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Turkey Silencing The Guns -- And Critics

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  • Turkey Silencing The Guns -- And Critics

    TURKEY SILENCING THE GUNS -- AND CRITICS

    CNN Wire
    May 29, 2013 Wednesday 10:40 PM EST

    By Emma Sinclair-Webb
    (CNN)

    Editor's note: Emma Sinclair-Webb is a senior Europe researcher at
    Human Rights Watch who focuses on Turkey.

    (CNN) -- Sevan Nisanyan, a Turkish-Armenian journalist, wrote a blog
    entry last September stating that critical comments about religion
    don't constitute hate speech. "Making fun of an Arab leader who
    claimed he contacted God hundreds of years ago and received political,
    financial and sexual benefits is not hate speech," he said. "It
    is an almost kindergarten-level test of what is called freedom of
    expression."

    An Istanbul court disagreed and on May 22 -- for these very words --
    sentenced him to 13 months in prison for "insulting the religious
    values of one section of the population." What makes his prosecution
    even more chilling is the fact that it followed public comments by
    Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdag recommending that Nisanyan should
    be prosecuted.

    There have been dramatic developments in Turkey in recent months
    as the government embarks on a bold attempt to end the entrenched
    conflict with the armed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and to start
    down the long road to peace with the Kurdish minority. While the sight
    of uniformed and armed PKK fighters -- male and female -- retreating
    to camps over the border in Iraqi Kurdistan is tangible evidence of
    progress toward peace, the Turkish authorities and judiciary are
    still cracking down on people who express dissent in words rather
    than with an AK47.

    One of Turkey's most fundamental human rights problems is in fact
    intolerance of free speech. Politicians regularly sue journalists for
    defamation. Editors and publishers are mostly unwilling to permit
    much criticism of the government for fear of harming their bosses'
    other business interests.

    The largest group of people being prosecuted for criticizing the
    government are accused of illegal political activism. The police,
    prosecutors and courts label their activities "terrorism," despite
    scant evidence of involvement in violence or material support to armed
    resistance. A couple of thousand local Kurdish activists are in jail.

    These are people who opted for non-violent political struggle in the
    Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), which has members in parliament.

    Among them are elected mayors, journalists, students and human rights
    defenders, and many lawyers.

    But not all of those targeted are even accused of terrorism. The
    targets of this clampdown include people who offend the government
    with satirical and even trivial criticisms.

    Nisanyan's conviction, which he has appealed, followed the conviction
    on April 15 of the well-known pianist Fazil Say, who received a
    10-month suspended sentence on the same charge for several tweets and
    retweets poking fun at Islam. The public was divided, as it was in
    Nisanyan's case, but the real discussion should have been about whether
    what either of the two men said actually threatened the public order,
    amounted to hate speech or deserved to be restricted on those grounds.

    The European Court of Human Rights has found over and over that Turkey
    has violated free speech. But prosecutors, courts, and government
    figures are still applying different standards to Turkey, muzzling
    views they don't want to hear. Most recently, there has been the
    spate of cases against people deemed to have denigrated the religious
    sentiments of the Sunni Muslim majority.

    On May 30, the feminist lawyer Canan Arin faces a trial hearing for
    critical comments she made to lawyers at a meeting of the Antalya Bar
    Association in 2011 on the subject of violence against women. She
    homed in on the problem of early and forced marriage. After Arin
    cited the Prophet Muhammad and President Abdullah Gul as examples of
    men who married child brides, she was prosecuted both for "insulting
    religious values" and "insulting the president." She faces a possible
    five year prison sentence.

    It is unlikely that any of these three will go to prison in the end,
    but the fact that they were prosecuted at all demonstrates that the
    political transformation of Turkey to a rights-respecting democracy
    over the past decade is incomplete. The authorities have used the
    criminal justice system to muzzle or punish criticism of the state
    and official history throughout the republic. Rather than moving away
    from this model, the present government seems to be happy to continue
    the tradition by using the courts to fight a battle with anyone who
    touches on the subject of religion in ways they don't like.

    The political breakthrough with the PKK offers an important
    chance of securing progress on human rights for all of Turkey's
    people. But as jailed Kurdish political activists and critics facing
    charges for offending someone in government have found out, that's
    only part of what's needed to secure progress on human rights for
    everyone. Moving toward a tolerant and democratic society also means
    that the authorities and the courts need to stop trying to silence
    their unarmed critics.

    The views expressed are the writer's own.

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