We were meeting at offices owned by the Yesevi Alperenler Association, a nationalist Islamist organization run by Mican, who also leads a coalition of conservative Turkish nongovernmental organizations. Dressed in a blue suit and shirt, Mican fidgeted with his pen as we talked. The 41-year-old was affable, but was eager to get to his next task.

“There was a belly dancer in front of a mosque, there were naked statues where you can see their body details, and symbols of satanism,” Mican told me. He was describing the works featured in an exhibition at ArtIstanbul Feshane, a cultural center in Istanbul’s Eyup neighborhood. In Mican’s view, the show was disrespectful of Islam and Turkey, and an attempt at spreading LGBTQ “propaganda.” “The owners of the artwork and the organizer of the exhibition will be punished,” he said.

Titled “Starting from the Middle,” the exhibition featured a diverse set of works by 300 artists and was organized by the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, whose president is Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, a member of the CHP, the secular left-wing party that represents Turkey’s main opposition party. Pieces included photographs of the Gezi Park protests in 2013 against the government’s creeping authoritarianism; a video that explores a massacre of Alevi Kurds by the Turkish army in the 1930s; and a text accompanying an installation that talks about the artist's struggles as an LGBTQ person in Turkey.

Although the show had support from CHP-aligned public officials, other elements in Istanbul’s city government saw it differently. Last month, prosecutors in Istanbul launched an investigation into the organizers of the exhibition, which ended of its own volition in late September, on allegations of “fomenting enmity and hatred among the public or insulting them” under Article 216 of the Turkish Penal Code. The law has frequently been used to criminalize blasphemy or retaliate against critics of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

But the case against the art show didn’t exactly start with Turkish authorities. A few days after the opening, a headline in the state-aligned newspaper Sabah read: “Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality supports LGBT perversion! Outraged exhibition in Feshane: It should be closed immediately.”

The next day, Mican led a group protest outside the exhibition with people chanting, “We don't want perversion in our neighborhood.” ArtIstanbul Feshane is situated in the Eyup neighborhood of Istanbul, a symbolic area to Muslims in Turkey as it is home to the burial site of Abu Ayyub al-Ansari, a close companion of the Prophet Muhammad.

In early July, after they attended one of Mican’s speeches about the event, a group of men tried to break through a line of police officers in an effort to vandalize the space. Mican says he did not encourage the violence, but also said that if the exhibition had not been held in such a religious area, the reaction would have been more muted.

“The police struggled to hold the people when I was reading the statement, they had to get 10 times more security,” Mican said. “If they hadn’t done it in the Eyup neighborhood we wouldn’t see that much reaction, so many people wouldn’t even know about it. I didn’t encourage the people to do that, but the people were angry and they gave a reaction.”

And now prosecutors have launched their investigation, following a criminal complaint against the exhibition, filed by Mican’s organization. 

None of this came as a shock to the show’s curators or to the artists involved. “Every time we want to open an exhibition, especially in a conservative area, we open it with the fear of being attacked,” said Okyanus Cagri Camci, a transgender woman and interdisciplinary artist whose work was featured in the show.

For artists like Camci, the prosecution’s investigation is part of an increasingly familiar pattern, in which criticism from conservative groups and the state-aligned media are followed by legal repercussions. 

Figures like Mican appear to have increased their influence on prominent political leaders in Turkey, drawing them down a more conservative path than they walked in the past. Grappling with a steep economic downturn and public frustration with the government’s slow response to the devastating earthquakes that hit southeast Turkey in February, Erdogan and his allies have seized the opportunity to make the LGBTQ community a scapegoat, using similar language to a burgeoning global anti-LGBTQ rights movement.

This newer shade of Erdogan and his AKP party was on full display during presidential and parliamentary elections in May, when Erdogan ramped up attacks on the LGBTQ community to rally support among his right-wing and religiously conservative base. “The family institution of this nation is strong, there will be no LGBT people in this nation,” said Erdogan at a rally in April. Erdogan and his allies are also seeking to turn rhetoric into legislative changes, starting with an amendment to the constitution that would define marriage as solely between a man and woman. 

Suleyman Soylu, deputy leader of the AKP and a former interior minister, made the erroneous claim to a group of NGOs in April that the LGBTQ community "also includes the marriage of animals and humans.” He accused the community of being under the control of Europe and the U.S., who “want a single type of human model where they follow a single universal religion, are genderless, and no one is in the family structure.” The tone and messaging in these speeches echoed the language of a swelling global movement that claims Western liberals are staging an assault on traditional family structures by imposing homosexuality and transgenderism on societies across the world. This movement has anchors in Russia, Hungary and the U.S. and is gaining a foothold in countries around the world, including, it seems, in Turkey. Mican confirmed to me that his organization has connections with groups in Russia, Hungary and Serbia — another place where LGBTQ people are facing increased hostility.

It wasn’t always like this under Erdogan, who has been president of Turkey since 2014, and served as prime minister for more than a decade prior to that. Mican lamented that as recently as two years ago, Erdogan was unwilling to talk about LGBTQ issues in the same way as he is now.

Kubra Uzun, a singer and DJ who is non-binary, has observed the same evolution, albeit from a different vantage point. Life under Erdogan was not always as bad as it is now, they said. But Uzun told me that in recent years, they’ve felt increasingly unsafe. “If I’m not playing or if I’m not having anything outside to do, like if I’m not shopping, I don’t go out anymore,” they said. “I mostly stay at home and read and listen to music.”

When we met at their home in late September, there was a small group of friends sitting in their kitchen. One was a trans woman who Uzun was hosting after she fled her home city in part because she feared for her safety. The community refers to Uzun as a mother, but they do not like being called that. “I am non-binary and mothering feels binary to me,” they told me.

Lying on the sofa and puffing on a cigarette, Uzun recounted a “golden period” in Turkey in the early 2000s, when there were fewer restrictions. 

“It was like you were in London clubbing,” they said. “You can walk freely, you can wear whatever you want.” But those times are long gone.

Although the tides began to turn following an economic recession in 2009, it was after the Gezi Park protests of 2013 that people like Uzun saw a real shift. At that time, what began as a vocal rejection of plans to build a shopping mall in a public park in Istanbul’s central Taksim Square ultimately drew hundreds of thousands of Turkish people to take a public stand against what they saw as the AKP’s erosion of secularism in Turkey and the dismantling of key democratic institutions, namely press freedom. It became a seminal moment in deepening the divide between liberal secular Turks and Islamist conservative supporters of Erdogan. 

Three years later, Turkey witnessed a failed coup attempt that was carried out by military personnel, but which Erdogan has long insisted was orchestrated by the U.S.-based Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen. In the ensuing period, Erdogan launched a major clampdown on Turkish society, imprisoning thousands of critics of the government that he and his allies accused of being stooges of the West seeking to undermine Turkey. By 2020, nearly 100,000 people had been jailed pending trial for alleged links to the Gulen movement. From Kurds to followers of Gulen and now, increasingly, gay and trans people, Erdogan has framed a variety of groups as enemies of the state, allowing him to cast out critics while boosting his popularity among his political base. He has passed sweeping legislative and constitutional changes that curtail freedom of expression, cementing his hold on power.

Along the way, Mican and other leading conservative figures have pushed politicians to harden their stance on the issue. Prior to Istanbul’s Pride march in 2016, Mican told state officials he and his organization would intervene if the event went ahead. Mican was later fined for making threatening remarks, but the march was also banned by the Istanbul governor’s office after they cited security concerns and the need to protect public order.

For the ninth consecutive year, the Istanbul pride march was banned in June, with the AKP governor of Istanbul saying it posed a threat to family institutions. Police clad in riot gear detained 113 people who marched despite the restrictions.

The more Erdogan focuses on homosexuality and transgenderism, the more other parties have started putting anti-LGBTQ policies into their agendas. Mican himself underlined this point in our conversation. The Vatan Party, a nationalist secular party that has supported Erdogan, in the past used protection from the threat of terrorism as a central tenet of its platform. Now it has shifted to the so-called threat of the “LGBTQ agenda.”

Even the CHP and other opposition parties thus far have remained quiet on discrimination against the LGBTQ community, particularly around the election period, said Suay Ergin-Boulougouris, a program officer at Article 19, an international organization that promotes freedom of expression. When I asked Uzun about whether they would have felt better if the CHP had won instead of Erdogan, they responded, “Same shit, different color.”

Uzun fears that Turkey is turning into Russia, where the state frequently equates homosexuality with pedophilia and has passed a series of anti-LGBTQ laws over the past decade. Erdogan further solidified his position on gay and trans rights on the global stage in 2021, when he pulled Turkey out of the Istanbul Convention, an international treaty opposing violence against women, after religious conservative groups criticized the law, arguing that it was degrading family values and wrongly advocating for the rights of the LGBTQ community. The convention has come under attack from leaders in several Eastern European countries, who argue that the document’s definition of gender is a way to dismantle traditional distinctions between men and women and a way to “normalize” homosexuality.

Another state that has notably hit the brakes on accession to the convention is Hungary. The government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has also tried to push through a ban on the use of materials seen as promoting homosexuality and gender change at schools. The law is currently being challenged before the Court of Justice of the European Union, which interprets EU laws to make sure they are applied equally in every EU member state. 

Populist leaders have positioned the family as something sacrosanct and used the idea that it is being destroyed by Western liberals as a way into power, said Wendy Via, president of the U.S.-based Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.

Right-wing leaders in the U.S. and Europe have framed LGBTQ rights as an agenda, personifying the concept as an enemy entity that is taking over. But Via argues the real entity that is taking over is a vast, well-resourced network of organizations with anti-LGBTQ and anti-woman agendas.

In Turkey, that network consists of dozens of conservative NGOs, who on September 17 held a large rally called the “Big Family Gathering” in the Eminonu area of Istanbul, for which Mican was one of the key organizers.

At the gathering, conservatively dressed mothers and their children held signs that read “Stop Pedophilia” and milled about while speaker after speaker decried Western imperialism before a crowd estimated by organizers to number in the thousands. Part way through the rally, Alexander Dugin, the far-right Russian political philosopher with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, appeared on a large screen and gave the crowd a speech about the need to fight global liberalism. It is “the fight of all normal people,” he told the crowd, “to save the normal relations between sexes, to save the family, to save the dignity of the human being.”

At the end of the rally, sitting on a park bench as people bustled around us clearing away equipment, I spoke to two men in their 20s, Kayahan Cetin and Yunus Emre Ozgun. They lead Turkiye Genclik Birligi, a youth organization closely associated with the pro-Russia Vatan Party. Cetin spoke in Turkish and Ozgun helped interpret into English, sometimes chiming in himself.

