ISTANBUL — A prominent columnist wrote recently about how President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey hates cigarettes so much that he confiscates packs from his followers, lecturing them on the evils of smoking.
The columnist, Kadri Gursel, then urged his readers to protest the president’s anti-democratic ways by lighting a cigarette and not putting it out.
For that, Gursel was arrested on terrorism charges and is being held in pretrial detention, one of 120 journalists who have been jailed in Turkey’s crackdown on the news media since a failed coup attempt in July. There, he has the company of 10 colleagues from his newspaper, Cumhuriyet, the country’s last major independent publication. Among them are its editor and the paper’s chief executive, arrested as he stepped off a flight to Istanbul last Friday.
Turkey now has handily outstripped China as the world’s biggest jailer of journalists, according to figures compiled by the Committee to Protect Journalists.
The jailings are the most obvious example of an effort to muzzle not just the free press, but free speech generally. More than 3,000 Turks have faced charges for insulting the president, including a former Miss Turkey, Merve Buyuksarac, who posted on Instagram a satirical rewording of the country’s national anthem as if Erdogan were singing:
I am like a wild flood, I smash over the law and beyond
I follow state bids, take my bribe and live.
She was sentenced to 14 months in prison, suspended on the condition that she not repeat any offensive remarks.
The government and its supporters are behind a wave of demands to Twitter to remove offending posts, more than all other countries in the world put together, according to Twitter’s Transparency Report (of 20,000 Twitter accounts affected worldwide this year, 15,000 were Turkish).
Several journalists — including Gursel, whose column was published three days before the coup attempt — have been retroactively accused of “subliminal’’ messaging in support of the July uprising.
Even more risky now is anything viewed as support for the outlawed Kurdish nationalist party, the PKK. Some have been attacked for calling members of the group “militants,’’ rather than “terrorists.’’ Others are in jail for advocating a resumption of the collapsed peace process with the Kurdish guerrillas — although few here dare use the word “guerrilla.’’
Failing to mention how many people were killed in the attempted coup, in any article about it, is also considered proof of terrorist sympathies.
Others have been convicted on terrorism charges for reporting a 2015 scandal in which Erdogan’s government was accused of supplying weapons to the Islamic State, which it is now fighting in Syria. One of those is Cumhuriyet’s former editor in chief, Can Dundar, who was free on appeal when he announced in August that he was not returning from a trip to Germany, saying he could not expect a fair trial in the wake of the coup attempt.
In addition to the jailings here, some 150 news outlets have been shuttered, ranging from TV stations to online enterprises, according to Erol Onderoglu, the Turkish representative for Reporters Without Borders.
But probably the most corrosive long-term effect of the crackdown has been a highly effective government push for businessmen who are loyal to it to take over ownership of many of the remaining outlets, turning them into avid cheerleaders for Erdogan and his policies.
