This January, a Turkish courtroom sentenced Sofya Alağaş, a Kurdish journalist and elected co-mayor of Siirt municipality, to 6 years and three months in jail on costs of membership in a terror group.
“I actually don’t know the way it will finish,” Alağaş informed Truthout. “The sentence was not a authorized resolution however a political one. If the Turkish state takes some steps in the direction of democratization, the case will finish with an acquittal. If it doesn’t, it will likely be accepted and I’ll be arrested.”
The sentence was the end result of an operation by the Turkish state that started in June 2022, when she and greater than a dozen different journalists have been arrested for actions the federal government alleged have been linked to the outlawed Kurdistan Employees’ Occasion (PKK), a militant group based in 1978, which Ankara considers a terrorist group. Kurds are Turkey’s largest ethnic minority group, however their conventional homelands additionally stretch throughout elements of contemporary Syria, Iraq and Iran. They’ve been focused by state violence in all of these nations for the reason that finish of the Ottoman Empire, particularly in Turkey.
The scenario in Turkey grew extra dire after July 15, 2016, when a faction throughout the Turkish army tried a coup in opposition to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Although the coup try was over by the subsequent day, the federal government quickly imposed what would develop into a two-year state of emergency, which allowed for harsher crackdowns on opposition media and rights teams, in addition to mass arrests: The U.S. State Division estimated that greater than 312,000 individuals have been arrested in relation to the try by way of 2021. The state additionally started to exchange elected mayors from the pro-Kurdish Individuals’s Democratic Occasion, recognized in the present day because the DEM Occasion, with “trustees” loyal to Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Improvement Occasion (AKP).
Alağaş mentioned she stop her communications job for a municipality of Diyarbakır, the biggest Kurdish-majority metropolis in Turkey, as a result of she refused to work for a trustee. However by December 2016, the state had closed practically 170 media shops. “A whole bunch of journalists have been left unemployed. A bunch of unemployed feminine journalists had based the web newspaper Şujin. I began working there,” Alağaş mentioned.
When the federal government shut down Şujin in 2017, the group based Jin Information, a women-run information company targeted totally on Kurdish ladies’s points.
Alağaş served as a information editor and reporter. Although Jin Information remains to be lively, it remained a goal. “Whereas working there, I used to be subjected to strain from the state many occasions due to the information we revealed. Lawsuit have been filed in opposition to me thrice on costs of constructing propaganda,” Alağaş mentioned. “Entry to the company’s web site was blocked 45 occasions.”
Alağaş remained at Jin Information till 2024, when she was elected as co-mayor for the DEM Occasion within the Kurdish-majority municipality of Siirt in southeast Turkey, the place she was born. She mentioned her election sped up the case in opposition to her. After her conviction and sentencing for terror costs in January, Alağaş joined the listing of dozens of pro-Kurdish and opposition mayors changed by officers loyal to the AKP.
In keeping with a report by Turkey’s Media and Regulation Research Affiliation, the fees in opposition to Alağaş stem from an investigation citing “Jin Information’s editorial insurance policies, reporting model, headlines” as proof Alağaş was selling “violence, criticism of the state, and sympathy for the PKK.” Alağaş mentioned these accusations have been revamped 103 of the 73,413 Turkish-language information objects Jin Information revealed throughout her tenure, together with articles concerning the isolation of imprisoned PKK chief Abdullah Öcalan, Turkish operations in opposition to Kurds in Syria and Worldwide Ladies’s Day — Turkey has lately imposed bans and restrictions on March 8 protests, along with barring Istanbul’s annual Pleasure march. “The prosecutor cherry-picked information objects and added them to the file in opposition to me,” she mentioned.
By December 2016, the state had closed practically 170 media shops.
Alağaş says articles revealed about her have been additionally added to her file — particularly about her successful the Maria Grazia Cutuli Award, an Italian prize for worldwide ladies journalists. “It was fascinating that the information studies concerning a world award have been added to the file as proof of a criminal offense,” she mentioned.
Alağaş informed Truthout she has by no means been subjected to bullying or harassment by the general public: “It’s the authorities that doesn’t settle for our journalism. The information we produce disturbs the federal government.”