The pair were proud to note their connections with Dugin and Putin’s United Russia party. Cetin and his group are associated with Vatan, but they also identify as Kemalists, a secular ideology that seeks to follow the principles of the Turkish Republic’s founder Kemal Ataturk. This means they may not always see eye to eye with the Islamist right who dominate the anti-LGBTQ movement in Turkey. But they share the common belief that LGBTQ rights present an existential threat to Turkish society and that they are an agenda being imposed by the West.

Cetin is trying to push legislation that would crack down on what they call “LGBTQ propaganda and institutions” and pointed to similar laws on the books in Russia, Hungary and China. Cetin says he has no problem with people’s individual “choice” to be gay, but wants parliament to place restrictions on organizations who are using their platforms to support LGBTQ rights through the media, including streaming platforms such as Netflix and Disney Plus. These kinds of cultural interventions are already underway — Turkey’s Radio and Television Supreme Council in July fined Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video and Mubi among other streaming platforms, accusing them of depicting homosexual relationships that are “contrary to social and cultural values and the Turkish family structure.”

With local elections in March 2024, the LGBTQ community fears Erdogan’s attacks on them will be amplified further. The government is seeking to implement laws that will ban content seen to promote LGBTQ identities in schools, a blow to younger gay and transgender people already struggling in the current environment. Last month the national education minister, Yusuf Tekin, said that authorities must fight homosexuality and that a new optional course called “The Family in Turkish Society” had been added to the school curriculum.

Two days after our first meeting, I met Uzun again at a club in the heart of Istanbul’s tourist district. There was a power cut soon after I arrived. When the lights came back on again, Uzun was quick to get back on the dancefloor. The room filled with a red glow as queer Istanbulites danced freely, the jubilant scene in stark contrast to the seismic shifts occurring beyond the walls beaded in sweat.

At the end of the night I had to wait my turn to say goodbye to Uzun. I asked them one final question about why Istanbul’s queer scene seemed to be thriving despite all the restrictions and threats against it. Uzun shouted over the music, “Text me your question.” They texted me their response the next morning: “RESISTANCE.”

But this isn’t the whole story. It is hard to resist when you fear being attacked on any street corner. Uzun told me that over the course of the past year, more than 50 of their friends had left Turkey. And they may be next. If their visa application is accepted, Uzun will leave for London.

The post How the global anti-LGBTQ movement found a home in Turkey appeared first on Coda Story.

The series was set to air on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Turkish Republic, October 29, when Ataturk became president. Instead, Disney said that the show will be released as two films: one to be shown on the Turkish free television network Fox, which Disney owns, and another to be released in theaters at a later date.

Turkish media and government officials blamed the Disney+ cancellation on Armenian lobby groups in the U.S., encouraging a popular backlash in Turkey against the company. Organizations such as the Armenian National Committee of America have expressed concerns that the series would gloss over Ataturk’s purported role in the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman soldiers in 1915 — actions that are widely recognized as a genocide, including by U.S. President Joe Biden.

The clash between the guardians of Ataturk’s historical memory and Disney — which was founded 13 days before Ataturk became president in 1923 — underscores a complex challenge for U.S. entertainment giants. They have to figure out how to produce content for global markets while some governments look to enforce their own views of history. 

In Turkey, Ataturk stands as a singular figure uniting Turkey. His image adorns walls everywhere, from barbershops to offices to fancy hotels. Prominent Turkish artists, journalists and politicians announced they would cancel their Disney+ subscriptions. Singer-songwriter Mustafa Sandal wrote to his one million Twitter followers: “I canceled it. Now it's your turn! No Atatürk, no us!”

“I suspect that any film, even the most hagiographic film of Ataturk, would end up being dredged over the coals by the Turkish media simply because it could never be hagiographic enough,” said Howard Eissenstat, a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute and an associate professor of history at St. Lawrence University.

When the journalist Can Dundar made a documentary in 2008 depicting Ataturk as a heavy drinker with a fear of the dark, two university professors filed a formal complaint with an Istanbul court requesting an investigation into Dundar for “eroding Ataturk’s respectability.” Publicly insulting Ataturk in Turkey is a crime. Turkey’s top mobile telephone operator, Turkcell, canceled its sponsorship of the film.

Ebubekir Sahin, the chairman of the Radio and Television Supreme Council, a state agency in charge of regulating broadcasting that opened an investigation into Disney, wrote on Twitter that Ataturk is Turkey’s “most important social value.”

Ataturk is widely revered in Turkey, but not always for the same reasons. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has sought to make Turkey a more religious and conservative society, has been selective about Ataturk’s legacy, downplaying his militant secularization of the country while praising his consolidation of the state and his fight against Western colonization in the Islamic world, according to Eissenstat.

There is a long history of U.S. media productions about Turkish history erupting into explosive debates, attacked by the Armenian diaspora or by Turks, according to Nicholas Danforth, a senior non-resident fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy.

In the 1930s, a film about the Armenian genocide was canceled after Turkey applied pressure on the U.S. State Department and MGM Studios, the maker of the movie. In 2002, the director of “Ararat,” a film about the Armenian genocide, was targeted with threats that Armenians in Turkey would be harmed as a reprisal for making his film.

The battle over cinematic portrayals of Turkey’s role in the Armenian genocide played out most prominently in 2016, when a film called “The Promise” was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film was only shown to a handful of attendees, but it received tens of thousands of one star ratings on IMDb, the film rating platform, followed by tens of thousands of ten star ratings, as Turkish nationalists and pro-Armenian groups flocked to the site to control the narrative.

No serious academics are willing to give genocide denial the time of day anymore, says Danforth. But, he said, there is frustration among historians about attempts to place all the blame at Ataturk’s feet. “There's plenty to criticize about Ataturk, but for very specific historical reasons, making him a stand in for all the crimes of Turkish nationalism is misleading as well,” Danforth said.

This is not the first time Disney has been caught between a state and a diaspora over accusations of whitewashing a genocide. Its remake of Mulan in 2020 was subjected to a boycott because it was filmed in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, where China is committing what the U.S. Department of State and parliaments in the U.K. and Canadia recognize as a genocide against the Uyghur people. In the credits, the movie gives special thanks to multiple Chinese government entities in the region, including to the public security bureau in the city of Turpan where several re-education camps have been identified.

Warner Bros’ blockbuster film “Barbie” caused a stir because, in one scene, Barbie is seen standing in front of a child-like drawing of a map of the world. Next to what is supposed to be China is a dashed line that the Vietnamese government says is a representation of the nine-dash line, a maritime boundary that China claims marks its ownership of the South China Sea. The film was banned in Vietnam as a result. Meanwhile, the same map also depicts England as bordering Asia.

The geopolitical rivalry between the U.S. and China has divided the executive ranks of Hollywood entertainment companies, upended marketing plans and rattled prop masters. In the 2019 trailer for “Top Gun: Maverick,” the Taiwanese and Japanese flags were removed from Tom Cruise’s iconic bomber jacket, even though they had appeared in the original 1980s film. Fans complained. The flags were reinstated. The movie was banned in China.

The Chinese government has been ramping up pressure on the American film industry since the late 1990s, according to Chris Fenton, a film executive and former president of DMG Entertainment, a global media company headquartered in Beijing. As China’s market leverage grows, the Chinese government has become more forceful in demanding compliance with its views.

The Pentagon has expressed alarm. In July 2023, it announced that it will not share bases, ships and equipment with productions that allow the Chinese state to censor content in a way that advances China’s national interests.

Yet despite a desire behind closed doors to push back, Fenton said there is no coordinated effort within the film industry to counter China’s efforts to control content. 

Conservatives in the U.S., frustrated by the Barbie movie map, which they see as legitimizing China’s position in the South China Sea, have attacked the film for undermining their values. Political commentator Ben Sharpiro began a scathing 40-minute review of the film by setting fire to Barbie dolls. In late June 2023, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis dominated the U.S. national news cycle when he accused Disney of putting “sexualized content” in its programming for children.

“The notion that Disney is in any way sexualizing children is preposterous and inaccurate,” Disney’s CEO Bob Iger responded, adding, “The last thing that I want for the company is for the company to be drawn into any culture wars.”

Disney+ was launched in Turkey last year as part of a global expansion into 42 new countries. Losing access to Turkey, with its population of over 85 million people, would be a blow to those plans. Disney+ has an estimated 50,000 subscribers in Turkey, compared to Netflix’s estimated 2.6 million, according to FlixPatrol.

Turkey is moving away from the West, disentangling itself from decades of alliance structures and huge defense contracts, according to Selim Koru, a fellow in the Eurasia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

“This is an American entertainment company pretending like these things are more or less as they were maybe 20 years ago,” he told me. “That a founding father of this deeply divided country is sort of an easy or manageable subject for a historical drama produced by a foreign company.”

The post Echoing its battles in Florida, Disney circles a Turkish maelstrom appeared first on Coda Story.

The European Centre for Media Freedom also came out in support of the Sabah journalists, condemning the detention and demanding that press freedom be upheld. But Turkey itself is a leading jailer of journalists, ranked 165th out of 180 countries in the 2023 World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders. And, according to German prosecutors, Erel and Albay were under investigation for the “dangerous” dissemination of other journalists’ personal data.

German authorities have legitimate concerns about the safety of Turkish journalists living in exile. In July 2021, Erk Acarer, a Turkish columnist, was beaten up outside his home in Berlin. Later that month, German authorities began investigating Turkish nationalist organized crime groups operating in Europe after the police found a hit list of 55 journalists and activists who had fled Turkey.

In September 2022, Sabah published information that revealed the location of Cevheri Guven’s home. It appears likely — though it has not been confirmed by German officials — that this was the reason for the arrests of Erel and Albay. Guven himself had been arrested in Turkey in 2015 and sentenced to over 22 years in prison. He was the editor of a news magazine that had published a cover criticizing Erdogan. Out on bail before his trial, Guven wrote that he gave his “life savings” to a smuggler to get him and his family out of Turkey. He now lives in Germany.

The ability of states such as Germany and Sweden to protect refugees, whether they are fleeing Turkey, China, Russia or Iran, has waned, as authoritarian leaders have become more brazen in using technology to stalk, bully, assault, kidnap and even kill dissidents. The Turkish state’s appetite for targeting critical voices abroad, especially those of journalists, has been growing for some time. As Erdogan’s government clamped down on media freedom at home, it has co-opted journalists working at government-friendly news outlets into becoming tools of cross-border repression. This has allowed the state to reach outside Turkey’s borders to intimidate journalists and dissidents who have sought refuge in Western Europe and North America.

