Eye of the storm

• Last Updated: January 02. 2009 8:30AM UAE / January 2. 2009 4:30AM GMT

The upstart newspaper Taraf has thrust itself into the centre of Turkish politics with a series of courageous challenges to the military and the government. Circulation is up – but the advertisers are gone. Suzy Hansen reports from Istanbul on the perils of publishing in the age of Ergenekon.


The Turkish holding company Alarko, a major conglomerate of energy, construction and tourism firms, resides in a pink former psychiatric hospital up in the hills off Istanbul’s stunning shore road, on the European side of the city, across from a seaside dance club called Reina. In December, I went to Alarko to meet with its chairman, a Turkish-Jewish businessman named Ishak Alaton. Alaton founded Alarko in 1954 with another Turkish Jew, Uzeyir Garih, and the two ran the firm together until Garih was stabbed to death in 2001 by a young soldier while visiting a cemetery in Istanbul. At the time the murder was seen as the random act of a violent psychopath, absent religious or political motivation. But the week that I went to see Alaton, prosecutors reopened the case, suggesting that the murder was linked to a mysterious ultranationalist gang called Ergenekon, whose intrigues have captivated and horrified Turks for the last year.

The cab driver who took me to Alarko was a Kurdish man born in the southeastern city of Mardin. In the privacy of the car, he delivered a long rant about the injustices the Kurds had suffered at the hands of the state, which in Turkey essentially means the military. The massive Ergenekon indictment contained allegations that the group had been connected to a secret intelligence unit of the military police called JITEM, which some say has carried out extrajudicial killings in Kurdish areas. He talked about Taraf, a one-year-old, left-liberal newspaper, which had distinguished itself by relentlessly covering the Ergenekon gang. The goofy but handsome driver, a John Turturro kind of guy, threw his hands around, laughing a lot. He had an excellent sense of comedic timing, and punctuated his sentences with dramatic pauses and heavy syllables, as if he admired the oeuvre of Chris Rock. “Taraf is good, but I mean, Ergenekon isn’t news to me,” he said. “All Kurds know about Ergenekon.” (Pause.) “We’ve all known about Ergenekon since we were children.” (Pause.) “Kurdish babies know about Ergenekon. Everyone’s JITEM. Everyone.”

But what Kurdish babies take for granted, many Turks only half-believe, and foreigners are inclined to dismiss entirely. This year, Taraf, as if spinning a serial novella on Turkish violence, may have single-handedly forced every Turk to reckon with the mounting evidence.

Ergenekon is, as the Turks beautifully call it, the derin devlet – the “deep state” –  a shadowy force apparently connected to the army, plying the strings of Turkish power. The idea of a deep state has been around since the 1970s, but this year the Ergenekon mafia has been formally accused of committing crimes in the name of neo-nationalism, secularism, and anti-Kurdish sentiment. The allegations include everything from the assassination of Armenian journalist Hrant Dink to plotting a coup against the ruling Islamic conservative AK Party. The Turkish media have been understandably preoccupied with the endless stream of sensational revelations emerging from the trial, but Taraf, an upstart daily founded by a book publisher and a team of liberal journalists, has done more than any other paper to place Ergenekon front and centre.

In Turkey, one’s newspaper is a bit like one’s football team, and many old, established Turkish companies probably wouldn’t have Taraf delivered to their offices. In some circles, that would simply look leftist, anti-establishment, bad. When I met with Alaton, however, he had a copy on his desk. The paper had been painfully digging into his partner’s murder case, but no matter. “I support Taraf’s existence,” Alaton said, “because I think it’s a very good contribution to democracy.” Alaton is known for his progressive views – he founded TESEV, one of Turkey’s most important liberal think tanks – and at age 81, he has been witness to his country’s many undemocratic episodes; his memory is long. When I asked why Turkish corporations had recently refused to advertise in Taraf, I was not entirely surprised when he replied, “They are afraid.”

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Taraf’s struggle for survival in some ways mirrors Turkey’s awkward lurch toward full democracy. During its first year, the paper's unprecedented challenges to the military, and then the government, have scared off advertisers, even as Taraf’s readership has grown and rival columnists have embraced the paper as the “hope” of Turkish journalism.

In the often unreliable world of Turkish newspapers, Taraf distinguished itself by asking ugly questions: about the military’s performance against the militant separatists of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and about the army’s dominant role in Turkish politics; about the prime minister’s commitment to human rights; and of course, about Ergenekon. The prelude to true democratic reform, the paper seemed to insist, was a truly open and free platform for spirited debate.

