The Land Of Silence

The Grand Poobah of Turkey, his Royal Imperial Highness and Sultan, the Caliph of Istanbul and (Life) President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey is a very sensitive soul ...

He Is A Sensitive Soul

.... whose feelings are easily hurt, and who needs to be protected from those who would bruise those feelings.

What else can we presume from the news, that in 2020 alone, more than 31,000 investigations related to the charge of insulting the dignity of the President of Turkey were filed with the Turkish courts.

Now in the Republic of Turkiye (to give it its new official international name - a version of “Türkiye Cumhuriyeti”), this is not a civil court matter, nor does it result in a small fine or a warning. No it nearly always results in a stiff term in the Turkish prison system, of between one and four years (usually above one year). I say nearly always, because such is the corruption of the court system by the ruling political party, that once accused you are essentially guilty, so a prison term is virtually always the result .... although often suspended.

A Moment On The Lips ... Possible Prison Time.

Take for instance Ms Sedef Kabas (translated to English by Google, so 'she' is 'he' in the text), who is apparently a well known journalist, and a brave woman as well. She has been live reporting on the Tele1 opposition-linked TV channel (Yes, some brave souls are still the opposition in Turkey, although with considerable handicaps in media coverage and campaigning opportunities). However she stepped over the thin, and often invisible line, and was arrested at 2am on Saturday/Sunday the 22nd of January 2020 in Istanbul, where a court ordered her to be jailed ahead of a trial (amazing how swift justice can be in some states .... a lesson to us all in Western Europe).

So what had she done to warrant such hard treatment? Well in a live TV show (where she couldn't be censored by government officials from the Radio and Television Supreme Council), she had the temerity to say "There is a very famous proverb that says that a crowned head becomes wiser. But we see it is not true. A bull does not become king just by entering the palace, but the palace becomes a barn." .... now as that doesn't mention Erdogan by name, its odd that his officials immediately determined that this was an insult to El Presidente Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey. She went on to compound the offence by later posting the quoted proverbs on her Twitter account.

A functionary of Mr Erdoğan, his Chief Spokesman Fahrettin Altun, wrote on Twitter that "A so-called journalist is blatantly insulting our president on a television channel that has no goal other than spreading hatred," adding that she was being "irresponsible". Ms Kabas denied to the court that she had intended to insult the president, while the editor of the Tele1 TV show, Merdan Yanardag, in which she had been appearing, said that "Her detention overnight at 2am because of a proverb is unacceptable. This stance is an attempt to intimidate journalists, the media and society".

The All Seeing Eye - Erdoğan Watches Over Türkiye Cumhuriyeti

Of course, Ms Kabas is not the first, or even the 31,001 person to have fallen foul of this law, its been in force for a number of years, and by its very nature, it is largely applied against those who are not so keen on the rule of Erdoğan. So hundreds of thousands have been threatened with, or silenced by its application. 

In fact you don't even have to be particularly political as former Miss Turkiye, Merve Buyuksarac found out in May 2016, when she too was charged with and convicted by a Turkish court, of insulting a public official [Mr Erdoğan], in postings she made on social media, when sharing a satirical poem on her Instagram account in 2014. She of course denied insulting Mr Erdoğan and appealed to a higher court, although she had received a comparatively lenient 14-month suspended prison sentence (its usually not suspended nowadays), as long as she behaved in the following five years.

Mr Erdoğan's lawyer at the time, Hatice Ozay, said in court that the post she had shared (along with many thousands of others on social media platforms), had gone beyond "the limits of criticism" and amounted to an "attack against my client's personal rights" .... and that was the only public justification given by Erdoğan for this jailing of his critics. He only became President in 2014 (after 11 years as Prime Minister), and so felt the need to explain even in 2016 (occasionally), but now he is all powerful and beyond the law, so explanations are superfluous to his dignity. His dignitas even extends in to countries that have large Turkish diaspora's such as Germany.

