The Death Blow to Turkey’s Media
BY MARCH 4, 2016
Earlier today, a Turkish court gave the green light to a government-approved takeover of media group Feza Journalism. The company owns Zaman, the country’s largest-circulation newspaper, and one of its top private news agencies. Crowds have gathered outside Zaman’s headquarters in Istanbul to protect the journalists from eviction by the police, who areeven now attempting to clear a path through them with water cannons. But if previous events are any indication, the friends of press freedom are unlikely to prove much help.
Though life has been hard for critics of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his administration lately, this wholesale assault on one of Turkey’s most powerful independent voices is a watershed.The government is signaling that there are no boundaries left in its crackdown on dissent.
Erdogan’s animus toward Zaman has its roots in the rivalry between the president’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the Gulen movement, a secretive Islamist network that once facilitated the party’s rise. Zaman has long played a key role in the far-flung Gulen business empire, and it has become an increasingly prominent voice in the chorus of Erdogan’s critics in recent years. The intensity of the bad feeling on both sides undoubtedly has much to do with the fact that they used to be allies.
As the AKP established its dominance in the early 2000s and began purging secular civil servants from the state bureaucracy, the Gulen movement — which is led by Fethullah Gulen, an exiled cleric now living in the U.S. — provided the manpower to replace them. In two high-profile trials launched in 2008 and 2010, Gulen-affiliated police and prosecutors put secular and military officials on trial for alleged coup attempts. Many outside analystspointed out flaws in those cases that indicated that the charges had been trumped up for political reasons.