“Taraf has probably enormously contributed to Turkey’s relative democratisation over the past year,” said Halil Berktay, a Turkish public intellectual and professor of history at Sabanci University who contributes a column to Taraf twice a week. “It has been like a flash of lightning.”

Taraf owes its boldness to a luxury that is increasingly rare – and not just in Turkey: an independent owner who does not interfere with the work of his editors. Taraf’s founder Basar Arslan, a 40-year-old bookstore owner and publisher, wasn’t particularly active in politics before launching Taraf, and he still shies away from the public eye. (He did not respond to questions for this story.) But according to his editors, he had always wanted to own a newspaper – and he called up a few of his friends to recruit them to produce a small daily that represented their liberal views, what he envisioned as “a very prestigious, independent paper,” according to Yasemin Congar, an editor, who added: “Now he loves it.”

But at first they thought he was crazy. Three heavyweights signed on anyway: the bestselling novelist and columnist Ahmet Altan, and two veteran journalists, Congar and Alev Er.

In Turkey, a large segment of the mainstream media is controlled by one man, Aydin Dogan, who owns the popular papers Hurriyet, Milliyet, and Radikal, as well as TV stations and various other business concerns. Hurriyet and Milliyet are more nationalist; Radikal more liberal. “We have seen an increasing cartelisation of the press and much more organic links between the press and political factions,” said Berktay. “It’s the Turkish version of the Berlusconi phenomenon. In fact, if Dogan came to power it would be a very precise parallel.”

Zaman, another heavy-hitting popular paper backed by followers of the Islamic leader Fethullah Gulen, is an exquisitely designed broadsheet catering to religious conservatives, and is largely supportive of AKP. (They boast one of the highest circulations, according to one source, at around 650,000; Hurriyet sells about 550,000 copies, Milliyet 200,000 and Radikal only 40,000). A fifth major paper, Sabah, was recently sold to a holding firm, Calik, seen as close to AKP. Cumhuriyet, a small, text-heavy, serious paper, serves the old-guard secular elite. And there are many, many others – too many to characterise – but few of them bucked the status quo with the same intellectual gravitas as Taraf.

Language tips off a paper’s readership: Zaman, more religious, will employ Arabic words; Cumhuriyet, a nationalist paper, will use as much Turkish as the language allows. You could divide how people vote roughly according to the newspapers they read – AKP die-hards might read Zaman, secularists prefer Hurriyet and Cumhuriyet. Leftists favour Radikal, which boasts some of the country’s best liberal columnists, though some have decamped – along with their readers – to Taraf.

Taraf eschews the paeans to the Turkish state typical of the other papers and hews to an antinationalist line. Yasemin Congar pointed out that even on national holidays, when all the other papers drape their front pages with red flags and photos of Turkey’s founder-hero Ataturk, Taraf abstains from patriotic displays. “It’s slightly irreverent in tone,” said Jenny White, a professor of anthropology at Boston University who has written many books on Turkey and lives on-and-off in Istanbul. “In a framework where counter-discourse can get you hauled into court or worse, humour and wit may be the only ‘safe’ forms.” “I’m amazed it hasn’t been shut down,” she added.

Instead, Taraf has continued to grow. “Taraf managed to reach a circulation which went over 90,000 at one point, but also managed to get a permanent readership of between 50-60,000,” Congar said. “At the beginning what looked realistic to me was 35,000 at most. We now have a readership which is not only leftists and urban youth, or only conservatives or liberals, or only the Kurds or Turks, but all of these people. There is a good segment of religious conservatives in our readership which was a surprise because we’re not religious or conservative.”

Taraf has also succeeded in attracting marquee names to its pages; writers like the esteemed intellectual Murat Belge; the Economist’s Turkey correspondent, Amberin Zaman; the prominent Armenian writer Etyen Mahcupyan; the founders of the clever activist group Young Civilians, Turgay and Yildiray Ogur; the columnist Gokhan Ozgun; and many others. Some of these writers are beloved figures in Turkey, and none are radicals, but they do represent a cross-section of the liberal establishment, the sort of people who might have lent their names to the recent high-profile petition-apology to Armenians for crimes during World War I.

“[Taraf] is oppositional simply on the grounds of democracy,” said Berktay. “And that has been completely missing from Turkish society for the last 200 years. They are real democrats. I don’t know what else to call them.”

