Erdogan
Expands His Assault on Journalists Beyond Turkish Borders
IPT News
May 3, 2016
|
|
|
|
|
Share:  
|
  Be the
first of your friends to like this.
|
A caricature depicts
Ebru Umar working away despite a Turkish ball and chain tied to her
ankle.
|
Ebru Umar was angry. A Dutch journalist of Turkish heritage, she has
been known to take that anger to the page. On the night of April 24, from
her summer home in Kusadasi, Turkey, she took it instead to Twitter, raging
against a letter the Turkish Embassy in the Netherlands sent to Turkish
organizations throughout the country. The message: Please report anyone who
has insulted Turkey or its president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. If possible,
include the perpetrator's name, e-mail address, and other identifying
information.
In tweets laced with profanity, including "#f***ererdogan,"
Umar decried the edict (which the embassy had later unconvincingly
explained was "misinterpreted" as a result of "unfortunate
wording"). Even more, she condemned the many Dutch-Turks who supported
it. Tweeting late into the night, she cursed Erdogan, cursed his
supporters, and battled verbally with Dutch Turks who responded by
threatening to turn her in to the police. Then she went to bed.
Soon after, a knock at her door signaled that someone had followed
through with the threat: Turkish police officers stood outside. Umar spent the night in prison. Though she was released the
next day, she may not leave the country. This land arrest could easily end
in days, or it could last years. Meantime, as Dutch officials negotiate
with the Turkish government to bring her home, she continues writing and
condemning the oppression facing her and other journalists.
That's not just in Turkey, which now stands 151st in a list
of 181 countries ranked
for press freedom.
"The biggest problem [in Turkey] is freedom of thought, and
especially freedom for journalists to engage in political commentary,"
Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk declared last year.
Increasingly, Turkish officials are making demands of, and threats
against, journalists abroad.
The notice from Turkey's embassy to the Netherlands, for instance,
followed Germany's decision a month ago to charge comedian Jan Boehmermann
for reading an anti-Erdogan poem on his talk show. The poem referred to yet
another incident in Germany: the satirical broadcast of a song titled
"Erdowie, Erdowo, Erdogan," which included such statements as:
"Equal rights for women: beaten up equally."
Shortly after the "Erdowie" satire aired, Erdogan demanded it be deleted from the station's web site and
wiped from the internet. The TV station refused.
But if German broadcasters had defied Turkey's demands, Chancellor
Angela Merkel has proved more malleable. There are political reasons for
this. As Dutch journalist Jeroen Wollars said
on Dutch TV program "De Wereld Draait Door" the day after Umar's
arrest, Germany has become completely dependent on Erdogan in the face of
the recent agreement over Syrian refugees, which essentially gives the
Turkish president the power to stop the wave of refugees to Europe or
permit it to continue. Hence, when the Turkish government demanded
Boehmermann be prosecuted for insulting its president, Merkel caved. The
35-year-old satirist now faces jail time on the grounds of section 103 of
the German penal code, which criminalizes insulting a foreign head of
state.
"Erdogan has become extremely aggressive since the deal,"
noted Turkey-based Dutch journalist Lucas Waagmeester on "De Wereld
Draaait Door." "And it's not just Erdogan – it's the Turkish
soul." In pursuing that aggression, Holland must have seemed like a
strategic target. Dutch Turks voted heavily for Erdogan in Turkey's snap election
last November, suggesting that they would be sympathetic to his call.
But no one had counted on Ebru Umar.
Legally, Umar faces the same dilemma confronting Boehmermann: Dutch law
also prohibits insulting foreign world leaders. (Though in the shadow of
the Boehmermann case, several parliament members have called for repealing
the law.) Meantime, pundits on Dutch news and talk shows debate the issue,
speaking of the "long arm of Erdogan" and condemning her arrest.
But not everyone agrees. The day Umar was released from jail, her
Amsterdam apartment was burgled, her old laptop stolen, and the word
"whore" scrawled in the hallway. "NederTurks," as Umar
calls them – second and third-generation Dutch Turks – continue to threaten
her on Twitter, and say in media interviews that she "deserved"
to be arrested.
She insulted our president, they say. In other words, they view Erdogan
as their president, and take conservative Turkish values – not Dutch – as
their own. What's more, identifying with Erdogan indicates that they
support restricted speech, a more Islamist culture, and have turned against
the free secular society in which they were born.
For this, Umar views them as traitors to their country, and to their
parents and grandparents who left everything behind, she writes, to give them freedom:
"I think your parents, who left house and home to give
you a homeland of freedom and security, are proud of you. Your parents who
for years have missed their families, have lived and worked in often
appalling conditions so that you, their children, could have a better life
than they did. Congratulations for your totally failed Dutch-ness.
Congratulations for your total loyalty to a pair of mountain goats from
Turkey – goatf*ckers, if you will, whom you follow as soon as they call on
you to behave like the NSB [a Dutch fascist party active from the 1930s to
1945]. Any idea what the NSB was? Oh, wait, no – the lessons in school
about WWII have been scrapped, right? Yes, thanks."
Dutch officials have begun voicing concern about Ebru's safety if she does return
to The Netherlands. Even so, she has refused police protection. A similar
reaction by another outspoken writer, Theo van Gogh (whose column she took over after his
2004 murder by a Muslim radical), proved fatal.
Meantime, what the Dutch are calling the "long arm of Erdogan"
continues to extend its grasp. On April 25, as Umar was leaving her prison
cell, American freelancer David Lepeska, who has lived in Istanbul for
years, returned from a brief holiday in Italy only to be denied re-entry at Istanbul's Ataturk Airport. Instead,
the freelancer, who has written for Al Jazeera, Foreign Policy
and others, was held for 20 hours before being ushered onto a flight to
Chicago without explanation. Contacted by e-mail the following day, he said
only, "A bit heartbroken, but determined to return."
But even if he is able to go back to Istanbul, what kind of country will
he be returning to? In March, authorities seized control of the country's most popular newspaper,
Zaman. In August, 2015, two American journalists working for Vice
were arrested and charged with terrorism, along with their
Turkish associate. Last Thursday, two editors from Turkish daily Cumhurriyet
were sentenced to two years in prison on blasphemy charges
for reprinting the Charlie Hebdo Mohammed cartoons.
For all its exotic charms and celebrated cultural riches, Turkey is fast
becoming a land where no journalist, no matter where he or she may come
from, can be safe.
Related Topics: Free
Speech, Islamist
Censorship, Turkey,
Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, Ebru
Umar, Orhan
Pamuk, Angela
Merkel, Jeroen
Wollars, Jan
Boehmermann, David
Lepeska, Zaman,
Free
Speech, Islamist
Censorship
|
Print
Send
Comment
RSS
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment