Constanze Letsch - Turkish journalist Can Dündar jailed after surviving gun attack
The prominent Turkish
journalist Can Dündar has been sentenced to more than five years in prison,
shortly after surviving an attack by a gunman who attempted to shoot him
outside a courthouse in Istanbul. “In the space of two
hours we have experienced two assassination attempts: one was done with a gun,
the other was judicial,” said the newspaper editor, speaking in front of the
court after the verdict was announced.
“The [jail sentences]
we received are not just to silence us. The bullet was not just to silence us.
This was done to all of us, to scare us into silence, to make us stop talking. “We all have to be
courageous, despite all of this, and defend the freedom of the press and the
freedom to information.”
Dündar,
editor-in-chief of Turkish daily Cumhuriyet, and fellow journalist Erdem Gül,
its Ankara bureau chief, were acquitted on charges of trying to overthrow the
government, but convicted of publishing secret state documents. Dündar was sentenced
to five years and 10 months in prison and Gül to five years. Both journalists
also still face charges of helping an armed organisation.
“This is a verdict
against journalism and we don’t accept it,” said Gül. Supporters chanted
slogans such as “The free press cannot be silenced.” The verdict came on a
dramatic day in which an attacker fired several shots in quick succession at
Dündar, who was unharmed.
Crowds of reporters
were waiting outside the courthouse for the verdict and NTV television reported
that one of its reporters had suffered minor injuries from ricocheting bullets.
Video footage showed a man
being restrained and then arrested. Accusing the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan, and the pro-government media of whipping up a climate of hatred
against him, Dündar said: “We know very well who showed me as a target.This is
the result of provocation. If you turn someone into so much of a target, this
is what happens.”
Erdoğan, who joined
the trial as a complainant, previously accused Dündar of undermining Turkey’s
international reputation, vowing that he would “pay a heavy price”. Dündar and Gül could
have faced life in prison had they been found guilty of attempting to topple
the government by publishing footage that purported to show Turkey’s state
intelligence agency ferrying weapons into Syria in 2014.
Their lawyers said the
prosecutor had called for Dündar to be jailed for 25 years for procuring and
revealing state secrets and for Gül to be imprisoned for 10 years for
publishing them. “We are now on trial
for our story: for acquiring and publishing state secrets,” Dündar told Reuters
during a court recess before the shooting and verdict. “This confirms [that]
journalism is on trial, making our defence easier and a conviction harder.”
Mahmut Tanal, from the
opposition Republican People’s party, said: “This case isn’t based on law, it’s
political. That’s evidenced by the president joining this case as a complainant
... There is an attempt to pressure the court.” Cumhuriyet’s
revelations, published in May 2015, infuriated Erdoğan, who filed a criminal
complaint against the journalists over what he portrayed as part of an attempt
to undermine Turkey’s global standing.
Regarding the video,
the president has acknowledged that the lorries, which were stopped by Turkish
paramilitary forces and police officers en route to the Syrian border, belonged
to the intelligence agency, but he said they were carrying aid to Turkmen
rebels in Syria. Turkmen fighters are battling against the Syrian president,
Bashar al-Assad, and Isis.
Turkish journalists
say local media outlets are facing one
of the worst crackdowns on press freedom since military rule in the
1980s. Prosecutors have opened nearly 2,000 cases of alleged insults to the
president since Erdoğan took office in 2014, prominent journalists appear in
court two or three times a week, Kurdish journalists are beaten or detained in
the country’s restive south-east and foreign journalists have been harassed or
deported.
Academics are also standing trial, accused of spreading propaganda by
the outlawed separatist Kurdistan Workers’ party. The result is a
climate of fear and intimidation that Turkish journalists have described as an
attempt to silence a critical press in a country that ranks 151st among 180 countries in the
world press freedom index.
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