Who's Muzzling the Turkish Press?

Journalist Andrew Finkel, who was fired a few weeks ago by Today's Zaman because of a critical column he wrote, has a powerful opinion piece in today's International Herald Tribune about some of the recent troubling trends in the Turkish press. From his column:

Sadly, the most effective censor in Turkey today is the press itself. To adopt a stance critical of current policies is to position oneself in opposition to the government — and editors only do so as a calculated risk. Columns exposing corruption or criticizing the government’s sprawl-inducing environmental policies are simply spiked.

When Turkish newspapers try to speak their mind, they often discover their advertisers dropping out, explaining apologetically that they have “come under pressure.”

The full piece can be found here. A previous post about Finkel's firing and it's implications is here.

[UPDATE -- CNN's Ivan Watson has a new piece out about press issues in Turkey, which can be viewed here.]

Rockin' the Kurdish Vote

A new Economist article points out why for Kurdish politicians in Turkey this summer's parliamentary elections might different than previous ones. As the article points out, this time around campaigning in Kurdish will be allowed, while the existence of a new Kurdish-language state-run television station and the arrival of several private Kurdish television and radio stations could also change the political landscape.

Credit for these changes should be given to the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has done more than many of its predecessors to liberalize and reform the Kurdish issue (despite the fact that its much-heralded "Kurdish opening," announced in 2009, failed to get too far). So why is the AKP expected to take a big hit at the polls in the southeast, while the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party looks set to make big gains? The Economist explains:

There are several reasons for AK’s ailing fortunes among the country’s 14m Kurds. They are no longer swayed by free coal and talk of Islamic fraternity. AK’s “opening”, which was meant to lead to an amnesty for PKK rebels untainted by violence, has been shelved. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, blames the Kurds. He says the PKK provoked Turks in 2009 when fighters returning from Iraq started delivering “victory” speeches.

The government’s response was to lock up thousands of Kurdish politicians, including BDP mayors. Selahattin Demirtas, a BDP leader, reels off the figures. At least 2,300 Kurdish activists have been jailed since 2009. Sentences sought by prosecutors in an array of cases against the BDP’s 22 parliamentarians, including Mr Demirtas, add up to a staggering 2,350 years.

Egged on by Mr Ocalan, the BDP has raised the bar with a civil-disobedience campaign that has seen a Kurdish female parliamentarian slap a policeman. Kurds are spurning mosques staffed by state-appointed imams in favour of Kurdish-language prayers in fields. Their campaign will not end, they say, until BDP prisoners are released, an amnesty is given to PKK fighters, education in Kurdish is permitted and the 10% threshold is lowered.

The strategy is paying off. Analysts reckon the BDP could win some 30 seats in June’s election. AK’s case has not been helped by the lacklustre candidates it is fielding in the south-east. This may be a good thing. The more Kurds there are in Ankara, the more comprehensive will be the new constitution Mr Erdogan promises to deliver after the election.

A senior AKP official I recently spoke with told me that the government's two main post-election priorities are passing a new constitution and restarting the stalled Kurdish reform initiative. The big questions remain how well can the AKP and a stronger BDP work together in parliament (based on what we saw in the current parliament, not so well) and how much confidence will the AKP have to take the political risk of making significant reforms on the Kurdish front (again, based on what we have seen before, questionable). Another failed "Kurdish opening" could prove to be very dangerous.

(Today's Zaman takes a look at the BDP's clever list of candidates here. On a related note, for more on the rise of the southeast's pro-Kurdish imams, take a look at this Christian Science Monitor article of mine from a few years back, and at this more recent Today's Zaman story.)

(photo -- BDP leader Selahattin Demirtas campaigning near Diyarbakir, Turkey, in 2009. By Yigal Schleifer)

Tied Up in Knots

Eurasianet's Nicholas Birch has a great piece up about an initiative in Turkey to get headscarved women on the ballot for the upcoming parliamentary elections. From his article:

A woman's group is stirring controversy in Turkey with a campaign to elect headscarf-wearing women to parliament. Some of the fiercest opposition to the initiative is coming not from secularists, but from religious conservatives.

With just over two months to go before Turkey’s parliamentary balloting, the country’s political leaders are starting to assemble party lists of candidates. The number of seats any given party wins is determined by the percentage of the vote it receives. The higher an individual candidate is on a party list, then, the better the odds of that person becoming a MP.

