Istanbul // Police armed with water cannon, tear gas, and a court order, forced their way into the headquarters of a media group in Istanbul on Wednesday, just days ahead of fresh parliamentary elections.
Earlier this week, Turkish authorities effectively seized control of the media group’s parent company, Koza Ipek Holding, by placing it under the management of a panel of trustees. The company has been placed under investigation over its links to the Gulen movement, an Islamic group opposed to the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). Prosecutors have accused the two TV channels and two newspapers run by the company of spreading terrorist propaganda.
The Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights, Nils Muiznieks, called the police raids “a particularly disturbing illustration of the dangerous path Turkey has undertaken in recent months as regards its stance on media freedom”.
The press in Turkey is no stranger to censorship and intimidation. Top officials, including president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, are known to order editors to pull content and sue unsympathetic cartoonists. Journalists shy from investigative reporting, particularly when it comes to corruption, for fear of treading on tender corporate toes. Those who rub government bigwigs the wrong way are routinely let go.
But in the run-up to Sunday’s election, poised to determine Mr Erdogan’s political future, and amid renewed fighting in the Kurdish south-east, the media crackdown has grown increasingly fierce. Some of the Turkey’s most renowned journalists have been placed under investigation for allegedly defaming Mr Erdogan in opinion columns or on social media. A leading cable provider has removed seven channels, all run by companies linked to the Gulenists, from its platform.
Just days after the deadliest terror attack in Turkey’s history, a twin suicide bombing that killed 102 people in Ankara, a court in the capital banned all media coverage of the bombing and the investigation that has come on its heels. A number of newspapers defied it. “For us, the blackout has no legal basis,” wrote Cumhuriyet, a paper of the secularist left, before publishing a series of articles documenting official negligence in the attack.
The intimidation has occasionally turned violent. In early October, a policeman captured on video holding a gun to the head of a journalist who had been filming a police operation in Silvan, a south-eastern town that has seen some of the worst violence in three months of clashes between security forces and militants from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Days earlier, four assailants beat up one of Turkey’s most prominent journalists, Ahmet Hakan, outside his home, breaking his nose and cracking his ribs. Three of the four later turned out to be members of the AKP.
Mr Hakan and the newspaper he writes for, Hurriyet, had previously been the target of several threats, lawsuits and an attack. In September, a crowd of Mr Erdogan’s supporters attacked the paper’s offices after accusing it of misrepresenting a statement made by the president. A recording showed one of the protesters, Abdurrahim Boynukalin, an AKP deputy, promising to teach the newspaper a lesson. “They never got a beating,” Mr Boynukalin was seen telling a group of men in the video. “Our mistake is that we should have given them one in the past.”
The timing of the latest crackdown is no coincidence, said Kadri Gursel, chair of the Turkish National Committee of the International Press Institute, or IPI. “It’s part of an electoral strategy,” he said, referring to Sunday’s election, in which the AKP hopes to regain the parliamentary majority it lost four months earlier. “The party that lost power wants to silence as many of the outlets that have escaped its control as possible.”
“The government is trying to say: if you vote against us, things will get very bad, people will be in trouble,” said Esra Arsan, a professor of journalism at Istanbul Bilgi University.
Top AKP officials, including Turkey’s prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, have condemned the attacks against Hurriyet and Mr Hakan. The party did not include Mr Boynukalin on its ticket for the November election. It also expelled Mr Hakan’s attackers.
During a September event in New York, days ahead of his appearance at the UN General Assembly, Mr Davutoglu warned that “groups in and out of Turkey” were carrying out “perception terrorism” against Turkey to damage its reputation.
On the same day, police detained and interrogated 32 journalists and media workers, all from Kurdish news outlets, in the south-eastern city of Diyarbakir. They were released hours later.
The events leading up to Sunday’s election ought to be a moment of reckoning for Turkey’s media, said Ms Arsan, as well as a wake-up call. Throughout the 1990s, she said, the mainstream press looked the other way as scores of journalists were detained, assaulted and killed amid the conflict between the state and Kurdish militants in the south-east. “They didn’t report this, because they were Kurds. But now the problem has reached their own door.”
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