Silencing dissenting voices will not solve the problem

Surrounded by a group of Turkish students in a car park at a university in south east Poland where I recently did a guest-lecture and book reading, I felt the full weight of controversy in talking about the creation of a Kurdish state - a concept that has been around since the Treaty of Sevres in 1920 as the Ottoman Empire collapsed and the Turkish Republic was established in 1923.

At least nine or ten Turkish students had gathered to inform me that a map, which I use as the plot in my novel Changing Borders was not real. I replied in Turkish ‘it’s a novel!’

‘You do know that map is not real, don’t you. Our friends were very sad when they saw you talk about it,’ a young Turkish girl said in her best English, currently on an Erasmus exchange. ‘We wanted to tell you it’s not real.’

No matter how surreal this incident was, it exposes a worrying mentality of how Turks approach the Kurdish issue. It’s better to reject the notion of the ‘promise’ than consider what went wrong. It is widely reported that Kurds number an estimated 30 million across the region, the largest ethnic population without their own country, although Northern Iraq goes by the name of Kurdistan and is fast becoming the defacto state for Kurds in the region.

The wave of arrests that took place in Turkey yesterday, in which an estimated thirty journalists were detained, their offices ransacked by police, and camera equipment confiscated is just part of a ‘pre-planned campaign to silence critical voices from within the Kurdish community,’ an MP from the Kurdish bloc told me by phone.

Police began their dawn raids at around 5 am, and proceeded to copy the hard drives of computers, confiscate cameras because memory sticks ‘couldn’t be copied on site’, and then detain those who work at news agencies of mostly Kurdish origin, although the local AFP photographer Mustafa Ozer was also taken under custody.

The pretext was that these people are suspected of being members of the Kurdish Communities Union or KCK, ‘the urban arm of the PKK’ as the police describe it. However, the KCK has yet to be proven as an illegal entity, so these journalists were arrested for what exactly? For reporting on the ongoing trial into the KCK, which has according to some estimates seen 3900 people detained, some sentenced, some still held without charge.

The idea that the KCK is ‘setting up a parallel state’ has yet to be proven by the courts, but having spoken to MPs from the main opposition party, the CHP, this case seems to have no grounds. Turkey is now discussing a new constitution, which would include more autonomy for the Kurds in the south east, which proposes local government on a municipal level be managed predominantly by Kurds. So what was the motivation behind these arrests?

Turkey ranks one of the highest jailers of journalists in the world. In 2011, the International Press Institute published the findings from a report by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) that placed Iran, China, and Turkey at the top of the list of most journalists in prison. The report by OSCE found that Turkey topped the list with 70 journalists in jail, but that Iran and China also ranked among the worst for journalists behind Turkey. Should these 30 arrested journalists remain behind bars, it has put Turkey way ahead of the competition.

Ahmet Sik and Nedim Sener, two highly respected investigative journalists have been held in prison since March without charge. Last month they were up in court and to the press community’s dismay, they were not released as was expected. The two are accused of being a member of a terror network, aka Ergenekon, plotting to bring down the government. Ironically it has been their investigative work that has gone some way to expose the alleged military plot, so whose side are they on? It’s widely known that Ahmet was arrested for a controversial book he was planning to publish on religious communities within the police force, who follow one of Turkey’s most powerful and untouchable Islamic scholars.

Having lived in Turkey for ten years, and watched three terms of the ruling AKP governance, I can say that yes many things have improved. A Kurdish party is now in the parliament, Kurdish language is no longer banned. A Kurdish channel, although state-run broadcasts, and private channels are set to follow. Kurdish language once banned is now being offered in universities, but freedom of speech is being slowly ebbed away at.

Perhaps we need to start understanding the mentality that is behind this new crackdown in which 30 journalists were arrested.

As offices were raided yesterday and cameras confiscated, I cast my mind back to the car park in Poland. If a tale of fiction can cause such a reaction, what hope is there for real conversation about solving Turkey’s chronic problem of its Kurdish identity, and the military’s intervention in politics.

Journalists feel afraid, ‘my phone number is on Mustafa (Ozer’s) phone,’ a photographer I know confessed to me as the news of the raids broke - wire-tapping is the usual evidence used against the press. Perhaps there will be an explosion of novelists in Turkey as journalists practise many layers of self-censorship to ‘stay safe’, although this has also proven not protective.


With almost 100 journalists in jail, Turkey really should start to question what kind of democracy it wants to be?