Turkish women's groups have been traditionally divided along ideological lines. But they are uniting behind the initiative, launched in March by a non-partisan group called Women Meet Halfway, to have women who wear headscarves placed high enough up on party lists so that they stand a decent chance of being elected.

"No headscarves, no vote," shouted sixty-odd women who gathered outside the parliament building in Ankara on April 8. "As it stands, our democracy is half-baked", said the group's spokeswoman, Nesrin Semiz. "Two-thirds of Turkish women cover their heads. Not one of them has a seat in parliament."

The campaign is generating an ambiguous reaction from an electoral constituency that, at least at first glance, would appear to be a natural ally: religiously conservative men.

The full article can be found here.

Turkey's political parties released their candidate lists today. Hurriyet takes a look at how women fared on the lists here. In the end, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) only nominated one headscarved candidate, placing her at the bottom of the candidates list, which means it's not very likely she'll get voted into parliament.

Inconvenient Truths

The recent firing by the Today's Zaman newspaper of one of its top columnists, Andrew Finkel, for doing his job -- which is to write smart, questioning pieces that push forward the conversation on important and difficult issues -- should be cause for great concern for anyone who cares about the development of an independent and democratic press in Turkey.

Finkel is one of the smartest observers of Turkish politics, reporting on Turkey long enough to have an insider's deep understanding of what makes the country tick, while at the same time maintaining his outsider's critical distance. It's a combination that provided for frequently memorable and essential columns during his his three-year stint at Today's Zaman -- and which also got him into trouble before. In 1999, Finkel was charged with "insulting state institutions" after writing about some inconvenient truths regarding the Turkish military, which then led to his being fired by his employer, the Sabah newspaper, at the insistence of the country's National Security Council (MGK) .

Although the military wasn't involved this time around, it's clear that Finkel again got canned for writing (or trying to write) about another inconvenient truth. Today's Zaman is supported by the Fethullah Gulen movement, which is currently in the middle of another press-related controversy in Turkey, having to do with the arrest of a journalist who was preparing to publish a book that accuses the movement of having infiltrated the country's security forces. Following the arrest of the journalist, Ahmet Sik, on charges that his book is connected to the Ergenekon coup plot, prosecutors went on an aggressive campaign to confiscate any unpublished versions of the book and even indicated it would be a crime for individuals to be in possession of the manuscript.

Finkel wrote a column in response to these developments, but Today's Zaman refused to run it and then let the columnist go. In the column, which was printed instead in yesterday's Hurriyet Daily News, Finkel takes his (now former) employer and the Gulen movement to task for their response to recent events. From his column:

It was a bit over three years ago that I was recruited to write this column for this newspaper (Today’s Zaman). I remember the conversation well. The editor-in-chief anticipated that I might be hesitant to associate myself with a press group whose prejudices and principles might not always coincide with my own. He explained what I knew already, that the Zaman Group supported and was supported by the Fetullah Gülen Community and that I would have to take that on board. However, he explained the paper's mission was to fight for the democratization of Turkish society – that Turkey was no longer a country which should be ruled by military fiat. He also impressed upon me that he was committed to liberal values and to free discussion. And then, of course, he flattered me by saying that mine was a voice which the target audience of Today’s Zaman would want to hear. What helped me to make up my mind was the presence of columnists whose reputations I respected and whose standard of integrity had got them into trouble in other “corners” of the Turkish media....

....I have already expressed my concern that the fight against anti-democratic forces in Turkey has resorted to self-defeating anti-democratic methods. This in turn has led to a polarization in Turkey. If your side loses power then the natural fear is that they will use your methods against you. In case this sounds like I am speaking in riddles, I am referring to the aggressive prosecution of people who write books. These may be bad books, they may be books which are written with ulterior motives, they may be books which contain assertions which are not true. But at the end of the day, they are books – and there are libel courts – not criminal courts – designed to protect individuals from malicious falsehood. In short, writing a book offensive to the Gülen community is not a crime.

It may be in bad taste, it might be off beam. It might every bit as nonsensical as the conspiracy theories that fill the shelves of Turkish book stores. But it might not. And until we actually read it we cannot know. More to the point, we can only question the motives of those who don’t want us to read it. It blackens the names of the censors, increases the credibility of a book which no one has even read. It’s also extremely foolish because in an age of Internet, you can’t actually stop people from whispering your backs. The point about the ostrich with its head in the sand is that it only fools itself.

However, I write this in the interests of defending the good name of this newspaper, with whom I have been associated since the first copy appeared on the stands. Having started the dialogue, it cannot stop.