Gülistan Korban, who runs the ladies’s middle on the South East Journalist Affiliation in Diyarbakır, agrees that state repression makes primary reporting a problem. “At first, once you talked about ‘press freedom,’ I assumed it was humorous. What press freedom in Turkey?” she informed Truthout. She mentioned the restrictions on media are a nationwide downside, however that it’s worse for these working in Kurdish cities, the place repression tends to be harsher and extra violent than in western Turkey.
“Think about, whilst you’re writing a report, or doing interview, even whereas writing what another person has mentioned, [and] sooner or later, we might be uncovered to an investigation, simply because we wrote that report,” Korban mentioned.
“That is all the time a giant downside for us whereas writing the information. We really feel our considering is restricted, that our ideas are shackled,” Korban mentioned. “We, as journalists, are usually not free,” and between the potential for male violence and entrenched cultural norms, “as ladies, we aren’t in a position to do our work in a enough means below this strain.”
However Korban mentioned she has additionally acquired threats and harassment from members of the general public for the varieties of reports she studies. Most just lately, she mentioned her outlet was threatened by the household of a 32-year-old man for reporting that he had kidnapped a 12-year-old lady with the intent to forcibly marry her. It wasn’t sufficient to discourage Korban and her crew. “I’ve a small daughter; how might we not write about this?” she mentioned, including that the lady’s household had reported the incident to police days earlier, and so they hadn’t began the investigation. However it seems, they didn’t miss the assistance: “Thank goodness, she was discovered, she was discovered instantly after we wrote the report.”
Korban added that she’s been reporting and modifying from dwelling because of issues about how a possible jail stint or worse would have an effect on her daughter. “You may think about how troublesome it’s to do that job as a girl journalist in a rustic,” she says, “the place ladies are killed daily.”
Journalists Beneath Menace
The repression in opposition to media by Turkey is a part of a worldwide pattern. The Committee to Shield Journalists (CPJ) confirmed that 2024 was the deadliest in its historical past for media staff worldwide. Practically 70 % have been killed by Israel, however others “have been or might have been focused by Turkish drones in Iraq and Syria.” They embody several Kurdish women journalists who have been covering Turkey’s attacks on primarily Kurdish forces in northern Syria and Iraq, comparable to Jihan Belkin and Gulistan Tara, who have been from Turkey, in addition to Hêro Bahadîn of Iraqi Kurdistan.
Inside Turkey, repression in opposition to ladies and different journalists persists, although the state of emergency led to 2018. At the least 30 journalists have been in prison in January 2025. Final month, police violently detained Jin Information journalist Öznur Değer; in Istanbul, former Bianet editor Elif Akgül, in addition to Kaos GL’s Yıldız Tar, who covers LGBTQ+ points, have been detained on terror costs. In the meantime mainstream TV anchor Özlem Gürses was released from a 52-day home arrest for “insulting state establishments” after she appeared in a broadcast to match Turkish-backed forces in Syria to ISIS (often known as Daesh) over their combating with Kurdish-backed militants.
“I used to be subjected to strain from the state many occasions due to the information we revealed. Lawsuit have been filed in opposition to me thrice on costs of constructing propaganda.”
Repression and violence in opposition to ladies journalists has come in opposition to the backdrop of Ankara’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention in 2021, a part of what one Amnesty Worldwide official called “the tip of a harmful anti-rights iceberg.” The 2011 treaty provided a blueprint for laws and awareness-raising measures to guard ladies from violence and rights violations. Killings of girls have been already excessive when Turkey pulled out of the settlement, however within the first 11 months of 2024, there have been not less than 359 reports of males killing ladies nationwide. Erdoğan has said the conference is antagonistic to “household values” and normalizes homosexuality. Extra just lately, he’s said his social gathering is “in opposition to the LGBT,” and final summer time, Turkey deported a trans lady refugee to Syria over her HIV standing. There, she was reportedly killed by her household and members of the Free Syrian Military.