And indeed, people seem to have a hard time classifying Taraf – the word “leftist” in Turkey has been subjected to a number of contradictory interpretations. To Berktay, who is often described as the first Turkish historian to recognise the Armenian genocide, there is a common thread that unites those who support the EU as a way of assuring support for human rights, who support the rights of the Kurds, the right to wear headscarves, and the right to criticise the army for its political interventions. “The neo-nationalists in this country have created their own gravediggers,” Berktay said. And Taraf, he continued, represents “a new morality.”

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Turks often must take sharply-drawn sides on complicated issues – you’re either for the military or the government, for secularism or Islam, for headscarves or miniskirts, for Kurds or the Turks. In 2008, picking a team became at once more important and more confusing, and Taraf’s evolution as the voice of the left – as supporters, and then critics, of AKP – was a study in this volatility. “Taraf is doing something very precious,” said Soli Ozel, a professor at Bilgi University and columnist at the newspaper Sabah. “By and large, they have been able to set the agenda in the country.”

That agenda has twisted and turned dramatically since AKP, boasting a sparkly economic record and facing no respectable opposition, again soared to power in the July 2007 election. A religious man, Abdullah Gul, became president, and the staunchly secular military confronted reality: the pious guys had the money, and they were here to stay. Left-liberal intellectuals, largely lacking a political party, and charmed by AKP’s European Union-looking promises and the opportunity for a real counterweight against the military establishment, threw their small, but high-minded support behind AKP. Here was an interesting alignment: liberals, religious conservatives, economy-first voters, and some Kurds, versus nationalists, secularists, Alevis (a beleaguered liberal Muslim sect that feels rightfully threatened by AKP’s fervent Sunni Islam), and young, liberal-minded Turks who couldn’t quite abide what they saw as Turkey’s version of the American Christian Right.

AKP immediately pushed hard to allow women to wear headscarves on university campuses, a sticking point among the military elite and secularists determined to preserve Ataturk’s legacy of laicism. Had AKP proved that all they really cared about was headscarves? Sometimes it seems all anyone cares about in Turkey is headscarves. But, it turned out that Turkish politics were not, in fact, all about headscarves, because soon enough came Ergenekon.

Ergenekon may be an unfamiliar word, and if foreign journalists haven’t taken pains to write about it, that’s because it’s too hard to explain. Some Turks feel AKP’s god-fearing minions have manufactured the Ergenekon myth to take down the secular establishment. For Americans like myself – with our cheerful tendency to dismiss everything hard and ugly as a “conspiracy theory” – Ergenekon mostly inspires incredulity. Could one loosely connected group of 86 people, hailing from various sectors of polite society, really be responsible for decades of assassinations, coup plots, and bombings?

Over the past year, Turks watched as ex-generals (real generals!), journalists (including old famous ones), and lawyers were hauled off to jail and charged with a vast right-wing conspiracy to wreak havoc on the nation. The 2500 page indictment read like A Recent History of Turkish Violence, and it seemed like every bad deed of the past 20 years was laid at the feet of Ergenekon. The journalist Andrew Finkel wrote an astute column called, “Ergenekon ate my homework,” and that’s exactly how it felt. Worse, a terrifying list of new assassination targets turned up in the rubble of the whirlwind investigation: Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Orhan Pamuk, the journalist Fehmi Koru. Ergenekon’s goal, the conventional wisdom went, was to foment so much chaos that the army would be forced to step in, stage a coup, and overthrow the AK Party.

Ultimately, the ongoing Ergenekon investigation was seen as a triumph over thuggery, neo-nationalism, and strident secularism. But it polarised secularists who thought the religious government was up to dirty tricks, and puzzled many others who felt the prosecution was out of control.

For a time Taraf seemed to break a new Ergenekon story every other day, and this too raised the eyebrows of sceptics. “I don’t see a journalistic achievement,” said one experienced Turkish journalist. “They just gobbled up what the police intelligence was leaking them regarding Ergenekon. In terms of challenging the state – sure, maybe [that is an achievement],” the journalist continued. “But they have gone overboard, and basically came across as a paper that is just out there to attack the military. In their reckless columns day in day out talking about how corrupt the military is, I didn’t find responsible journalism.”

Some months later, the judiciary, traditionally in line with the military, launched a closure case against the AKP, threatening to ban Erdogan and others from politics for “anti-secular activities.” Turkish liberals, and most of the world, rallied around AKP in the name of democracy. AKP won, and the Turkish army appeared to be in retreat.