(The full column can be found here. And some thoughts from Jenny White here.)

Finkel's firing strikes me as a very bad omen for which direction the political discussion in Turkey may be heading and for the health of the Turkish press. It's also a troubling development for Today's Zaman (and its Turkish-language sister paper, Zaman), which has become an increasingly blunt instrument in recent months, frequently resorting to the the same questionable journalistic tactics that it had long criticized its rivals for using. As one of two English-language papers in Turkey and because many of its writers represent a Gulen perspective, the newspaper remains a valuable resource and an important read. But after Finkel's firing, it is a much diminished publication. Finkel in many ways embodied Today's Zaman's mandate, and was then fired for fulfilling that mandate. The question, then, is: has the paper's mandate changed?

"I do not doubt that the current Turkish government, like those that preceded it, uses both carrot and baseball bat to get the media on its side," Finkel wrote in a September, 2009 column on press issues that seems particularly relevant today. "Yet even were the elected government to value a free and vital press (and there are days when this appears to be the case), the question remains whether the press itself is prepared for the role."

[UPDATE -- Today's Zaman editor-in-chief Bulent Kenes has penned a column explaining why his paper let Finkel go. While Finkel was one of the first journalists that he thought about hiring when he launched the paper, Kenes says that something (or, as he sees it, someone) has now "changed."

"So what is it that has changed?" he writes. "What has changed is that some of our writers have come under the influence of the strong and dark propaganda that is at play and have started to stagger. Unfortunately I feel the same way about Finkel, who I know does not have ill intentions in any way."

That certainly seems to clear things up, doesn't it?]

Eastern Dreams

Joshua Walker has a good piece up on the Huffington Post site that looks at the roots and trajectory of Turkey's current foreign policy and the role of historical memory in shaping that policy. From his piece:

Presenting Turkey as a "soft power"in the Middle East was made possible by Turkey's broader democratization since the end of the Cold War and in particular since September 11, 2001. There seems to be a relationship between greater democratization and Eastern oriented foreign policy initiatives throughout Turkish political history. The three longest serving prime ministers (Adnan Menderes, Türgüt Özal, and Recep Erdoğan) have all implemented at least one Eastern oriented initiative (Baghdad Pact 1955, Central Asian Initiative 1991, and "Strategic Depth" 2004) along with their domestic democratization efforts. These same prime ministers commanded the largest percentage of the parliament and were among the most responsive to public opinion, which led often to tenuous relationships with Turkey's traditional purveyors of foreign policy, the military. There is something electorally attractive about Eastern initiatives even if they are less institutional or formalized in the same way than Western initiatives have tended to be (NATO 1952, EC Application 1987, and EU candidate status 2004). Within the democratizing Turkey of the last decade civilian leaders cannot as easily ignore public opinion on critical foreign policy questions in the same way as military leaders who previously dominated Turkish foreign policy decision-making.

The role of history and imperial memories has further facilitated the transformation in Turkey's outlook on the Middle East. Turkey's "rediscovery" of the Middle East has been greatly initiated by the AKP's historical memory and ideas about Turkey's "rightful" place as the heir to the Ottoman Empire both in and outside the region. The rise of the AKP has subsequently meant a de-emphasis of the "othering" and "Islamic threat" in Turkey's view of the region. Closer Middle Eastern relations are not seen as being dichotomous or detrimental to Turkey's western orientation, at home or abroad, as they had been seen under military rule in the 1980s. Hence, a more "Islam-friendly" approach that focuses on economic opportunities and shared heritage has come to permeate Turkey's policy towards the region.

The full article can be found here.

The Libyan Rift

I have a briefing up on the World Politics Review website that looks further at the difficulties Turkey has faced in formulating its Libya policy, how that has affected relations with some of its allies and what lessons that might provide in other cases of regional instability. From the briefing:

Ankara has backed off from its initial opposition to NATO being involved in the Libya crisis and is now even expressing its willingness to take a leading role in the military operation there. But Turkey's initial position and its hard bargaining within NATO before finally agreeing to let the alliance take over military operations in Libya could reinforce a gathering impression that Ankara is acting as a spoiler and outlier within the organization. That impression first surfaced following Turkey's initial opposition to the appointment of Anders Fogh Rasmussen as NATO's new secretary-general in 2009, and it was further established by the tough conditions Ankara initially set for joining the alliance's missile defense program. If not addressed, it could risk hardening into a dangerous split between Turkey and NATO.