A part of the “anti-rights iceberg” in Turkey is linked to the state of its democracy. Erdoğan has been in energy for greater than 20 years. The AKP has grown more and more authoritarian, particularly after the coup try additional eroded already weak democratic establishments. The federal government stays among the many high jailers of journalists, although Turkey has lengthy focused media. In 2007, Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was assassinated on a fundamental avenue in central Istanbul, a part of a protracted pattern of anti-press violence that goes again to army rule within the Nineteen Eighties and ‘90s. Exiled journalists from Syria in Turkey have usually been caught up in xenophobic assaults, spurred on by rhetoric from the secular opposition, the far proper and the ruling social gathering. These xenophobic forces exploded in a pogrom in opposition to Syrians final summer time within the central Turkish metropolis of Kayseri and elsewhere. Crackdowns on the press often most have an effect on leftists and minorities, however additionally they transcend id. Insulting the Turkish nation has been a criminal offense since 2005 — Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk has been charged below that regulation twice — and opponents have labeled a 2022 regulation on disinformation a “censorship regulation” for the potential it has to permit extra state interference in social media and unbiased information content material.
As Alağaş says, “If you don’t publish biased information that praises the AKP, you might be positively a goal.”
But, when the federal government and PKK entered peace talks in 2013, Korban remembers that “reporting the information, doing all your job at the same time as a girl, was really easy.… There have been 20 to 30 ladies journalists working within the discipline within the area. Now, I can depend them on one hand.” However repression reemerged shortly. When the Gezi Park protest motion broke out in Might of that yr, police used water cannons, beatings and tear fuel to interrupt up demonstrations, whereas not less than two sexual assaults by authorities have been reported. The truce between the federal government and PKK broke down by 2015, resulting in efforts to oust Kurdish parliamentarians because the financial system and forex started to falter. Main shifts are probably once more on this entrance: On February 27, PKK chief Öcalan called on fighters to put down their arms, main the group to declare a ceasefire, depending on his chief’s launch from an island jail.
Can It Occur Right here?
Some analysts have drawn parallels between Erdoğan and U.S. President Donald Trump — throughout a diplomatic spat in 2019, Trump even called himself a “huge fan” of the Turkish president. From the cults of character that propelled them to energy, to their reliance on “way of life points” to, as Xavier College’s Nazan Bedirhanoğlu wrote for Democracy Seminar, their makes an attempt to “reinforce symbolic boundaries” among the many public, their methods hinge on sowing divisions: “Polarization thrives when enemies … are established as the primary pillars of political discourse.”
Katherine Jacobsen, the CPJ coordinator for the U.S., says the attitude that “it could possibly’t occur right here” is a harmful one.
“Comparative politics has many pitfalls … however I feel there are various examples globally we will be taught from,” says Jacobsen. “This type of sense of American exceptionalism, particularly round media — that we gained’t have these varieties of issues which might be in Turkey or in Hungary or Brazil — doesn’t work anymore. We’re gone the purpose of getting any kind of exceptionalism in that realm.” In reality, all the journalists Truthout spoke to for this text, from Turkey and the U.S., reported some kind of official or public menace associated to their work.
Like Erdoğan, Trump is antagonistic to the press: By one count, he verbally attacked the media greater than 100 occasions forward of the 2024 election, and he’s threatened to throw reporters in jail. The Coalition For Ladies in Journalism wrote in a report final yr that Mission 2025 poses main challenges for an unbiased press and democracy, as Reporters With out Borders notes that repression of girls journalists is rising worldwide and tends to be worse below authoritarian regimes. In keeping with a report from October 2024 from the International Women’s Media Foundation, journalists throughout the U.S. have been already going through elevated ranges of harassment and threats of violence.
Since his inauguration in January, Trump has banned the Related Press from White Home occasions and attacked reporters by title. One administration official accused a Voice of America reporter of being “treasonous” and referred to as for his dismissal over a quote he utilized in his protection. Meta has ended fact-checking efforts, which can probably enable misinformation to flourish, because it does on Elon Musk’s X, which reports have proven is flooded with content material from neo-Nazis and white supremacists. In February, Musk additionally complied with a request from Turkey to dam “scores” of X accounts linked with its opposition, together with Kurds and leftists, in addition to “quite a few distinguished journalists and information shops.”
Ladies journalists — and particularly those that are additionally journalists of shade and LGBTQ+, disabled, or in any other case marginalized journalists, and those that have been writing about race or different kinds of inequality — are among the many most susceptible to harassment and violence.