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Taraf had positioned itself as a harsh critic of the military well before the Ergenekon story. In the fall of 2007, Taraf questioned the army’s handling of a PKK attack on a military outpost called Daglica. The PKK captured eight Turkish soldiers, eventually released them, and the army, embarrassed, branded the soldiers as traitors who collaborated with the PKK. Daglica whipped the nation up into a fury of nationalistic and anti-Kurdish sentiment; photos of men waving guns and flags popped up in the papers. Attacks on PKK bases in Northern Iraq soon followed. Taraf would later publish leaked documents from inside the military suggesting that the army knew in advance of the Daglica attack.

“We really pursued that story, and when they decided that those eight soldiers were to be made scapegoats, we said ‘no way,’” Congar said. “They were arrested and blamed for acting like agents for PKK. We didn’t buy it. Other newspapers did not go after it at all,” she went on. “We ask questions: What happened? Why wasn’t the commander at the post that night? There are all kinds of things that indicated to us that there was a lack of security – we knew, we felt, that the commanders were responsible. I’m not saying necessarily it was a conspiracy altogether, but they did not take the necessary precautions to protect the soldiers.”

According to Congar, doubting the preparedness or skill of the Turkish military was a line the press would not typically cross. “You hear it in journalism circles – so many people admire and envy Taraf,” Berktay said. “They will say, ‘Let’s face it: If our informants brought us the same information from inside the military, we wouldn’t have published it.”

Cengiz Candar, a popular columnist for Radikal, recently wrote that Taraf had made Radikal a better newspaper; Yavuz Baydar in Today’s Zaman and Hasan Cemal in Milliyet have echoed that enthusiasm.

But Taraf has not confined its criticism to the military. After Erdogan, falling behind on reforms required for EU membership, began to take a harder line on Kurdish issues, disenchantment with the AKP spread to the pages of Taraf. This fall, another PKK raid on a base called Aktutun caused the deaths of 17 Turkish soldiers, and Taraf, aided by more leaked documents, again pursued the military’s strange failure to protect itself.

When the chief of staff of the army told them to watch it, Erdogan sided with him, and Taraf’s front page carried the devastating headline “His General’s Prime Minister.” It sounds harsh in English, but in Turkish it is a very clever manipulation of the possessive, and all the more damning. Erdogan was enraged. The long-building disappointment with the Liberals’ Favorite Religious Prime Minister had reached an early peak.

But the AK Party’s political dominance makes the media’s thoughtful antagonism of the government all the more crucial. “In the Aktutun incident he did not do what he was supposed to do as the prime minister, which was to question the military rather than questioning us,” Congar said. “And then on the Kurdish issue he started speaking like a Turkish nationalist, not a reformer, and started saying things that didn’t embrace the Kurds. He has slowed down in the reforms again. But when you talk to his people they say, ‘OK, there are things in the making and, yes, we are behind our promises,’” she said. “So we’re sceptical, but it’s not like we don’t believe in him anymore. It’s just our job to push him or to push anyone.”

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Who would go this far in attacking not only the army, but the government too? Taraf’s critics have proposed a series of theories about the paper’s funding, suggesting that it is secretly backed by exiled Islamic leader Fethullah Gulen, a controversial figure at odds with the Turkish army, by the AKP government itself, or even by everybody’s favourite scapegoat, the CIA. (I think George Soros is in there somewhere too.) Gulen, the philosophical leader of a large Islamic brotherhood, tends to pop up in Turkish gossip as an Oz-like character whose followers are thought to surreptitiously control the country. “Ah, Gulen is like Keyser Soze in The Usual Suspects,” Soli Ozel said. “Everywhere at all times.” But here in Turkey, home of something called the “deep state,” suspicion rules the day.

It is hard – for a great many reasons – for Turks to believe that an independent newspaper can exist in Turkey, and this scepticism speaks volumes about Turkey’s hard-to-explain but insidiously suffocating atmosphere.

In some ways, Turkey can feel as free as any other developed nation, but deeply-held fears readily strangle dissent. Memories of military coups and the steady creep of a violent neo-nationalism make ordinary Turks scared to do or say the wrong thing, and paranoid about ulterior motives.

This climate of fear goes beyond Turkey’s notorious anti-speech laws, though those have a lot to do with it. The infamous Article 301, which prohibits “insulting the Turkish nation,” swept Orhan Pamuk to a much-publicised trial and inflamed the European Union’s theatrical exasperation with their wayward Muslim brothers. Before I moved to Turkey, many Americans asked me whether, for example, I’d be able to say the forbidden words “Armenian genocide” out loud. Perhaps they imagined goons would snatch me right off the pavement.

