-cut heroes or villains in this affair. Aydin Dogan, chairman of the Dogan organization, is not a scrappy newspaperman fighting for his life, but rather a media baron and business magnate who is a kind of Turkish Rupert Murdoch, controlling a very large slice of the Turkish media scene. As Andrew Finkel points out in an excellent recent column in Today’s Zaman:

As Turkey's press baron extraordinaire, [Dogan] openly promoted his allies and intimidated his foes to carve out a world favorable to himself. He confessed as much in an interview I once did for TIME magazine in which he defended his papers' support for a press law which actually restricted freedoms of expression but which allowed his media holding to be more aggressive in expanding his share of the television market. Why, he asked me, should he cut off his nose to spite his face?

Mr. Doğan was used to cultivating governments, and in the days of weak coalitions, his support mattered. Many regard the 1995 general election in Turkey as a proxy fight between the Doğan Group and Sabah rather than the parties on the ballot paper. Before entering a (failed) coalition with Tansu Çiller, Mesut Yılmaz went to consult with Doğan and the two remained allies. This in itself was not a crime (Tony Blair paid similar sorts of homage to Rupert Murdoch). However, the Doğan Group was persistently criticized for rendering paper thin the firewall between editorial independence and financial self-interest. Ertuğrul Özkök, the editor of the flagship Hürriyet newspaper, proudly wore two hats -- that of a journalist and that of a member of the board who could happily negotiate incentives from the government for factories his parent company was trying to build.

That said, the recent developments are troubling. I would be more comfortable with the possibility of the government taking the Dogan Group down if there existed a truly independent press in Turkey that could step in and fill the vacuum that would be created. That, unfortunately, is not the case. As I have written before, Turkey’s deeply domestic political polarization has worked its way into the country’s media. Whatever the sins of the Dogan Group’s outlets, the pro-government press (Zaman and it’s English-language affiliate Today’s Zaman, in particular) have not distinguished themselves in recent years, showing a disturbing willingness to be used as tools for spreading disinformation. (You can check out previous media-related posts here.)

Tax officials and Dogan are apparently entering negotiations that might lead to a settlement of some kind, although it’s hard to imagine the government backing down too far on this. Whatever happens, it certainly could cost Turkey, both domestically and abroad, raising questions of press freedoms in the country. The European Union, which Turkey hopes to join, has already expressed its concern, with a spokesman in Brussels saying the other day: "When the sanction is of such magnitude that it threatens the very existence of an entire press group, like in this case, then freedom of the press is at stake.”

The Truth on Trial?

Ogun Samast, the youngster accused of murdering Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, faces 20 years in prison if convicted. Nedim Sener, a journalist with the Turkish daily Milliyet, could face 28 years in jail for writing a book that details the the police negligence and intelligence failures that led to Dink's murder.

From Hurriyet:

Milliyet daily reporter Nedim Şener’s book "Dink Murder and Intelligence Lies" focused on the intelligence deficiencies by security agencies before and after Dink was shot dead, leading to a police officer and three senior Police Department intelligence chiefs filing complaints against him....

....After the book’s release in January of this year, Muhittin Zenit, a police officer working at the intelligence division at Trabzon at the time Dink was assassinated, filed a criminal complaint about Şener for "targeting personnel in service of fighting terrorism, obtaining secret documents, disclosing secret documents, violating the secrecy of communication and attempting to influence fair trial" through his book.

After the investigation’s end, Prosecutor Selim Berna Altay charged Şener with "making targets of the personnel in service of fighting terrorism, and obtaining and declaring secret information that is forbidden to be declared," asking for a prison term of 20 years. Since they do not fall under his authority, Altay sent the dossier on "violation of the secrecy of communication" and "attempting to influence fair trial" to theIstanbul Second Court. In the meantime, it was also claimed the book contained the offense of "insulting governmental institutions," and that too was added to the second investigation. Prosecutor İsmail Onaran handled this investigation and filed a second case against Şener asking for his imprisonment for three to eight years.

There is another case ongoing in a Trabzon court against eight personnel from the Trabzon Gendarmerie Command who are accused neglecting their duties regarding Dink’s death. The accused are facing up to two years in prison if found guilty.

"Some of the security personnel that sued me are under investigation for neglecting their duty for Dink’s murder. They want to punish the journalist writing about the responsibilities of those people," said Şener.

In his defense, Şener has noted that the information in his book was already in the public domain and easily found online. (Take a look at this Bianet article for a bit more on the case.)

Although Şener may not be convicted, the fact that a prosecutor decided to press ahead with the case is very troubling, the message of the prosecution appearing to be that even publishing the truth can be a punishable offense. The case also serves as another indication that, despite training programs for prosecutors and judges and efforts at reform, Turkey's judiciary main concern remains protecting the state and its institutions, rather than safeguarding the rights of individuals.

Banned in Turkey, Pt. III

As previously mentioned in this blog here, and here, Turkey has some very strong -- and misguided -- internet censorship law. Google's YouTube and several other prominent websites are currently blocked in Turkey, mostly for carrying material that insults Ataturk, but also for other offenses, such as showing pornography. Turkish law allows the web to be attacked from all sides: individuals and organizations can petition almost any court to have a particular website shut down if they feel it insults them or the Turkish nation in some way, while the government has an agency that monitors websites and that can shut them down without going through the courts.

Now, according to recent reports, the nationalist Atatürkist Thought Association (ADD) has asked prosecutors to look into shutting down Google Sites, a free service run by the search engine giant that allows for the creation of websites. Apparently someone over at the ADD found some websites powered by Google Sites that contain material that insults Ataturk or "Turkishness." “For this reason, we request that an investigation be launched into the issue and necessary precautions be taken,” the organization's petition to the Ankara Public Prosecutor's Office says. If the prosecutor decides to go ahead and take the case to court, the Google service could very well be blocked.

Although there might be a place for some controls over the internet and what it contains, it's clear that Turkey's law, as it is currently constructed, is allowing for the country to be cut off from useful internet tools. That could ultimately affect the country's development, which certainly doesn't seem to be in line with Ataturk's vision for Turkey.

[UPDATE -- You can check out a new Freedom House report on Turkey's internet laws here.]

Banned in Turkey, Pt. II

For those interested in reading more about Turkey's misguided internet censorship laws, a new report by Cyber-Rights.Org is essential reading. A PDF version can be downloaded here.

Also, a very interesting article in the New York Times Magazine gives some more details about Google's struggle with the Turkish courts over their YouTube ban and about the company's growing role in determining the limits of free speech. 

Banned!

Access to this blog, as well as to the millions of others ones that use the Blogger hosting service, was recently blocked in Turkey by court order. Although the ban was provisionally lifted after five days, the Blogger ban is part of a worrying trend in Turkey, which has seen overzealous bureaucrats and ill-informed judges blocking access to more and more websites. YouTube has been blocked in Turkey since May, one of the more than 850 websites banned so far this year. Is Turkey on its way to becoming a leading internet censor? Read more....