In February 2020, a person was charged with hate crimes and harassment after he spat on and threatened trans lady journalist Serena Daniari in New York. Whereas overlaying an Oregon MAGA rally that autumn, journalist Beth Nakamura recorded Trump supporters harassing her and screaming “the press is the issue.” In 2021, one Los Angeles-area information anchor told Prism that as a Black lady journalist, she’s acquired close to fixed on-line harassment, principally from nameless accounts. “In the event that they thought they weren’t doing something unsuitable, they wouldn’t cover their id. That takes time and thought, and that makes it much more twisted,” she mentioned. And in 2023, Trump supporters physically assaulted a girl journalist who was making an attempt to query him in Miami. In the meantime, ABC Information correspondent Rachel Scott reportedly acquired loss of life threats after interviewing Trump at a gathering of Black journalists in Chicago in July.
Pittsburgh Lesbian Correspondents weblog founder Sue Kerr has been overlaying the LGBTQ+ neighborhood for greater than 20 years. All through her profession, she says she’s been a goal. “I’ve skilled a whole lot of harassment, rudeness and [been] focused by TERFs [trans-exclusionary radical feminists] a number of occasions. I’ve had three males stalk me. I used to be doxxed by Stormfront,” one of many earliest white supremacist hate websites on the web. However she says the harassment acquired worse for her after Trump’s inauguration in January.
“This was an precise loss of life menace by somebody utilizing their actual Fb account. That was unnerving. They weren’t hiding their id and that’s uncommon. The menace talked about different individuals — admins and other people affiliated with me,” Kerr informed Truthout, including that she has contacted police however has but to listen to again. Kerr says the menace was over her help for and protection of the trans neighborhood. “The dehumanizing rhetoric from the present administration empowers individuals to let their worst sides present.”
Jacobsen sees the precedents the Trump administration is setting, for instance by suing media shops and journalists, as more likely to embolden different politicians. “If the president is lobbing defamation fits in opposition to a lot of totally different information organizations, who’s to say an area official can’t sue an area journalist?” That would have a chilling impact on marginalized journalists’ willingness to report, particularly in native newsrooms. “It pollutes your entire media ecosystem,” she says. “Mistrust within the media has been rising for some time now. Trump didn’t invent the idea of denigrating the media within the U.S. However he did tactically determine to trip on the rising wave of distrust … and capitalize on that for his personal political ends.”
Kerr says she thinks the hazards going through ladies and LGBTQ+ journalists within the U.S. drive them to “be inventive in how we share our tales.”
Dealing with Repression, Journalists Received’t Again Down
Award-winning journalist and educator Stephanie Manriquez is from Mexico Metropolis however has lengthy labored in Chicago. She is the director of Lumpen Radio, an unbiased FM neighborhood station based mostly on town’s South Aspect. The station is multilingual and trains neighborhood members to do radio, permitting them to participate in working the volunteer-run outlet.
Lumpen Radio is a part of the Public Media Institute (PMI), an unbiased media nonprofit targeted on mutual assist and native tales. Manriquez says the station has labored to attach migrants to sources, and has been recording their oral histories, which can develop into a podcast sequence.
“We’re combating with our personal tales and hoping that can not be censored — we’re simply talking truths,” Manriquez informed Truthout, however she admits there’s some fear about how the present political local weather might have an effect on Lumpen. The station produces exhibits for Spanish audio system, together with “Boletín Migrante,” which she says goals to vary the narrative across the migrant expertise by creating areas that transcend worry, and countering misinformation with tales of resilience.
Manriquez says that as a result of PMI has lengthy been a vital voice, “portraying what the neighborhood feels and fears in a radical and inventive means,” its contributors are already “alert about who’s watching us.” For Lumpen, the main problem posed by the present local weather could also be monetary. “We all know that the funds shall be lower sooner or later, normally for nonprofits,” she says. “However I hope we will resist and proceed creating.”
And that’s a sentiment that’s shared by journalists in Turkey. After we spoke on the telephone, Korban informed me from Diyarbakır that the dangers ladies and different susceptible teams take to report on their communities might be price it.
“In any other case, if we by no means step up, we will solely dream of excellent days, proper?”
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