This is certainly not the case, though restricting free speech seems like a curiously obvious authoritarian flaw in a country supposedly desperate to prove its democratic bona fides to the West; taking a Nobel laureate to trial certainly makes Turkey an easy target. But the currents of Turkish nationalism run deep, and at the heart of this Kemalism is a concern for the fragility of the nation, which demands the jealous protection of the state at all times.

It’s important to note that not only Article 301 puts Turks on trial. A laundry list of ridiculous laws can be dispensed willy-nilly to shut someone up, and most of the victims are not figures of international renown whose trials attract the world’s attention.

This is why, when Taraf first appeared in the fall of 2007, one friend of mine, a young Kurdish academic, had no doubt as to its fate: “I don’t see how a paper like this will last,” he’d said. “They’re going to shut it down.” After all, in April 2007, the magazine Nokta was closed for publishing the diaries of a military officer who revealed coup plots within the army.

Taraf has not been shut down, and in November the paper celebrated its first birthday. On Istanbul’s Asian side, in a neighbourhood called Kadikoy, nestled beside the Bosphorus and surrounded by the surreal lights of this undulating city, the staff gathered on the roof of their building. There was a bonfire, American R&B; music, lots of smoking, a little dancing, beer on ice in large bins, and a cake the size of a table. Spirits were high, despite the apparent departure of the paper’s corporate advertisers and what looked to be a period of looming financial crisis.

Taraf never had a great deal of advertising anyway, but these days their ads usually appear on a single page and say things like, “It’s good that you exist, Taraf”; “I support Taraf”; or “Without a democratic press, there can’t be democracy.” Taraf had drummed up support for the paper by selling ads for 500 and 1000 lira (Dh2400) to largely anonymous individuals.

“Among the businessmen and women we know – those who are very supportive of the newspaper and call us up and praise us,” Congar said, “when it comes to open support with advertising, they’re very reluctant.”

But neither the declining financial fortunes nor the threat of anti-speech trials seemed to faze the staff; everyone I spoke to at the paper insisted self-censorship was simply unheard of. “We just act like a bunch of crazies,” Congar said, and didn’t seem terribly afraid of the consequences. “There was the open threat of a raid [of the office] and I think it was stopped somehow by the government,” she continued. “We receive e-mail threats, personal death threats – I do, and Ahmet does, and probably some of the columnists do, because we are more out there. Some of them we pursue through the prosecutor’s office. Most of them we don’t.”

“I used to take the ferry [to Kadikoy] all the time, and Ahmet told me not to do that,” she added. “Not because they’re going to kill me, but someone could say something. And Ahmet carries a gun. But he always carried a gun. Alev carries a gun. These guys like guns, it’s not like they have to carry guns. But it also shows me that they feel more secure having a gun. They don’t want a bodyguard after them all the time. And this is all partly because of what happened to Hrant Dink.”

Altan is likely the most famous figure on Taraf’s staff. His novels and nonfiction have sold millions of copies. He comes from a well-known leftist family, and during his career as a columnist – marked by an appealing mixture of wit and gravity – he has suffered through numerous anti-speech cases. One arose over a column called “Atakurd,” in which he imagined a country called “Kurdey,” where Turks were the minority. When I interviewed him last winter, he said, “I don’t have any auto-control. We taught all the editors that we publish everything, if it’s news and if it’s true. There are no boundaries, we don’t stop anyone from publishing anything.” Altan and Congar each face seven different court cases for their writing.

Congar, for her part, seemed confident that even a provocative newspaper could operate freely in Turkey – particularly now that the country’s EU aspirations have made the government sensitive to world opinion. “I think the government knows that closing or raiding a newspaper offices will make them look very bad in Europe,” she said. (It should be noted that this concern did not prevent the country’s decision to ban YouTube earlier this year.)

Perhaps, Congar suggested, the all-seeing powers of the state itself ensure Taraf’s ability to do as it pleases: “We know that the Turkish intelligence, military and civilian, are keeping a very close eye on us – reading our e-mail, listening on our phones, and bugging our rooms, even this conversation,” Congar said, looking around the room. “But then they know the truth. We don’t have secrets. If they take me and, I don’t know, torture me,” she laughed, “there’s nothing I can tell.”


Suzy Hansen is a freelance writer living in Istanbul and a fellow with the Institute of Current World Affairs.