Meanwhile, relations between Turkey and France, which were already strained before the Libyan crisis because of differences over Ankara's European Union membership bid, appear to be heading towards an even rougher patch. Turkey was noticeably among the countries not invited to the Paris meeting that led to the start of military action against Libya, with French officials suggesting that Ankara's stated opposition to an intervention there disqualified it from attending. Turkish leaders, in response, have obliquely accused Paris of being motivated by oil concerns and seem to have made a priority of reducing the French leadership role in the Libyan operation.

The fact that an ambitious middle power like France spearheaded the action in Libya highlights the ways in which the crisis represents a missed opportunity for Turkey to have assumed the kind of regional leadership role it aspires to play. While Erdogan, Davutoglu and other Turkish leaders have long talked about their desire to create a proactive Middle East foreign policy that respects regional sensitivities, Ankara's undefined and overly accommodating approach to the Libyan crisis, at least in the early stages, left the door open for other actors to step in and assert their vision for how the problem should be resolved.

Turkey, though, could look at Libya as a dress rehearsal. With unrest continuing in Yemen and especially in neighboring Syria -- two countries where Ankara has recently been investing heavily in both political and economic terms -- Turkey is likely to be faced with some of the same, if not more-complicated, policy problems it faced in Libya. How Ankara chooses to confront those challenges could very well be an indicator of the lessons it has drawn from the Libyan crisis.

You can find the full piece here, and a look at Turkey's Libya policy by the Economist's Amberin Zaman here.

For Ankara, of course, the biggest worry right now is probably what's taking place in next-door Syria. Writing in Today's Zaman, Omer Taspinar suggests that events there could provide another test for Turkey and its efforts to become a regional leaders. From his piece:

Ankara has had a love affair with Damascus under the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government over the last eight years. The Syrian-Turkish bilateral relationship is a remarkable story of a journey from enmity to best friendship. This puts a lot responsibility and pressure on Turkey’s shoulders. The events in Syria will provide a crucial litmus test for Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in terms of testing his commitment to democratization in the region.

Turkey is uniquely placed to apply some friendly advice and pressure on Syria for constitutional reforms. Over the weekend Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu delivered a lecture in which he emphasized the importance of striking the right balance in the Middle East between freedom and democracy. Damascus may be in no mood to listen, but this is the right time for Turkey to use its leverage with Syria to send a clear message that change is unavoidable. Syria’s balance between freedom and security will need to change with rapid political, social and economic reforms. The Assad regime needs to act now.

More here.

Banned in Turkey - Again!

[UPDATE -- Despite reports that the ban on access to Blogger has been lifted, the block appears to still be in effect (as of March 31, 2011).]

[UPDATE II -- According to this article in Milliyet, the block is still on because the court order to restore service refers to something called "Blogsport," not "Blogspot." Sad, but true.]

This blog, along with every other one hosted on Google's Blogger service, is currently not accessible in Turkey by court order. As was the case the previous time this happened, it appears that some blogs on Blogger are showing clips of Turkish football/soccer matches that cable provider Digiturk has exclusive rights to, prompting the provider to ask the court to take Blogger down. Turkey's problematic (to put it mildly) internet laws allow for sites to be taken down wholesale, rather than simply blocking access to the offending pages. This was the case with YouTube, which was banned in Turkey for years because Google refused to remove a few videos that mocked Ataturk.

Take a look at this previous post for more information about Turkey's misguided internet laws, which not only allow the courts but also a government agency to block access to sites. Meanwhile, Today's Zaman's Andrew Finkel takes a look at the Blogger ban and the wider issue of freedom of expression in Turkey in a column that leaves not sure whether to laugh or cry.

Turkish officials have indicated that new internet-related legislation which should avoid bans like this is coming down the pike, but there is some concern among activists that it could in fact make things worse. According to Yaman Akdeniz, a professor of law at Istanbul's Bilgi University and one of the leading Turkish authorities on internet issues, the new legislation will create four types of centrally-administered filtered profiles that every Turkish internet subscriber will have to sign up for (the default one being a "standard" profile which will also be filtered, although it's not yet clear what will be filtered out). "What they are building is NOT a child protection mechanism but Turkey's Internet Censorship Infrastructure. You can quote me on that," Akdeniz, who has taken a look at the proposed legislation, wrote me in a recent email.

For now, if were in Turkey and tried to find this blog (and are too honest to use proxies), this is what you would reach:

Bu siteye erişim mahkeme kararıyla engellenmiştir.

(Translation: "This site has been disabled by court order.")