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A Tradition Still Alive in the
Turkish Press
By Ayse Gunaaysu
It’s not the first time that a mainstream newspaper in
Turkey features a highly provocative front page headline
making an unfounded accusation that would obviously incite
public hatred and animosity towards the “other.”
I’m talking about Hurriyet, one of the biggest circulation
newspapers in Turkey. It’s front page headline on Aug. 3
named the PKK—the outlawed Kurdish armed organization—as the
perpetrator of the July 28 bombing in Istanbul that killed
17 people. The news item reported in detail how one of the
nine suspects detained—the “bomber”—entered Turkey illegally
and how he watched, in cold blood, people dye in the
explosion.
What the readers of Hurriyet—whose logo reads “Turkey
belongs to Turks”—couldn’t learn from their newspaper was
that, after a thorough police and then public prosecutor’s
interrogation, the court had detained the suspects not on
charges related to the July 28 bombing but because they were
members of an outlawed organisation. The court ruling for
the arrest of the suspects had made no mention of the
bombing at all. This was because there was practically no
evidence to accuse any of the nine persons taken in custody
of being the bomber or being linked in any way with the
bombing. The daily Taraf, interviewing the family and the
employer of the suspect, reported in its Aug. 5 issue that
the alleged bomber did not enter Turkey illegally, but was,
in fact, a textile worker working uninterruptedly in the
same factory for the past seven years and living with his
family.
On the same page, next to this news item, Ahmet Altan, son
of the legendary Labour Party member of the Turkish
parliament in the 1960’s, starts his column by saying that
the fundamental aim of justice is not to catch a criminal
but to protect the innocent. Justice, he continues, catches
and punishes the criminal for the sake of protecting the
innocent. And the biggest fear of justice is to punish an
innocent. With his usual forceful style, he uses “is”
instead of “should be,” just to underline that using the
format “should be” is not enough in formulating such a vital
principle and that this should be an axiom, a categorical,
rather than a conditional rule.
However, despite the fact that the court ruling is open to
all, the Minister of Interior and other government
spokespersons declared the suspect as the bomber, without
making any reference to Taraf’s counter-arguments.
Several newspapers, including Taraf and Radikal, reported
that the PKK had disowned the bombing and condemned it. The
group’s spokesperson had clearly stated that the bombing had
nothing to do with the “Kurdish liberation movement,” and
that they were against the killing of civilians and believed
this looked like one of the secret operations staged many
times in the past.
Hurriyet’s headline and the provocative report supporting
the Minister’s statement is not just an example of poor
reporting practice. This is a country where the ongoing
armed clashes for the past 30 years has triggered, every now
and then, mass aggressions on Kurdish immigrants trying to
make a living in the cities far away from their war-stricken
home villages. Several times in the outskirts of big cities,
Kurdish laborers working at terribly low wages without any
social security have been the target of lynch attempts
following rumors that they were linked with the PKK. The
buildings of the DTP, the Kurdish party represented in
parliament with 17 deputies, have at times been attacked by
ultra-nationalists, and several years ago a bus carrying DTP
members was destroyed by stone-throwing mobs yelling
anti-Kurdish slogans in Gebze, a district of Istanbul,
leaving dozens of people injured. More recently, a
conference hall where the DTP held a meeting was blockaded
for hours by thousands of people, with police doing nothing
about it, and a DTP member dying of a heart attack in the
process. In other words, Hurriyet knew very well that such
an accusation, proven to be unfounded by the court ruling,
carried the potential of triggering a new surge of
anti-Kurdish sentiment among ultra-nationalists.
But, yes, this is not the first time. For decades,
semi-official Turkish newspapers provoked hatred towards the
“enemies of the nation”—sometimes the “communists,” many
times the “disloyal minorities,” and frequently the “Kurdish
separatists.” Throughout many tragic events in the history
of Turkey, not to mention the minor ones, headlines in
newspapers have served as a catalyst in stirring frantic
masses to action.
Turkish readers were introduced to the history press’s role
in various incidents of ethnic and religious mass aggression
towards non-Muslims in Rifat Bali’s book Cumhuriyet
Yillarinda Turkiye Yahudileri: Bir Turklestirme Seruveni,
roughly translated to Jews of Turkey in the Republican
Period: A Story of Turkification (Iletisim, 1999).
I’m not even talking about the ultra-nationalist and
ultra-Islamist newspapers’ routine hate speech here, but the
practice of one of the biggest dailies in Turkey. The
routine hate speech in extremist publications includes open
insults aimed at Armenians, Jews, and Kurds and personal
attacks on religious leaders of minorities. But while there
are laws protecting Turkishness from being insulted, there
are none that protect non-Turks from insult in Turkey.
These are the days when, for the first time in this
country’s history, a legal case is under way against figures
who were pointed out by human rights advocates for years as
having dark ties with the “special war machine” within the
state, what is known in Turkey as the “deep state.” These
are the times when the DTP, the independent Istanbul deputy
Ufuk Uras, and various other opposition circles are calling
for a deeper investigation that would pave the way for some
kind of partial catharsis and a much better democracy,
rather than a superficial washing of the hands of the most
visible criminals already known very well by some. In the
midst of such unpredictability, some people—like the editors
of Hurriyet—further blur the public’s perception by means of
unfounded accusations against the nation’s hate figures such
as the PKK and the Kurds. After all, inciting hatred and
animosity is the best, most efficient, and most sustainable
means of manipulation.
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