In 2016 Erdoğan filed a complaint in the German courts, under Section 103 of the then criminal code that banned insulting representatives or organs belonging to foreign states, against Jan Böhmermann, a German comic. The court then banned the comic from repeating parts of an 'obscene' poem (the sexual references to goats and sheep were unacceptable it ruled), he wrote about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The Deputy Prime Minister of Turkey, Numan Kurtulmuş, called the poem a "serious crime against humanity" ... yep, genocide of Armenians is nothing, but insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in a poem, is a "serious crime against humanity."

However also in 2016 the German courts rejected his complaint about a song, broadcast on German television in which Mr Erdoğan was criticised on a range of issues ranging from the imprisonment of journalists to heavy-handed treatment of protesters including women ("equal rights for women - they are beaten up equally"). "When a journalist writes a piece that Erdogan doesn't like, he quickly ends up in jail, newspaper offices closed down, he doesn't think twice, with tear gas and water cannons he is riding through the night," say some of the lyrics rather prophetically.

2016 was a busy year for Erdoğan's lawyers, as a 16 year old boy was arrested at school in the central city of Konya, for allegedly insulting the president and criticising the ruling Islamic-rooted AK Party during a speech. His speech, given to commemorate the killing of a Turkish soldier by Islamists in the 1920s, was recorded on video and broadcast by Dogan News Agency, defended Turkish secularism and the principles of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the modern Turkish republic, but he also reportedly called Mr Erdoğan the "thieving owner of the illegal palace." He told the court that "I've made the statement in question. I have no intent to insult." As he left the courthouse the unnamed boy reportedly said: "There is no question of taking a step back from our path, we will continue along this road." He still faced a trial and a possible four-year sentence if found guilty.

Bulent Kenes, Editor of Today’s Zaman (an English language newspaper), was guilty of insulting Erdoğan in a tweet in July 2014 (before Erdoğan was President), implying his late mother would have been ashamed of him had she lived to see what he was doing to Turkey. He was given a 21-month suspended jail sentence. Mr Kenes had argued that he was protected by Turkish law on freedom of speech and also that his tweet had not specifically mentioned Erdoğan, but as usual the Turkish court rejected his arguments.

Treatment Of Critics Is Very Hard In Erdoğan's Türkiye Cumhuriyeti 

Even back then in 2016, it was thought that almost 2,000 people, including Turkish celebrities and schoolchildren, had been prosecuted in the country, for insulting the president after he came to office in 2014, under what was the previously little-used, but now thoroughly exercised law.

The law is so insidious that Erdoğan's body guards inventively use it to justify their own violence. So for example in 2019, Sertuğ Sürenoğlu an İstanbul-based lawyer, was restrained and beaten by the bodyguards of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan after he objected to the president’s police and security detail about the President holding up traffic. They responded by forcing Sürenoğlu into a vehicle, where they tied his hands from behind, and beat him for two hours, and then later they forced him to sign a statement saying he had insulted President Erdoğan. 

He was then handed back to the police for formal detention, after which he was put under house arrest by an İstanbul court. He had told the prosecutor what he had experienced and the Ankara Bar Association filed a criminal complaint against the bodyguards, and an opposition deputy even brought the incident to parliament, posing a question to Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu but to no avail.

The madness has even taken hold in Universities ....  Tunahan Gözlügöl, a student at the Middle East Technical University (ODTÜ), was sentenced to 8 years and 22 days in prison for “insulting” the university rector Mustafa Verşan Kök in a tweet he posted, in which he criticized the university management over a construction project at the campus. His tweets,  were reportedly considered a personal insult by the rector himself who made a court complaint. The ODTU is generally considered to be anti-government in stance, with its students and professors often facing prison terms for “insulting” Presdient Tayyip Erdoğan and other state officials.

It should be pointed out that this is all taking place in the greater context of nationwide purges following the failed coup attempt, and after which the Turkish government launched a massive crackdown on the real and alleged followers of the Gulen group. This under the pretext of an anti-coup crackdown under which, according to an official statement from the Turkish Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu, a total of 622,646 people have been the subject of investigation, and 301,932 have been detained, while 96,000 others have been jailed due to alleged links to the Gülen group since the failed coup. The minister said there are currently 25,467 people in Turkey’s prisons who were jailed on alleged links to the Gulen movement.