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World’s biggest prison for journalists is in Turkey

Thursday June 22 2017
journo

Can Dündar (left), former editor-in-chief of Cumhuriyet newspaper and detainee in Turkey, received this year’s Golden Pen of Freedom Award in Durban, South Africa. PHOTO FILE | AFP

By DICTA ASIIMWE

Turkish journalist Can Dündar won this year’s Golden Pen of Freedom Award by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) as the global organisation directed its fight for press freedom towards his government.

The Golden Pen of Freedom Award is an annual recognition made by WAN-IFRA to recognise the outstanding action of an individual or group in the cause of press freedom.

Mr Dündar, a former editor-in-chief of Cumhuriyet newspaper, received the award during the WAN-IFRA Congress in Durban, South Africa, and immediately declared he was accepting it in the name of his colleagues who remain in prison in Turkey. He is in exile, away from his family, to avoid life imprisonment for his work.

READ: Journalist Joy Doreen Biira arrested in Uganda

Turkey is described as the world’s biggest prison for journalists, holding 150 in jail.

Mr Dündar was arrested together with Ankara bureau chief Erdem Gül in November 2015, following the publication of photographs showing trucks used by Turkey’s intelligence services to send arms to Syrian rebel groups — after President Tayyip Erdogan had claimed the trucks were delivering humanitarian aid.

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Aiding terrorism

Authorities accused the two journalists of knowingly aiding an armed terrorist organisation, as well as being members of a terrorist organisation, obtaining and exposing secret state documents, as a means of political and military espionage.

Had their cases gone to trial, they would both have faced life imprisonment but after spending 92 days in jail, the pair was released in February 2016, when the Turkish Supreme Court decided that their detention was an undue deprivation of liberty.

Shortly after his release, Mr Dündar left Turkey, but while in jail, he wrote and later published notes on his imprisonment.

The journalist moved the participants with an account of how Turkish political elite have taken control of the country’s media through ownership and control.

READ: South Sudan bans 20 foreign journalists

Compromised media

He said President Erdogan took time before the crackdown to compromise media leaders with economic gain, while other media owners and editors were isolated and forced out of their publications, which were then sold to Mr Erdogan’s cronies.

“Publications in Turkey are in the hands of seven individuals. As a result, the truth has become either impossible to write or read,” said Mr Dündar.

By giving the award to Dündar, WAN-IFRA, which is a leading member of the global freedom of expression movement, was continuing its consistent denunciation of the attacks on journalists and the lack of guarantees for the press to carry out their profession, said president of the World Editors Forum Dave Callaway.

Technology outburst

The irony is that this repression is thriving at a time when the Internet should have improved freedom of expression and access to information, enabling the public to make informed choices.

Autocratic states and terrorist organisations are being helped in their misinformation agenda by the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Google, for economic gain, as they have refused to take on the responsibility of publishers.

Hence right-wing politicians exploit the Internet, to plant seeds of genocide targeting poor marginalised members of society like immigrants, minority groups and Muslims.

READ: Yes, hate speech can lead to bombs and bodies...

Maria Ressa founder of social media news site Rappler, against whom #arrestmaria has been trending due to Rappler’s unfavourable coverage of President Rodrigo Duterte’s deadly war on drugs, says her organisation did a study and found that one fake Facebook account can influence three million other users.

READ: Uganda Police top list of violators of journalists' rights

Technology companies have always projected themselves as defenders of freedom of expression and access to information, and for a while everyone including the media believed this.

Arab Spring

During the Arab Spring, stories came out of Egypt and Tunisia commending the Internet for helping to overthrow oppressive regimes.

But now the opposite is happening as these Internet publishers have refused to play their role of moderating, the way media houses do, by sieving truth from lies, not giving voice to hate speech and other undesirable information.

Without this moderation, Aidan White, director of the Ethical Network for Journalists says that technology companies are providing megaphones for leaders and terrorists alike, to sow propaganda that could lead to genocide.

READ: Why does genocide occur?

Mr White said that genocide took place because there were years when journalism in Rwanda and the Balkans gave up its role of moderating conversations in the interest of society, which allowed for propaganda setting one section of the population against another to take root.

Something similar is happening on the Internet, the only difference being that the reach of such hate speech is wider.

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