Zehra Dogan - I was just released from prison in Turkey because of my art, but I refuse to be silenced
Fighting between
security forces and armed groups in Kurdish-majority cities began in Turkey in 2015, and
I, as a Kurdish journalist, felt the need to visit those cities. The media in
Turkey, which is almost completely under government control, was only reporting
information shared by the security forces, put out in a one-sided and
propagandistic way.
In 2015 I was working
for the JINHA, a women’s news agency, which was made up entirely of women and
wrote all its news from a feminist perspective. There was still one year left
before JINHA, of which I was a founder, would be closed by government decree. Before I went to these
cities, some people warned me I could be arrested. At the time these places
were under military siege, with a 24/7 ban on going out into the streets and
the bodies of civilians, who had been killed in the fallout of clashes, lying
for days in the middle of the road.
But if I did not go, I
would have been leaving my people on their own, and their stories would never
have been heard. I was also frightened of being detained or wounded in the
fighting, but this was not going to stop me from doing what was necessary as a
journalist. To fear is human, but to give in to fear when trying to tell the
people the truth in the face of a repressive regime is to lose the struggle
before it has even started.
As a reporter, I
covered conflict zones for months, and I relayed what I saw and the statements
of witnesses living in these cities. But our coverage went unseen by a large
proportion of the Turkish
press. The websites on
which our news was published were censored. As a painter, I decided to use art
in order to convey what had happened there.... read more:
