On March 28, Özgürlükçü Demokrasi’s central office in Istanbul and the building of printing press Gün Matbaa, where the daily is printed, were raided by police in simultaneous midnight operations. Acting without a search warrant, police reportedly broke locked doors and searched the buildings. On the night of the raid, 12 people were detained. This was followed the next day by at least 15 more detentions along with raids on employees’ homes. Two executives with the newspaper and 20 printing press employees, including the press’s owner, were arrested last week. They and their lawyers were also denied proper legal access.
According to ANF reports, those detained are:
From Özgürlükçü Demokrasi, Principal Signatory İhsan Yaşar and Managing Editor İshak Yasul; from Gün Matbaa, owner Kasım Zengin and employees Erdoğan Zamur, Musa Kaya, Polat Arslan, Cemal Tunç, İrfan Karaca, Kemal Daşdöğen, Mehmet Emin Sümeli, İhsan Sinmiş, Uğur Selman Kelekçiler, Kazım Göçer, Necat Hizarcı, Mahmut Abay, Muhammet Özkan, Mehmet Kadir Özkara, Cumali Öz, Süleyman Güneş, Özgür Bozkurt and Sadettin Demirtaş.
On Tuesday, April 10, Özgürlükçü Demokrasi editors Mehmet Ali Çelebi, Reyhan Hacıoğlu and Hicran Urun; reporters Pınar Tarlak, Ramazan Sola and Nedim Demirkıran; and a former reporter with Özgürlükçü Gündem (Özgürlükçü Demokrasi’s predecessor), Mehmet Beyazit, were brought before a court on accusations of “membership of a terrorist organization”. While Sola, Demirkıran and Beyazit were released on bail, editors Çelebi, Hacıoğlu, Urun and Tarlak were arrested following a court decision.
Following the raid, the International Press Institute (IPI) issued a statement in conjunction with other international and European freedom of speech organizations. The full statement, which condemns the police raid against the Kurdish newspaper and printing press, which are now under administration of a government trustee, can be read here.
Though it attracted strong reactions from both local and international groups, the police raid is not the first move against Turkey’s Kurdish press. Özgür Gündem, a leading pro-Kurdish outlet, was “temporarily” closed by a court decision on August 16, 2016. The shutdown was followed by a police raid on the daily’s Istanbul office, resulting in the detention of 24 journalists and media workers.
Similarly, in September 2015, the building housing the offices of Diyarbakır-based Dicle News Agency (DİHA), Turkey’s one and only Kurdish publishing newspaper Azadiya Welat, Aram Publications and KURDİ-DER – Kurdish Language Research and Development Association was raided by police, resulting in serious damage to the property and the detentions of 32 people, all of whom were later released.
Following the police raid, DİHA and 14 other news agencies were shut down by via decree on October 14, 2016.
Among those detained in the police raid was former DİHA News Editor Ömer Çelik. In a recent interview with IPI, Çelik spoke about his own experience at DİHA, an organization he said sought to reflect political change in Turkey, and the parallels to the situation involving Özgürlükçü Demokrasi.
“As Kurdish media, we were at a point where we defined ourselves from “the other” discourse in Turkey”, Çelik said. “Between 2014 and 2015, Turkey transitioned from a [period characterized by the] peace process to a period of conflict. This transition was also analysed later in many human rights groups’ reports, which pointed out that this period of conflict would have created lots of other rights violations and paved the way to many unlawful practices by the state security forces. We were just trying to report the same facts that had been written in those analyses.”
Currently working as an editor at Mezopotamya News Agency, Çelik was earlier held in pretrial detention for over 300 days for his reporting on the emails of Turkey’s energy minister, who is also President Erdoğan’s son-in-law, by a hacker group called RedHack. Two other editors from different media outlets – Tunca Öğreten from the news website Diken and Mahir Kanaat from the newspaper BirGün – were also detained in that investigation.
Çelik noted that, before it was shut down, DİHA was already among the most targeted news agencies by the government.
“We faced pressure and arrests before, too”, he said. “However the intensity of this pressure had tripled in the last couple of years (prior to the shutdown). In fact, the first news agency that was blocked in Turkey immediately following the state of emergency was declared was DİHA itself. From that day till its closure, DİHA was blocked 49 times in total.”
Çelik also stressed the difficulties of working under worsening financial regulations. “Even if you put the pressure and political violence aside, just to survive financially is very difficult these days.”
For journalists who worked for now-closed news organizations such as DİHA and Özgürlükçü Demokrasi, the struggle goes on in the form of financial sanctions, political violence and arrests. Journalists who lost their jobs either cannot find a place in the mainstream media due to their past work or those who manage to find employment and forced to practice self-censorship.
Local and international solidarity plays a significant role in this struggle. Çelik emphasized that journalists with DİHA, Mezopotamya Agency and others need such solidarity to survive this critical period.
“All of us undoubtedly believe that no colleague should be prosecuted for his or her journalistic work and we have to stand side by side no matter what the circumstances. Only then can we defeat this danger and the pressure directed against us.”
