Right after RecepTayyip Erdogan’s electoral victory to become the first almighty president of Turkey, Turkish judges sentenced six Zaman journalists to heavy prison sentences ranging from eight years and nine months to 10 years and six months.
The father of Zaman’s last publisher, Celal Afsar, has been arrested for being a member and a leader of “an armed terrorist organisation”. Zaman was Turkey’s largest newspaper when it was first confiscated in March 2016 and then banned in the wake of the botched coup of July the same year. After it was confiscated, its critical editorial policy changed overnight and it became just another government mouthpiece. Following the ban, the government started a witch-hunt against almost all the Zaman editorial staff. Many of my colleagues are either in jail or in hiding.
Some of them fled the country. I have an arrest warrant for being a member of an armed terrorist organisation although I have lived in Brusselssince 2001 and was not in or near Turkey when the coup attempt took place. The sentences given to Zaman columnists were condemned by the Organisation of Security and Co-operation in Europe, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the European Federation of Journalists and many others as grossly unjustified and unfair.
The indictment was a textbook example of farcical nonsense. There were plenty of advertisements, articles and news stories put forward as proof but no evidence that would show my colleagues were members of an armed terrorist organisation. There was not a single weapon found related to the defendants.
There was neither evidence connecting them to the botched coup nor communication with the coup perpetrators or the military personnel. What the prosecutor had as proof were the articles written by these columnists. Take the example of Professor Sahin Alpay, who is 75 years old.
He had been accused of participating in “perception engineering” just because he wrote critical articles about President Erdogan. The prosecutor was well aware that there was no crime, but he had to invent one. In the indictment he said: “Even in their articles, which seem to have no criminal activity, they (Zaman columnists) have violated the rights of the statesman and government authorities.” Another invention by the prosecution was the accusation that Zaman knew about the looming coup of July 15 – nine months and 10 days in advance.
The proof is the TV commercials Zaman had aired in October on several TV channels. Hard to believe but real, the indictment said: “In the media and web pages of the organisation, a commercial had been aired on October 5 for the Zaman daily. After an aerial image of a city centre where we hear sirens, a baby is smiling on the screens. We assess that this commercial was actually heralding the looming coup d’état… “Right after nine months and 10 days of the start of the commercial of sirens, the image of a ruined city together with the smiling baby profiles, the coup took place. This cannot be explained by mere coincidence.”
According to the Stockholm Centre for Freedom, which was created in Sweden by exiled Turkish journalists, there are 178 journalists behind bars, and another 143 are wanted. Turkey is by far the biggest journalist jailer on Earth, well ahead of China. Reporters Without Borders has putTurkey at 157 out of 180 countries in its 2018 world press freedom index. Yet Erdogan claims that the Turkish press is more free than its counterparts in Europe. After Erdogan was elected as the first omnipotent president of Turkey without any checks and balances, three newspapers and a TV station were banned and all their property was confiscated. More terrible was the arrest of Celal Afsar, who is 86 years old and has many health issues.
He was detained at the end of last month together with his daughter and his son-in-law. Afsar is the father of Akif Afsar, who is the last publisher of Zaman. Akif is living abroad but is wanted on charges of “leading an armed terrorist organisation”. The witch-hunt against Zaman is at full speed. If the publisher or the journalist cannot be arrested, then their close relatives are put behind bars. Neither my colleagues nor my publisher have ever led or become part of a terrorist organisation. Their only crime was to criticise Erdogan’s authoritarian drift, which they thought was their right and duty in a supposedly democratic country.
Selçuk Gultasli is a Turkish journalist