Since last year, Sabah has revealed details about the locations of several Turkish journalists in exile. In October 2022, it published the address and photographs of exiled journalist Abdullah Bozkurt. The report included details about where he shopped. This was just a month after I met Bozkurt at a cafe in the Swedish capital, Stockholm, where he now lives. Bozkurt told me that he is constantly harassed online by pro-government trolls and because of the large Turkish immigrant population in Sweden, many of whom are Erdogan supporters, has been forced into isolation. It has had, he said, an adverse impact on his children’s quality of life.

Two years before Bozkurt’s personal information was leaked, in June 2020, Cem Kukuc, a presenter on the Turkish channel TGRT Haber, said of Bozkurt and other critical journalists: “Where they live is known, including their addresses abroad. Let’s see what happens if several of them get exterminated.” Just three months after that broadcast, Bozkurt was attacked in Stockholm by unidentified men who dragged him to the ground and kicked him for several minutes. “I think this attack was targeted,” Bozkurt told the Committee to Protect Journalists, “and is part of an intimidation campaign against exiled Turkish journalists with the clear message that we should stop speaking up against the Turkish government.” Bozkurt deleted his address and vehicle and contact information from the Swedish government’s registration system after the 2020 attack, but both Sabah and A Haber, another pro-government media outlet, still published his address last year.

Sabah and A Haber are both owned by the sprawling Turkuvaz Media Group. It is “one of the monopolistic hubs for pro-government outlets,” said Zeyno Ustun, an assistant professor of sociology and digital media and film at St. Lawrence University in the U.S. The group’s chief executive is Serhat Albayrak, the brother of a former government minister, Berat Albarak, who is also Erdogan’s son-in-law.

Turkuvaz says that its newspapers have a collective readership of 1.6 million. In April, a month before Turkey’s tense general election, in which Erdogan managed to secure his third term as president, Turkuvaz’s channel ATV was the most watched in the country.

A few days before the second round of the presidential election, in late May, I met Orhan Sali, the head of news at the English-language broadcaster A News and the head of the foreign news desk at A Haber. To enter Turkuvaz’s tall, glass-paneled headquarters on the outskirts of Istanbul, I had to pass through three security barriers. An assistant took me to Sali’s spacious office on the third floor. Sali, who was born in Greece, is small with an incongruously graying beard on his round, youthful face. He wore a crisp, white shirt. On a shelf near Sali’s desk sit a couple of awards, including at least one for “independent journalism,” he told me.

In the same breath, Sali also said, “We are pro-Erdogan, we are not hiding it.” He acknowledged that there is a risk in publishing the names of journalists critical of the Turkish government but said it was not unusual. “If you read the British tabloid newspapers,” he told me, “you will find tons of pictures, tons of addresses.” 

This is not entirely accurate, according to Richard Danbury, who teaches journalism at the City University in London. “It is not true,” he told me, “that even tabloids as a matter of course publish people’s addresses and photos of people’s houses, particularly if they have been at risk of being attacked.”

But Sali was unconcerned. He approached a panel of screens covering the wall. Some of these channels, he said, are hardline and totally supportive of Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the main opposition candidate in Turkey’s recent election. “All of them,” he told me, “are terrorists.”

In the lead up to the presidential election, Turkuvaz outlets such as A News and A Haber gave Kilicdaroglu little to no coverage. Erdogan, meanwhile, received extensive coverage, according to Reporters Without Borders. One pro-government channel, TRT Haber, gave Erdogan 32 hours of airtime compared to just 30 minutes for Kilicdaroglu.

Sali, who seems to have a penchant for deflecting criticism of Turkuvaz’s journalism by comparing it to that of the British press, told me he sees no problem with this lack of balance. “The BBC,” he said, “is supporting the ruler. Who is the ruler? The king. You cannot say anything against the king, can you?”

At least seven journalists who have had their addresses published by Turkuvaz outlets are alleged by Erdogan’s government to be followers of the Islamic cleric Fetullah Gulen, who is suspected of having orchestrated a failed coup against Erdogan in 2016. Since the coup attempt, Erdogan’s government has imprisoned hundreds of critics they refer to as “FETO terrorists,” a derogatory reference to Gulen supporters. Cevheri Guven — the editor whose address in Germany was published in Sabah in September 2022 — is often described in pro-government media as the Joseph Goebbels of FETO, a reference to the Nazi propagandist.

“The 2016 coup had a major effect on the media landscape in Turkey,” said Joseph Fitsanakis, a professor of intelligence and security studies at Coastal Carolina University. “At that point,” he told me, “Erdogan made a conscious decision, a consistent effort to pretty much wipe out any non-AKP voices from the mainstream media landscape.” The AKP, or the Justice and Development Party, was co-founded by Erdogan in 2001.

In October 2022, the Turkish parliament passed sweeping legislation curtailing free speech, including implementing a vaguely worded law that effectively leaves anyone accused of spreading false information about Turkey’s domestic and foreign security facing three years in prison.

Before Erdogan’s rise to power, Turkey did not enjoy total media freedom, said Ustun, the media professor at St. Lawrence University. But, she told me, during his 21 years in politics, “there has been a gradual demise of the media freedom landscape.” Following the widespread protests in 2013, referred to as the Gezi Park protests, and the 2016 coup attempt, “efforts to control the mainstream media as well as the internet have intensified,” she added. The overwhelming majority of mainstream media outlets are now under the control of Erdogan and his allies.

Henri Barkey, a professor at Lehigh University and an adjunct senior fellow at the Council for Foreign Relations, told me that Erdogan has “muscled the press financially” by channeling advertising revenues to pro-government outlets such as those owned by the Turkuvaz Media Group. Erdogan, Barky says, has also weaponized the law. “They use the judicial system to punish the opposition press for whatever reason,” he told me. “You look left and you were meant to look right, and in Turkey today that is enough.”

The media has, for years now, been used as a tool of transnational repression, says Fitsanakis. In 2020, for instance, the U.K. expelled three Chinese spies who had been posing as journalists. But, Fitsanakis adds, since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, intelligence services in Europe and North America, fueled by a heightened awareness of the threat emanating from Moscow, have been collaborating more closely to remove Russian spies from within their borders. 

The actions of other diplomatic missions too are being more closely monitored. Turkey, one of the most prolific perpetrators of transnational repression, according to Freedom House, has found itself a target of Western surveillance, making it harder for the state to place intelligence operatives inside embassies. In lieu of this traditional avenue for embedding intelligence sources in foreign countries, Fitsanakis believes, governments are turning in greater numbers toward friendly journalists. “It’s the perfect cover,” Fitsanakis told me. “You have access to influential people, and you get to ask a lot of questions without seeming strange.”

Erdogan’s re-election, experts fear, could mean he will further clamp down on democratic freedoms. Barkey believes there will be a brain drain as more intellectuals and critics leave Turkey for more congenial shores. But the evidence suggests that an emboldened Erdogan can still reach them.

“We might see a lot more emphasis on silencing any kind of opposition to Erdogan in the coming years,” Fitsanakis told me. “And because much of the opposition to Erdogan is now coming from Turks abroad, that fight is going to transfer to European soil.”

The post Turkey uses journalists to silence critics in exile appeared first on Coda Story.

Hundreds of Uyghurs fled China in 2014, as the Chinese authorities launched a crackdown on the Muslim-majority ethnic group native to the northwest region of Xinjiang. The aim, the government said, was to stamp out extremism and separatist movements in the region. The authorities called it the “strike hard campaign against violent terrorism” and created a program of repression to closely monitor, surveil and control the Uyghur population.

The authorities bulldozed mosques, saw any expression of religion as extremist and confiscated Qurans. By 2018, as many as one million Uyghurs had been sent to so-called “re-education” camps. Across the region, an extensive high-tech system of surveillance was rolled out to monitor every movement of the Uyghur population. This remains the case to this day, with the Chinese police in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, reportedly requiring residents to download a mobile app which enables them to monitor phones. 

Back in 2014, Uyghurs seeking to flee the burgeoning crackdown were forced to take a notoriously dangerous route, known as the “smugglers’ road,” through Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand into Malaysia — from there, they could reach Turkey. Though Malaysia had previously deported some Uyghur Muslims to China, in 2018, a Malaysian court released 11 Uyghurs on human rights grounds and allowed them safe passage to Turkey. By September 2020, despite Chinese anger, Malaysia declared it would not extradite Uyghurs seeking refuge in a third country. 

But before they could make it to Malaysia, many Uyghurs were detained by the immigration authorities in Thailand and returned to China. Human rights groups condemned the deportations, saying that Uyghurs returned to China “disappear into a black hole” and face persecution and torture upon their return. 

Hashim Mohammed, 26, was 16 when he left China. He spent three years in detention in Thailand before making a dramatic escape. He now lives in Turkey — but thoughts of his fellow inmates, who remain in Thai detention, are with him every day. This is his account of how he made it out of China through the smugglers’ road. 

Hashim’s Story 

On New Year’s Day, in 2019, I was released from immigration detention in Istanbul. It was late evening — around 10 p.m. It was the first time I had walked free in five years. And it was the end of my long journey from China’s Uyghur region, which I ran away from in 2014. 

It started back in the city of Urumqi in Xinjiang, 10 years ago now. I was 16 years old and had recently begun boxing at my local gym. In the evenings, I started to spend some time reciting and reading the Quran. The local Chinese authorities were beginning their mass crackdown on Uyghurs in the name of combating terrorist activity. Any display of religious devotion was deemed suspicious. 

The local police considered my boxing gym to be a sinister and dangerous place. They kept asking us what we were training for. They thought we were planning something. They started arresting some of the students and coaches at the gym. Police visited my house and went through all my possessions. They couldn’t find anything.

After some time, the gym closed — like lots of similar gyms all over the Uyghur region. People around me were being arrested, seemingly for no good reason. I realized I couldn't live the way I wanted in my hometown, so I decided to leave. 

At that time, thousands of Uyghurs were doing the same thing. I had heard of a smugglers’ route out of China, through Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and eventually to Malaysia. From there, I’d be able to fly to Turkey and start a new life. We called it the “illegal way.” It’s very quick once you leave China, it only takes seven days to get to Malaysia. 

At the border leaving China, we met with the smugglers who would get us out. They stuffed around 12 of us into a regular car, all of us sitting on top of each other. I was traveling alone, I didn’t know anyone else in the car. 

I remember one guy, Muhammad, who I met in the car for the first time. He was from the same area as me. He was with his wife and two kids and seemed friendly. 

The road was terrifying. There was a pit of anxiety in my stomach as the smugglers drove through the mountainous jungle at night at breakneck speed. I watched the speedometer needle always hovering above 100 kmph (about 60 mph), and I couldn’t help thinking about how many people were in the car. We heard about another group, crossing the border into Cambodia in a boat, who nearly drowned. After just seven days, we reached Thailand and the border with Malaysia. We sat in the jungle, trying to decide what to do — we could try climbing the border fence. 

But we also saw a rumor on WhatsApp that if you handed yourself in to the Thai border police, they would let you cross the border to Malaysia and fly onward to Turkey within 15 days. People on the app were saying some Uyghurs had already managed it. At this point, we’d been sleeping outside, in the jungle, for days, and we believed it. We handed ourselves in, and the police took a group of us to a local immigration detention center in the Thai jungle. 

Fifteen days slipped by, and we began to realize that we’d made a terrible mistake. With every day that passed, our hope that we would get to Turkey slipped away a little further. No one came to help us. We were worried that the Thai authorities would send us back to China.  

I was put in a dark cell with 12 guys — all Uyghurs like me, all trying to escape China. Throughout our time in jail, we lived under the constant threat of being deported back to China. We were terrified of that prospect. We tried many times to escape.

I never imagined that I would stay there for three years and eight months, from the ages of 16 to 19. I used to dream about what life would be like if I was free. I thought about simply walking down the street and could hardly imagine it. 

There were no windows in the cell, just a little vent at the very top of the room. We used to take turns climbing up, using a rope made out of plastic bags, just to look through the vent. Through the grill, we could see that Thailand was very beautiful. It was so lush. We had never seen such a beautiful, green place. Day and night, we climbed up the rope to peer out through the vent. 

We knew that the detention center we were in was very close to the Thai border. One guy who I shared the cell with figured out something about the place we were in. The walls, he said, in this building built for the heat were actually very thin.

We managed to get hold of two tools. A spoon and an old nail. 

We began, painstakingly, to gouge a hole in the wall of the bathroom block. We took turns. Day and night, we had a rota and quietly scraped away at the wall, making a hole just big enough for a man to fit through. There was a camera in the cell, and the guards checked on us frequently. But they didn’t check the bathroom — and the camera couldn’t see into the bathroom area, either. 

We all got calluses and cuts on our hands from using these flimsy tools to try to dig through the wall. We each pulled 30-minute shifts. To the guards watching the cameras, it looked like we were just taking showers. 

The guys in the cell next door to ours were working on a hole of their own. We planned to coordinate our breakout at the same time, at 2 a.m. on a Sunday. 

We dug through as much of the wall as we could, without breaking through to the other side until the last moment. There was just a thin layer of plaster between us and the outside world. We drew numbers to decide who would be the first to climb out. Out of 12 people, I drew the number four. A good number, all things considered. My friend Muhammad, who I met on the journey to Thailand, pulled number nine. Not so good.

That Sunday, we all pretended to go to sleep. With the guards checking on us every few hours, we lay there with our eyes shut and our minds racing, thinking about what we were about to do.

Two a.m. rolled around. Quietly, carefully, we removed the last piece of the wall, pulling it inward without a noise. The first, second and third man slipped through the hole, jumped down and ran out of the compound. Then it was my turn. I clambered through the hole, jumped over the barbed wire below me and ran.

The guys in the next cell had not prepared things as well as us. They still had a thick layer of cement to break through. They ripped the basin off the bathroom wall and used it to smash through the last layer. It made an awful sound. The guards came running. Six more guys got out after me, but two didn’t make it. One of them was Muhammad. 

The detention center we were in wasn’t very high security. The gate into the complex had been left unlocked. We sprinted out of it, barefoot, in just our shorts and t-shirts, and ran into the jungle on the other side of the road, where we all scattered. 

I hid out for eight days in the jungle as the guards and the local police tracked us through the trees. I had saved some food from my prison rations and drank the water that dripped off the leaves in the humidity.

It’s impossible to move through the undergrowth without making a lot of noise — so when the police got close, we had to just stay dead still and hope they wouldn’t find us. At one point, we were completely surrounded by the police and could hear their voices and their dogs barking and see their flashlights through the trees. It was terrifying.

Finally, after days of walking and hiding in the undergrowth, we made it to Thailand’s border with Malaysia. It’s a tall fence, topped with barbed wire. I managed to climb it and jump over — but the guy I was with couldn’t make it. He was later caught and sent back to detention.

In total, there were 20 of us who had managed to break out of the Thai jail. Eleven made it to Malaysia. The others were caught and are still in the detention center in Thailand. 

After spending another year in detention in Malaysia, I was finally able to leave for Turkey. After two months in Turkish immigration detention, I walked free. I had spent my best years — from the age of 16 until 21 — in a cell. I feel such sorrow when I think of the others who didn’t make it. It’s a helpless feeling, knowing they’re still in there, living under the threat of being sent back to China. 

Now I have a good life in Istanbul. Every morning, I go to the boxing gym. I’d like to get married and start my own family here. But half of me lives in my home region, and my dream is to one day go back to my home country.

Muhammad, my friend who I met on the smuggler’s road, is still in the Thai jail. He’s such an open and friendly person, and he was like my older brother inside. When the hope drained out of me and I broke down, he always reassured me and tried to calm me down. He would tell me stories about the history of Islam and the history of the Uyghur people. I’ll always be grateful to him for that. I think about him, and the other Uyghurs still trapped in Thailand, all the time.

The post Escaping China with a spoon and a rusty nail appeared first on Coda Story.

After the February earthquakes that destroyed so much of the region, Syrian refugees became the targets of resentment, hate speech and violence. Politicians were quick to seize upon the public mood. Exploiting the anger directed at refugees became a key tactic for candidates in tense, often ugly campaigns. Turkey will vote in the first round of the presidential election on May 14, and, for the first time in two decades, it appears that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan could lose his hold on power. 

In Antakya, three months after the earthquakes, hollowed-out homes with cracked walls hang precariously over a sea of rubble, trinkets and clothing. In Hatay province alone, over 23,000 people died in the earthquakes. Many in the area still live in camps. The luckier ones live in homes made out of shipping containers provided by the state. As Turkey faces repair bills totaling tens of billions of dollars, container homes — indeed, whole container cities — will be required as construction gets underway.  

Across the region most affected by the earthquakes, Syrian refugees are still living in makeshift tent colonies. NGO workers and Syrians I spoke to said they had been pushed out of official, state-run campsites by Turkish citizens and even the local authorities.

In April, Amnesty International accused the Turkish police of beating and torturing alleged looters in Antakya and reported that Syrians were targets of xenophobic abuse by Turkish officials.

Mouna, a Syrian refugee in Antakya whose home was destroyed in the earthquakes, told me she’d been forced to leave a state-run camp by the Turkish residents. She now lives in a tent she has set up beside the ruins of her former home. Resourcefully, Mouna has built an extension to her tent that contains a kitchen and a toilet. A washing machine and a fridge are powered by electricity rerouted from a nearby power supply. Her neighbors are all Syrian refugees who go in and out of the crumbling buildings around them to retrieve possessions to put in their tents. 

A 46-year-old single mother of two sons, Mouna left Syria in 2012, during the early phase of the Syrian civil war. She has been slowly building a life in Turkey. Her job in a dessert factory paid enough for her to afford rent and keep her family safe. 

After the earthquakes struck in February 2023, Mouna and her sons were housed in an official camp but were soon driven out by Turkish people who resented having to share scarce facilities with refugees. She says Syrians were bullied and told that they could not use the toilets. A little girl, Mouna says, hit her and told her that “Syrians should go home.” The authorities did little to help. Mouna and her neighbors rely on a Syrian NGO for water and food.

Syrian refugees in Turkey are “caught between two earthquakes,” says Murat Erdogan, a professor at Ankara University. “One is the physical earthquake,” Erdogan (no relation to the Turkish president) told me, “and the other is a political earthquake.” Even before the disaster, he adds, “social cohesion was not easy because of the number of the refugees.” There are over 3.5 million registered Syrian refugees in Turkey, and for nearly a decade Turkey has hosted more refugees than any other country in the world. 

Unpublished data Erdogan collected in January 2023 for the “Syrian Barometer,” an annual survey he conducts, showed that 28.5% of Turks see Syrians as the number one problem in Turkey, an increase of 3% from the year before.

But now, Erdogan believes, the earthquakes have cemented in people’s minds the image of Syrians as criminals and a drain on public services.

Throughout Antakya, Syrians living in camps dotted around the city told me stories that echoed Mouna’s experience of discrimination. One woman, heavily pregnant, was hit so hard in the stomach by a group of Turkish men that she lost her baby. Another woman told me her son was beaten by military officers who accused him of stealing. She showed me photos on her phone of a child’s mangled and bruised limbs.

But there are also many stories of Turks and Syrians helping one another to deal with the aftermath of the earthquakes. Mouna told me she knew Turkish people who remained kind and supportive. But the rise in anti-Syrian sentiment is evident and impossible to ignore.

A Turkish man I met in Hatay province boasted that he had shot a looter in the leg. He suspected the man was Syrian. “How could you tell?” I asked. “From his mustache,” the man replied.

The earthquakes have caused a massive spike in anti-Syrian hate speech online, said Dilan Tasmedir, who runs Medya ve Goc Dernegi, an organization that monitors rhetoric about migrants in the Turkish media. Slogans like “We don’t want Syrians” and “No longer welcome” trended on Twitter. The comedian Sahan Gokbakar wrote to his 3.7 million followers on the platform: “Health, shelter and all our material resources should be used only for our own people, not for foreigners.” While some criticized the comment for its divisiveness, the tweet racked up more than 280,000 likes.

When protests against the regime of Bashar Al-Assad in Syria erupted into a civil war in 2011, millions fled the country. Turkey’s tiny refugee population mushroomed as the Turkish president welcomed Syrians into the country as guests. “When a people is persecuted,” Erdogan declared, “especially people that are our relatives, our brothers, and with whom we share a 910 km border, we absolutely cannot pretend nothing is happening and turn our backs.”

When Erdogan allowed Syrians to seek refuge in Turkey, he was breaking with a long nativist tradition in his country of not accepting high numbers of refugees. But he also now had a powerful bargaining chip in negotiations with Europe.

In 2016, a year after Europe faced its largest migrant crisis since World War II, the European Union signed a deal with Turkey in which the country received six billion euros to help with improving conditions for refugees. Turkish nationals were granted visa-free travel to Europe, and, in return, Ankara agreed to prevent refugees from leaving Turkey illegally for Greece and to take back refugees who had left Turkey illegally and been turned away at EU borders. The aim was for the EU to process the asylum requests of Syrian refugees while they awaited a decision in Turkey instead of trying to cross illegally into Greece. But the EU was slow to hold up its end of the bargain, keeping the flow of immigrants granted entry into European countries to a trickle. 

Erdogan temporarily reneged on the deal in 2020, letting migrants pass through Turkey to Greece. He said that the EU was providing inadequate support. By 2021, about 28,000 Syrians had been resettled in Europe, well below the maximum threshold of 72,000 outlined in the original agreement.

The EU deal prompted a shift in attitudes inside Turkey, as it dawned on many Turks that their Syrian “guests” were in fact not there temporarily, but permanently, said Tasmedir of Medya ve Goc Dernegi. More than 200,000 Syrians have been granted citizenship in Turkey since 2011. And many will vote for the first time during the May 14 general election. Opposition groups claim that Erdogan granted these Syrians citizenship in an attempt to expand his own electoral base.

Erdogan could use all the extra votes he can get. Public frustration over Turkey’s economic crisis, botched earthquake relief efforts and endemic corruption have all weakened Erdogan’s appeal to the point that defeat in the first round seems like a distinct possibility. The pressure of the election on both the government and opposition parties is extremely high, and the hot button topic of much of the campaigning has been the nationwide hostility toward Syrian refugees.

Regardless of political ideology, Turkish political parties are now promising to send refugees back to Syria. Kemal Kilicdaroglu, a 74-year-old economist and social democratic politician, is Erdogan’s main contender for the presidency. He’s promised to “fulfill people’s longing for democracy,” repair strained relations with the West and unseat Erdogan. He’s also said that returning Syrians to Syria within two years is one of his top goals. Kilicdaroglu’s party,​​ the Republican People’s Party, is the largest in a coalition of opposition parties called the National Alliance. While Kilicdaroglu has a lead on Erdogan in most polls, the results of the first round of voting are expected to be close.

Then there’s the Victory Party, a far-right, anti-immigrant party formed in 2021, with only one representative currently in the Turkish parliament. But, Ankara University professor Murat Erdogan told me, it has had a “profound effect” on political discourse.

Last month, Umit Ozdag, the leader of the Victory Party and its sole representative, tweeted a video of a group of people he implied were Syrians. He depicted them as Arab invaders who, he said, would transport the “Middle East's understanding of religion, culture of violence, humiliation of women, rape of children, rape of boys, drugs” to Turkey. Ozdag’s central policy proposal is to expel all Syrians from Turkey within one year.

In January, the Victory Party began its “Bus to Damascus” fundraising campaign, in which it asked supporters to name people they wanted returned to Syria and to provide donations for bus tickets. As people across the region sought shelter just days after the earthquakes hit in February, Ozdag began accusing Syrians of looting and called for the police and soldiers to shoot looters on sight. In one instance, he shared a video on Twitter of a live news broadcast which he claimed showed a Syrian man stealing a phone during rescue operations. 

Ozdag later admitted he was wrong but refused to apologize, even after it emerged that the man was a Turkish volunteer helping with the search-and-rescue operations. One Turkish rescue worker became so frustrated with Ozdag’s divisive rhetoric that he confronted him on camera. “We, whether Muslim or Christian, are fed up with hearing this sort of talk,” the man told Ozdag.

In Europe and the United States, the question of how to deal with refugees has been highly polarizing, with voters’ views on migration often correlating with where they might be placed on the political spectrum. In the U.K., for example, voters on the left tend to be less hardline on immigration than voters on the right. But in Turkey, the desire to send Syrians back is now the status quo, receiving widespread support from an estimated 85% of voters. In some cases, I found that voters on the left express even more hostility toward refugees than those on the right.

At a May 6 rally held by Kilicdaroglu’s party, I spoke with several younger supporters of the social democratic candidate who saw Arab migrants as an existential threat to liberal secular values. Nida Koksaldi, a 21-year-old architecture student, told me she supports the Republican People’s Party because she supports women's rights, animal rights and LGBTQ rights. Had I met Koksaldi in California, I might have expected her to have included refugees in that list. But she agrees with Kilicdaroglu’s proposed policy of expelling Syrians. They are violent, she said of migrants generally, bad for Turkish society and bad for women’s rights. “They even rape us,” she told me. 

Friedrich Puttmann, a doctoral researcher at the London School of Economics, believes that much of the resentment toward Syrians is rooted in Turkey’s own struggle for its identity. The Republican People’s Party was the party of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic who espoused a philosophy of secularism and encouraged Turks to look to the West as a model. Kemalists, who support Ataturk’s sweeping reforms, tend to be more liberal and firmly support women’s rights. Historically, voters who support the party have feared cultural influence from the Arab world, which is often painted by Kemalist politicians as uniformly conservative and patriarchal. 

Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party is more aligned with religiously conservative voters, and therefore, according to Puttmann, has historically been more closely linked with Arab culture. Prior to the Syrian civil war, in the early years of Erdogan’s leadership, the country had already become more economically tied to Arab states. So when hundreds of thousands of Syrians entered Turkey as refugees, supporters of the Republican People’s Party were already angry at what they saw as the “Arabization'' of Turkey.

Over time, as more Syrians have come to the country, voters in both blocks have become increasingly hostile toward Syrians. Supporters of Erdogan’s party, torn between their duty toward fellow Muslims and their resentment over cultural differences and the economic impact of migration, have begun reframing Syrians as bad Muslims. 

More secular Turkish people see the presence of Syrian refugees in Turkey as evidence of a cultural shift that has occurred under the Justice and Development Party, with Turkey becoming a more conservative, religious and Arabicized country. They see Syrians as part of a system that has eroded Turkey’s secular, liberal identity, Puttmann says. This perception seems to ignore the fact that many Syrians are also secular and liberal.

In an attempt to match the opposition’s rhetoric on returning Syrian refugees to Syria and in the face of mounting public pressure, Erdogan’s government has shifted its policies. Last year, Erdogan announced a plan to send up to a million refugees back to Syria, though the country is still at war. There have been reports that the Assad regime has tortured and disappeared refugees who returned to the country. Reports also emerged last year of Syrians being arrested and forced into northern Syria at gunpoint by Turkish officials. More recently, Erdogan has begun trying to negotiate with the Assad regime to reach a deal that would facilitate the return of Syrian refugees. Assad’s precondition for any settlement is that Turkey withdraw its troops from the parts of northern Syria that it has controlled since 2016 following successive military operations aimed at limiting Kurdish control of the region.

Kilicdaroglu says he will negotiate with Assad and is widely seen as a more appealing negotiating partner for the isolated dictator. Kilicdaroglu has also said he will withdraw Turkish troops from northern Syria, secure his country's border and repatriate Syrians — as long as Turkey’s security requirements in northern Syria are met.

Back in Antakya, the election feels like a battle fought in a distant land. Political posters with gleaming candidates are the only new and shiny objects in an empty, dust-covered city. Most Syrians living in the camps are too focused on surviving from one day to the next to concern themselves with elections they can do little to influence.

More than a decade after the first Syrians fled the civil war and arrived in Turkey, it is hard to find hope among the refugees in Antakya. What future they might have had, they say, has disappeared with the earthquakes.

Mouna told me she brought her kids to Turkey so that they could have a better future than in Syria. Now she fears they have none in a country that doesn’t want them. But Mouna also recalled that when she first arrived in Turkey, people were hospitable and she was able to make friends. “And I think this will happen again,” she said, “because not all the people are bad.”

The post In Turkey, anger at Syrians reaches boiling point as elections loom appeared first on Coda Story.

Almost two months later, Kocer is still being investigated and does not know if he will be sent to trial under a controversial law, the so-called disinformation law, which criminalizes the spreading of false or misleading information. If convicted, Kocer could face a prison sentence of up to three years.

Critics say the disinformation law, passed in October 2022, is the latest example of the gradual dismantling of democratic freedoms in Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has run the country for over two decades now.

As Turkey approaches its presidential election on May 14, the disinformation law, which was used to silence journalists in the aftermath of the earthquakes, casts a shadow over free speech in what some Turkish people see as the most important election in the Republic’s 100-year history.

On election day, the state will use the law to suppress the reporting of what is happening at polling stations and justify detentions and arrests, said Baris Altintas, the co-director of the Media and Law Studies Association, a non-profit organization which offers legal assistance to journalists in Turkey. The Turkish government might also initiate internet shutdowns, website blockings and bans on Twitter accounts, she told me. 

One of the most controversial changes under the disinformation law was an amendment to the Turkish criminal code called Article 217. It states that people can be imprisoned for up to three years for disseminating false information related to the country's domestic and foreign security. The law specifies that the false information has to be related to the “internal and external security, public order and general health of the country” to be considered a crime.

What this means in practice is unclear — which may be the point.

“Such wording, within the Turkish context can refer to anything and everything and often concepts such as external security and/or national security as well as public order are taken lightly,” said Yaman Akdeniz, a professor of law at Istanbul Bilgi University.

The law states that disinformation must be distributed in a way that disturbs public peace, with the motive of creating concern, fear and panic among the public. But, Akdeniz explains, it does not define anxiety, fear or panic, leaving its interpretation up to public prosecutors who consider whether to bring forward a case, as well as the criminal courts if an indictment is issued.

Turkey has low levels of judicial independence, with most judges appointed by the president and the parliament, which is dominated by Erdogan’s party, the AKP, and its coalition of allied parties.

Unpublished research by the Media and Law Studies Association shows that six journalists were detained under Article 217 for their work covering the aftermath of the earthquakes. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, only Iran, China and Myanmar currently jail more journalists than Turkey.

The earthquakes, which killed more than 45,000 people in Turkey alone and destroyed around 214,000 buildings, have put the AKP under immense pressure in the lead up to the elections. The party has been accused of undermining construction safeguards, thus worsening the impact of the earthquakes. It has also been criticized for overseeing a chaotic response to the disaster, fueling widespread anger against what many see as a corrupt government.

In response, the government has described its critics as “provocateurs” and shut down access to social media sites, including homegrown sites, on some service providers, all while people were using these platforms to search for survivors.

Two journalists arrested in February, Ali and Ibrahim Imat, were reportedly only released on Friday, having spent weeks awaiting trial for allegedly spreading fake news. The brothers had raised allegations that the Turkish authorities in Osmaniye were withholding tents from people made homeless by the earthquakes.

On at least two occasions, when reporting from the earthquake-affected region, Mir Ali Kocer said he was confronted by police officers in order to stop him from filming. One incident was caught on camera. This was something several journalists have reported experiencing.

When he was summoned to the police station, the policemen told Kocer he was being investigated for spreading disinformation for comments he had posted on social media. According to Kocer the posts that the police showed him included one in which he said he could smell dead bodies.

Kocer told me he was simply sharing information, obtained from survivors of the earthquakes or local officials and the police, which the government refused to share. He said his posts are usually supported with a photo, a video or an interview with someone. Kocer, who refers to the disinformation law as the “censorship law,” believes the police were just trying to intimidate him. But, he told me, he will continue to be a journalist even if he is forced to report from inside a prison.

Prior to the disinformation law, the state already had a wide range of legal tools available to target critical voices, including an anti-terrorism law that has forced dozens of journalists and dissidents to flee while many others have been imprisoned. 

Another law, forbidding people to insult the president, led to 33,973 prosecutions in 2021 alone. Schoolchildren and a former Miss Turkey, the 2006 winner of a national beauty pageant, have been prosecuted under the law. In 2016, a man was sentenced to a year in prison for posting images on Facebook comparing Erdogan to the Lord of the Rings character Gollum.

Often, the anti-terrorism law is used against journalists who make accusations against judges or police officials tasked with combating terrorism, says Ozgur Ogret, the Turkey representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists. In cases where this charge does not stick, the disinformation law gives the state another way to target the same journalists and imprison them for doing the thing that is, by definition, their job — spreading information.

In December 2022, Sinan Aygul became the first journalist to be arrested under the disinformation law, after he posted a tweet accusing police officers and soldiers of sexually abusing a child. He later retracted the story for inaccuracies.

Aygul could have been charged by the police for making targets of those who are tasked to combat terrorism, said Ogret. But instead the state decided to use the disinformation law.

The impact of the law extends beyond journalists. Hundreds of people had legal proceedings initiated against them and dozens were detained for spreading “provocative” posts on social media in the wake of the earthquakes. It is unclear at this stage how many of these people were held under Article 217, but it is likely that a lot of them were detained using the law, said Altintas, the director of the Media and Law Studies Association.

Article 217 poses a bigger threat to NGOs, academics and ordinary citizens than journalists, who are more seasoned in dealing with the state and have been targeted for years using a mixture of laws, Altintas told me. Now the disinformation law means anything anyone tweets or says can be used against them.

The disinformation law also imposes heavy sanctions, including six-month bans on advertising, on social media platforms that fail to comply with content removal requests from prosecutors or the courts. These same companies are also obliged to provide user data, when requested, in relation to specific crimes, including when people are accused of disseminating fake news.

The authorities can limit access to social media platforms by slowing down the speed of the service for non-compliance with these requests. The platforms have been put in a further bind as they are now required to set up subsidiaries in Turkey, making them more criminally, administratively and financially liable. “The disinformation law forces social media platforms to be complicit in the state’s censorship regime,” said Suay Boulougouris, a program officer at Article 19, an international human rights organization that promotes freedom of expression.

The opposition in Turkey, after years of elections riddled with fraud, have become highly organized in election monitoring, in which social media plays a vital role, allowing citizens to share information on irregularities, including ballot stuffing, violence and the deliberate miscounting of votes. The new disinformation law makes it easier for the government to remove content en masse or to clamp down on the social media sites themselves — a real possibility, says Bolougouris, as Erdogan, who is lagging behind the opposition in the polls, scrambles to find a way to secure his presidency.

“The implications of these amendments go beyond Turkey,” she told me. “Because if Turkey is able to implement these amendments without a strong pushback from platforms, for example, it will set a dangerous precedent and it will have implications for the open functioning of social media around the world.”

Turkish government officials have over the years been keen to draw parallels between Turkey’s internet laws and a law in Germany, referred to as NetzDG. The German law has been heavily criticized for requiring social media companies to comply with content takedown requests from German authorities. But Boulougouris disagrees with the comparison, saying that the operating environment in Turkey, with its weaker institutions and judiciary, is totally different from Germany.

As the election approaches, the opposition is looking more unified, with six parties backing one candidate, Kemal Kilicdaroglu. The opposition have rallied around pledges to implement constitutional changes that roll back presidential powers, crack down on corruption and give state media organizations back their independence and impartiality.

But Yaman Akdeniz, the law professor, cautions against being overly optimistic that these changes will be implemented if the opposition wins. Turkey has a long history of censorship, he told me, “don’t expect this to be a smooth process.”

The post As elections near, Turkey weaponizes the law to suppress speech appeared first on Coda Story.

As a people subject to ongoing repression in China — or genocide, as a U.S. congressional committee heard in Washington, D.C. last week — it could appear the Uyghurs have found peace in Turkey, a space where they can preserve and even revive their language and literature. 

But on Tuesday, March 14, the Kutadgu Bilik bookshop was raided by the Turkish police. They dragged books out in large bags to a van parked outside.

The first time the police raided the shop in August 2022, they confiscated hundreds of books. This time, members of the Uyghur community protested. Some lay down in front of the police van to prevent it from leaving.

“This shop is a solution for us,” the owner, Abdulla Turkistanli, told me, a day after the police raid. “We can teach our next generations here, we can keep our culture alive.”

Uyghur bookstores in Istanbul play a vital role in sustaining the culture, in giving Uyghurs across generations and continents access to their language and history. Estimates of the Uyghur population in Turkey vary from over 50,000 to around 150,000, making it probably the largest community of Uyghurs outside their traditional home in Xinjiang, a vast region in northwest China that borders several Central Asian countries, Russia, Pakistan and India.

For close to a decade now, the Chinese state has been conducting a violent crackdown on its Uyghur population. This campaign, which has increased in intensity since 2017, extends far beyond China’s borders. Uyghurs in the diaspora are subject to surveillance, while their families back home are sent to re-education centers and prisons where many have been tortured and raped. Uyghur literature has also been a prime target, with dozens of renowned writers, poets, publishers and academics disappeared into the labyrinthine system of internment camps. 

This has all but destroyed the small trickle of books coming out of the region, severing a critical link between those who escaped and those still trapped inside.

Turkistanli, the bookshop owner, wears his exhaustion on his face. Years of pressure from the Chinese state have left him depleted of energy, if not of the will to keep fighting. On the night of the raid earlier this month, he was rushed to a hospital with heart problems. It has been, he told me, a chronic ailment, first sustained after he was imprisoned in Kyrgyzstan after leaving Xinjiang in 2008. He says he was tortured by Chinese officials and injected with a mysterious substance. 

Speaking on March 23 to the newly formed U.S. bipartisan committee examining the rivalry with China, Gulbahar Haitiwaji, a Uyghur woman who was detained in a Chinese re-education camp for three years, said that the detainees were told they were being vaccinated when they were injected with undisclosed drugs but were actually being sterilized. 

Turkistanli was eventually able to leave Kyrgyzstan for Turkey. In 2013, he opened his first bookstore. At the time, he said, Uyghurs could travel more freely between Istanbul and Xinjiang. The Uyghur diaspora would return from each visit laden with books. In this way, hundreds, if not thousands, of books were removed to safety.

Over the years, the Uyghur diaspora community in Istanbul has added thousands of volumes to the Kutadgu Bilik collection. But the cost of reprinting these books is high. There are usually only two to four copies of any given title in Turkistanli’s shop. The Turkish police, when they raid the shop, say that Turkistanli does not have the copyrights necessary to reprint books. Acquiring the copyrights, Turkistanli told me, is impossible without the cooperation of Chinese authorities. Even contacting the authors of the books, if they are in Xinjiang, is impossible. Turkistanli estimates that around 90% of the books in his shop were written by people who have been swallowed up by the prisons and re-education camps.

He believes that the Turkish police are acting under pressure from the Chinese state when they raid Uyghur bookshops. In this environment, he told me, he does not know how much longer his shop can stay open.

It is a fate that other Uyghur booksellers in Istanbul also face.

In the district of Zeytinburnu, the once bustling heart of Uyghur life in Istanbul, Abdulhalil Abithaci told me he would soon be closing his bookshop. The pandemic, he said, and Turkey’s underperforming economy has meant that many Uyghurs — who tend to make less money than the general Turkish population — cannot afford to buy books anymore. Many, he adds, are leaving Zeytinburnu for less expensive areas, while others have left Turkey altogether to seek a better life further away from China’s reach in Europe, North America and Australia.

The first wave of Uyghurs came to Istanbul in the 1950s, escaping religious persecution under a newly formed communist regime in China. Subsequent periods of repression drove more and more Uyghurs to flee abroad. The fall of the Soviet Union brought a new era of controls, as the Chinese state increasingly sought to “Sinicize” Uyghurs by forcing them to assimilate into mainstream Chinese culture. 

For the few able to escape China’s harsher crackdowns since 2017, Turkey has been a place of refuge. As Turkic people, Uyghurs and Turks share historical, linguistic and cultural ties, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was once seen as an advocate for Uyghurs. But as Ankara has sought closer ties to China, the situation for Uyghur refugees has become more precarious.

Turkey is home to the largest number of refugees in the world, with millions escaping war in Syria in particular. The Turkish government, though, is itself a notorious conductor of cross-border repression, especially targeting suspected followers of a movement led by the Muslim preacher and scholar Fethullah Gulen who has been based in the United States for over two decades. According to a report by the think tank Freedom House, Turkey was second only to China between 2014 and 2021 in perpetrating acts of “physical transnational repression.”

It is because Turkey so often acts to repress dissent beyond its borders that it acts as a willing accomplice to other repressive regimes, including China, says Howard Eissenstat, a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute and an associate professor of history at St. Lawrence University. “It boils down to a transactionalism,” he told me, “that both China and Turkey see as part of international relations, since neither is concerned with the rule of law.”

Many Uyghurs living in Istanbul fear that the threat to their safety is growing, as Erdogan and Chinese President Xi Jinping become closer. Seyfullah Karatug, for instance, told me he feels his life as a Uyghur refugee in Istanbul depends on the whim of an unpredictable Turkish state. The fear of arrest or deportation constantly hangs over him.

I met the 24-year-old Karatug at the Uyghur bookshop Kutadgu Bilik, the day after the police raided it. One of his eyes had been blackened during the protests from the night before. Karatug told me he visits the store almost every day. As the only Uyghur bookstore in Sefakoy, Kutadgu Bilik closing would be a personal disaster. That’s why Karatug raced to the store when he received a WhatsApp message that it was being raided by the police.

When he asked the police if they had a warrant and filmed them manhandling protestors, a policeman punched him in the face. Video footage seen by Coda Story, as well as a hospital report, corroborates Karatug’s claims. Karatug told me his father had sent him and his brother to Egypt in 2016, fearing for their future in China. The brothers have had no contact with their family since late 2017, when they believe their father was arrested. Knowing the sacrifice his father made, Karatug told me, made him determined to keep his language and cultural traditions alive, to pass them onto his younger brother. It’s why Uyghur bookshops are so important to him.

For now, though, Kutadgu Bilik at least remains open. Once Abdulhalil Abithaci’s bookshop in Zeytinburnu closes, though, there will only be two Uyghur bookshops left in Istanbul. The impact will be felt beyond the streets of the Turkish metropolis, hurting the Uyghur diaspora around the world.

“Books are very important for the survival of our culture and people,” Dilnur Reyhan, a Uyghur sociologist based in Paris, told me over the phone. “If the bookstores in Istanbul do not survive, it will be a major blow. That is why I think the Chinese state ordered this attack, and the Turkish authorities executed it.” Reyhan, who edits a Uyghur-French magazine, added that the war in Ukraine had driven up the price of paper, putting the hope of creating new Uyghur bookstores away from Turkey further out of reach.

One Uyghur software developer, Memeteli Niyaz, has built a website that has around 3,000 free ebooks on it, 600 of which were sent from within China by an anonymous source. But Niyaz has already been forced to migrate the website to a new host after the one he was using received copyright complaints. He fears his website, too, will inevitably be shut down. 

A week after the raid, I visited Abdulla Turkistanli again. He told me that some Turkish writers had come to the shop and encouraged him to carry on providing books to Istanbul’s Uyghur community. Turkistanli had just donated hundreds of books from his shop to the community, something he does every year at the start of Ramadan. This year, he was more generous than usual.

If the store is raided again, he told me, it is better that the books are already spread throughout the community, where there is at least a chance they will be read, enjoyed and protected.

The post In Istanbul, the last Uyghur bookshops struggle to survive appeared first on Coda Story.

China

China continued to be the most dangerous cross-border offender. As part of its highly sophisticated transnational repression campaign, the regime issued hundreds of lnterpol red notices — requests to police around the world to detain and send suspects back to China. In April, the Chinese government tried to force back four members of the Uyghur minority, who have been targeted heavily within and outside China, from Saudi Arabia. Among the four was a 13-year-old girl who, along with her mother, risks being sent to a detention center. Following an outcry from human rights groups, the deportation has been delayed. 

Under the banner of an anti-corruption program called Sky Net, the Chinese state has also ramped up efforts to repatriate Chinese nationals it accuses of corruption. The program has seen thousands targeted in the last few years, including the Chinese businessman Ma Chao, a member of the persecuted Falun Gong movement currently living in Cyprus. At the start of the year, members of his family in China were arrested to increase pressure on him to return. Just one month later, an Interpol notice was issued against his wife. 

Even within the U.S., traditionally seen as the ultimate safe haven for those escaping persecution abroad, China has ramped up its efforts to target dissidents. In October, the FBI charged seven individuals with conducting a campaign to surveil and coerce U.S. residents to return to China. In response to this concerning trend, a group of Democratic congressmen have introduced a bill that seeks to codify transnational repression as a crime under U.S. law.

Turkey

Turkey is one of the biggest transnational repression actors. High-profile attempts to return Kurds back to Turkey were a regular occurrence in 2022. Turkey has been able to leverage Russia’s war in Ukraine, demanding that Finland and Sweden commit to more proactively returning dissident Kurds to Turkey in exchange for Turkey’s support for their NATO membership bids. Turkey’s government has provided a list of dozens of people it wants repatriated. It continued to tap informal networks to attack and threaten journalists living abroad. Those targeted in Sweden include the Turkish-Kurdish journalist Ahmet Donmez, who, in March of this year, was attacked outside his home.

Iran

Over the years, the Iranian regime has used tactics such as assassinations, renditions and digital intimidation to target Iranian citizens in countries in Europe, the Middle East and North America, according to Freedom House. During the past three months of cascading protests across Iran, there has been renewed global interest in the dangers facing Iranian activists living at home and abroad.

In October, masked men attacked anti-government protestors outside the Iranian embassy in Berlin, leaving several injured. The British police recently warned two British-Iranian journalists and their families that they faced an increased “credible” threat from Iranian state security forces. The head of the U.K.’s domestic spy network, MI5, used his annual threat update to warn of Iran’s ambitions to “kidnap or even kill British or U.K.-based individuals perceived as enemies of the regime.” He said that there had been at least 10 such potential threats since January 2022.

Saudi Arabia

Since U.S.-based Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in 2018 inside the Saudi embassy in Turkey, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has been under a measure of diplomatic pressure. That has not stopped him from expanding the Saudi government’s transnational repression efforts. In August, the same month that President Biden met with the prince, three people were sentenced in Saudi Arabia after being surveilled while abroad. One was a 34-year-old mother who had tweeted about the Kingdom while in the U.K. 

It was also in August that a former employee of Twitter was convicted in the U.S. for using his access to Twitter’s data to spy for the Saudi regime. Last week, a U.S. judge dismissed a lawsuit against bin Salman that sought to hold him accountable for Khashoggi’s murder. The judge said that, while he felt uneasy about it, his hands were tied because the Biden administration had made a recommendation to give the Saudi leader political immunity. Having cemented its position as one of the worst transnational aggressors of 2022, the Biden administration’s policy is likely to provide wiggle room for the Saudi regime in 2023.

The post The year in cross-border repression campaigns appeared first on Coda Story.

“It was very quick and unexpected,” Lucy Usoyan told me over the phone. “You never expect to be under the foot of a president’s bodyguard.” U.S. State Department documents obtained by Usoyan’s lawyers indicate that Erdogan witnessed the attack and may have ordered it to be carried out.

Authoritarian regimes are increasingly ignoring the sovereignty of other nations to lash out at dissent abroad or locate and punish citizens who have found refuge in another country. In what experts label “transnational repression,” governments like Erdogan’s are intimidating people through online disinformation campaigns and, increasingly, by physically targeting them for violence.

The U.S. Congress has responded by introducing a bill designed to crack down on the targeting of Americans by foreign regimes. The Stop Transnational Repression Act, which aims to define and criminalize transnational repression in federal law, would impose a maximum 10-year sentence for those convicted of the crime. 

The bill “would be a very powerful deterrent to folks who want to try and undertake these actions on behalf of their governments,” Annie Boyajian, the vice president for policy and advocacy at Freedom House, said.

Figuring out how to effectively counter acts of transnational repression — which by definition are acts committed by sovereign foreign governments — is challenging for legislators. Freedom House has warned that it is difficult to distinguish “legal activity on behalf of a foreign power or entity from illegal activity, and thus to address transnational repression threats before they escalate.”

The bill has been introduced at a politically fraught moment. The bill’s co-signers are all Democrats in a House soon to be controlled by the Republican Party. And President Joe Biden’s ability to maneuver is constrained by energy politics and global pressures fueled by Russia’s war in Ukraine. In June, Uzra Zeya, a State Department under secretary, affirmed the Biden administration’s strategy to tackle threats posed by China by using tools such as imposing visa restrictions, controlling technology exports that could be used to conduct acts of repression and enhancing law enforcement.

In October, the U.S. Department of Justice charged seven individuals with conducting a campaign to surveil and coerce a U.S. resident to return to China as part of an effort called “Operation Fox Hunt.” The operation is part of a strategy designed to target people outside of China which, alongside Operation Sky Net, claims to have caught 8,000 international fugitives. The Chinese state says these individuals are accused of committing financial crimes, but some are dissidents and whistleblowers.

A weak link is federal communication with local law enforcement, analysts say. The FBI has set up a transnational repression hotline, but local police fail to “understand the full scope of the threat” posed by foreign regimes, Boyajian, from Freedom House, said. By codifying transnational repression into law, she said, the bill will encourage law enforcement agencies to take transnational repression more seriously.

Biden came under fire last week when a U.S. judge dismissed a lawsuit against the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, for the murder of U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The judge said that while he felt uneasy about it, his hands were tied because the Biden administration had made a recommendation that the Saudi leader be given political immunity.

The starkly different approaches to transnational repression committed by the Saudi royal family and the Chinese Communist Party are an indication of how efforts to stop and prosecute transnational repression are diluted by America’s wider geopolitical goals. The U.S. is currently taking an aggressive posture against China’s government, while countering transnational repression from Saudi Arabia risks souring relations with a major oil supplier.

The post Democrats want to prevent attacks on dissidents living in the US appeared first on Coda Story.

Then one day in March, when Donmez was driving his six-year-old daughter home from school, he was violently attacked. His car was bumped from behind, at a crossroads before the strip of houses ringed by security cameras where his home is. He got out of the car to speak to the driver. He does not know how many were in the car, but he is sure it was more than one. Then from behind he was hit with something hard over the head. Then blackness.

Donmez regained consciousness the next day. He spent three weeks in the hospital and a rehabilitation center. With help from the police, his daughter, and wife, Donmez understands small remnants of what happened. He knows his daughter turned her head away before he was attacked. For now, she does not really understand what happened. He worries about the day she will find out.

Swedish police have not been able to identify the perpetrators. That has not stopped Donmez and others from drawing their own conclusions: that the order for the attack “came from Ankara” — Turkey’s capital. And he believes the government’s interior minister, Suleyman Soylu, was behind it.

Political sanctuaries like Scandinavia have become increasingly dangerous places. More and more regimes simply ignore the sovereignty of other nations to pluck their own dissidents from their foreign homes, or physically attack them, with no regard for refugee or asylum status.

Donmez believes on that March day he joined a long list of journalists living abroad who have been targeted by the Turkish state. Under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s violence against its critics has spread globally at an unprecedented rate, marking the country as a contender for the world's leading cross-border aggressor against dissidents, what policy-makers and academics call “transnational repression.”

“Turkey is extremely prolific in transnational repression,” said Nate Shenkkan, senior director of research at Freedom House. 

Since coming to power in 2002, Erdogan has transformed Turkey into what political scientists call an elective dictatorship. Whatever the label, his descent into authoritarianism and his willingness to deploy political violence has unleashed a torrent of repression inside and outside Turkey. 

Shenkkan dates Erdogan’s swerve toward authoritarianism to 2006, but says it took him years to really take control of the full apparatus of the state. First, Erdogan went for supporters of Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen, who he alleges was the mastermind behind a coup attempt to topple him from power.

Pressure also was aimed at an older target of the Turkish state: the Kurdish people. Since 1984 the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, has conducted an insurgency against the Turkish state in pursuit of more political and cultural rights and to establish an independent Kurdish state. Turkey says the PKK is a terrorist organization.

The Erdogan regime has targeted for attack ethnic-Turks like Donmez who are journalists, and since the coup attempt in 2016 he has sought to brandish dissidents of all stripes and colors as Kurdish or Gulenist terrorists.

Henri Barkey, a professor at Lehigh University and an adjunct senior fellow at the Council for Foreign Relation who was born in Istanbul but is a US citizen, is one of many accused by the Turkish state of orchestrating the coup, as well as being a CIA spy. He told me that “there's a certain degree of laziness on the part of the state, just accusing people for the hell of it. They've developed this culture of enemies.”

In recent years, Turkey has scaled its domestic culture of enemies into a global system of fear, surveillance, and repression, sweeping up journalists, activists, academics, and dissident politicians living around the world.

With an army of government and citizen trolls at his fingertips, Erdogan exercises immense power to quell online dissent while controlling a physical world network capable of surveilling, assaulting, extraditing, kidnapping, and killing dissidents abroad.

Erdogan may start using that network even more aggressively. He is increasingly cornered, Turkey’s economy is plummeting, losing around 26% of its value against the dollar in the past year. And Erdogan faces an election in nine months, leaving experts concerned about what he will do in order to consolidate his hold on power.

“The elections next year are amazingly critical, because if he loses, a lot of people, maybe including him, but certainly his family and close confidants, will end up in jail,” Barkey told me. “That’s what he’s afraid of: revenge. He is going to do everything in his power to stay in power.”

I met Kurdo Baksi, a jovial and self-assured journalist, at a cafe around the corner from his Stockholm home. There was a familiarity between him and the woman behind the counter, the sort a regular might expect.

Baksi was relaxed, but told me that since Sweden applied for NATO membership in May, he takes more precautions when traveling around the city. He uses different modes of transport every day, and is always aware of his surroundings.

“I don’t get on the same subway every day, I change vehicles, one day car, one day bus,” he said. “I look at people much more than before. I like to know who is behind me.”

Baksi’s family, who moved to Sweden from Turkey when he was just 15, have been targets of the Turkish state for most of his life.

“My family has been in Sweden for 51 years. My uncle was a very famous journalist in Sweden, and I have a sister who was a member of parliament for many years. So the Swedes joke and say we are the most Swedish family.”

Sweden's glistening lakes and abundant forests seem an unlikely backdrop for Turkish transnational repression. But in recent years, with its Kurdish population numbering in the tens of thousands, it has become a hotbed for just that.

In response to the war in Ukraine, Sweden and Finland applied for NATO membership. Most of the alliance seemed to welcome them with open arms. Except for Turkey.

Before agreeing to their NATO accession, Turkey has forced a commitment from the two Scandinavian countries to be more proactive in extraditing those it sees as threats. Turkey provided a list of dozens of people to extradite. At the top of that list are Kurds who Turkey alleges are members of the PKK.

After a lot of diplomatic brinkmanship, Sweden and Finland agreed to lift an arms embargo on Turkey, change their anti-terrorism laws, and cooperate more on Turkey’s extradition requests.

Hamza Yalcin, a left-wing Swedish journalist of Turkish-Kurdish descent, told me that he will not wear headphones when he walks on the street, for fear of not knowing when someone is behind him. The situation has gotten worse for him since the NATO saga. "I am usually careful at nights and in the evenings. But at the same time, I know if they want to reach us, they can do it. We have no real protection."

It feels like “you have a little stone in your shoe and you can never get rid of it, it can never leave me,” said Baksi, who says his ten-year-old twin daughters feel Turkey’s reach. “Last week they asked me if I was under attack by Erdogan, because I think they heard something,” he said.

Baksi does not believe he will be attacked because since 1992 he has had enhanced police protection. He has been a target of a number of authoritarian states because of his work as a journalist, but none more than Turkey where he is frequently singled out in the media. 

While Baksi has not been assaulted like Ahmet Donmez’s experience while driving home in his car, due to his high profile he is now heckled on a weekly basis by “hooligans” on e-scooters, who drive up to him in a threatening manner. “When I go into the city now, some Swedish-Turkish guys come up to me and say, ‘long live Erdogan.’ This has not happened before.”

Amineh Kakabaveh says the current situation in her adopted country has made ethnic-Kurds such as herself much more afraid than they used to be. After 14 years as a member of Sweden’s parliament, she is leaving this month having decided not to run for re-election in the September national elections.

Since we spoke Sweden held those elections and a coalition of right-wing parties are on the cusp of forming a new government. The Swedish Democrats are set to be part of that coalition having won the second highest number of votes after the party in power, the Social Democrats. This was an outcome that Kakabaveh feared, as the new government is likely to be less sympathetic to the situation facing its Kurdish population. Turkey is still holding off on approving NATO accession until Sweden takes steps to comply with its demands and has continued to apply pressure.

“Because the Social Democrats have made that agreement with Erdogan, people are afraid. Even I am afraid, not because the Social Democrats will extradite us, but because they made it possible for the next government too,” says Kakabaveh.

To meet Kakabaveh, I had to pass through a large copper colored door, a metal detector, and multiple policemen. Inside the secure confines of the Riksdag, Swedish parliament, we sat in a cafe in the new part of the historic building; it reminded me of an upmarket airport lobby.

She is hospitable and offers me tea and a slice of the parliament’s signature cake. This cozy cafe is a far cry from the outside world, where Kakabaveh requires protection from the Swedish secret services and police. “Yesterday I was at a meeting, there were five or six police and two bodyguards,” she told me.

If you ask Kakavaveh who she is being protected from, the list is long: the Turkish state, the Iranian state, Islamic extremists, right wing extremists. While she feels the threat posed by Iran is on par with Turkey, she says Turkey can be more aggressive.

Even within these walls, one of the few places she feels physically safe, abuse can still trickle in like venom. She regularly receives abusive messages in letters, emails and on social media. She said the attacks are often sexualized. On Instagram, she believes abuse comes from members of the far-right Turkish organization the Gray Wolves. Islamic extremist groups who support Erdogan, have called for her tongue and head to be cut off.

Erdogan has sought to tighten his control on the online sphere, infiltrating a space that once provided a platform for dissidents to voice discontent with his regime. Erdogan expanded his network of trolls, often called AK Trolls, named after his political party.

In 2020, Twitter suspended 7,340 accounts which were linked to the youth wing of the AK party. The majority of these accounts were fake and compromised, and were designed to spread pro-AK party narratives, as well as criticize opposition groups and parties. Opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu has said that tens of thousands of trolls are being funded by the Turkish treasury. In the six months leading up to January 2022 he said of the 700,000 posts tagging his account, 300,000 were AK trolls.

Other authoritarian states such as China have employed similar methods. China’s army of 2 million paid trolls, is backed up by ten times that number of volunteer trolls, according to a U.S. State Department technology adviser. Often university students and members of the Communist Youth League, these trolls work in tandem with the state, seeking out perceived enemies and targeting them with propaganda.

For dissidents living abroad, Turkey can also rely on networks of trolls in multiple countries. In Kakabaveh’s case she believes she has been targeted by pro-Erdogan groups in Europe. 

Sourcing where those targeting Kakabeveh come from is not always possible, but the messaging can often be rooted back to the state and a network of state-run media organizations.

Earlier this summer, Kakabaveh says that a Facebook message was sent to her brother saying that if she is not quiet the sender would cut all the Kakabaveh family’s tongues out. “My summer was destroyed,” she told me.

A former fighter for the Kurdish military force called the Peshmerga who was born in Iran, Kakabaveh sought refuge in Sweden when she was just 19, having spent much of her life fleeing conflict and persecution in Iran, Iraq and Turkey. She has not seen her parents, who live in Bukan in northwestern Iran, since 2015. Kakabaveh cannot go to Iran and since Turkey began a propaganda campaign against her in 2015 she can no longer meet her parents there.

At the end of our two hour conversation, Kakabaveh took me on a whistle-stop tour through parliament. She showed me her recently vacated office. All that now filled the room was a bright neon light. As we walked around, Kakabaveh was friendly to everyone; smiling, stopping to chat, hugging people. It’s clear she thrives off human interaction.

Out on the street I walked her to her car, behind us lurks a tall athletically built man. Kakabaveh tells me this is her security. 

“You know one thing that is very horrible, but is true, is that all my lifestyle, since I was six years old, has formed me to be a person that doesn't give up and I don’t see myself as a victim,” she told me.

Later in September, despite leaving parliament, she is touring a number of European countries to talk about the Kurdish struggle.

As we walked away from the Riksdag Kakabaveh told me that she was off to go exercise. After which she was going to meet a Kurdish woman to speak about their current situation.

Then she disappeared into a blacked-out SUV with her bodyguard and drove off.

Targeting dissidents abroad has historically carried a price. The murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey in 2018 caused a global uproar. In a democratic country such as Sweden, states like Turkey usually pretend to play by the rules and use proxies to silence people.

In Sweden, Turkey has a number of organizations that can help coordinate and conduct acts of transnational repression, from religious organizations to mafia groups. One of the most prominent organizations is the Gray Wolves, a Turkish nationalist organization. The group has been widely accused of carrying out acts of violence on Kurds. In 2020 France banned the Gray Wolves in response to the group conducting “extremely violent actions” and spreading hate speech at Armenians.

In April of this year, the Turkish foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu saluted a group of protestors with the symbol of the Gray Wolves. Erdogan appears to have used the same salute in 2018.

Joseph Fitsanakis, professor of intelligence and security studies at Coastal Carolina University, says that five or six years ago the Gray Wolves were not an organized presence in Turkish politics, but that “lately they have become more institutionalized.”

Fitsanakis believes that Gray Wolves are not skilled enough to participate in advanced intelligence collection activities. But he does suspect that they could be deployed for more hands-on types of operations, like intimidating people through threats and beatings.

For more advanced intelligence collection, Turkey has a sophisticated intelligence service called MIT. And Fitsanakis says the boundary between diplomats and intelligence officers operating in Europe has been blurred. “I think at this point, it’s very difficult to distinguish between the traditional espionage arm of the Turkish state, basically the MIT, and the diplomatic corps,” he told me.

MIT also relies on a network of civilian organizations and the Turkish diaspora. Fitsanakis estimates there are around six thousands civilian informers in Germany. Reports have indicated that the Turkish police developed an app that allows Turkish immigrants in Germany to report on people they deem suspicious. Saudi Arabia has used a similar tool to target dissidents.

Turkish citizens have been plucked from Kosovo to Kenya to Kyrgyzstan.

A new system has been built, unprecedented in its intensity. Fitsanakis says “the last time we saw something like this was in the 1970s, with the intelligence war between the Israelis and Palestinians.”

In 2020, a man walked into an Austrian police station and announced he had been sent to kill a former politician in Austria who was of Kurdish descent and had been vocally critical of Erdogan. “You could have potentially had a NATO country that actually funded or hired an assassin to kill a European Union parliamentarian abroad. That, to me, is incredible,” says Fitsanakis. 

In the summer of 2017 Hamza Yalcin was finishing a holiday in Spain. As he was going through passport control before catching a flight to London, a notice popped up on the screen. Turkey had put out an Interpol notice calling for his arrest. Interpol notices have increasingly become a tool for authoritarian states to hunt down critics abroad. Turkey, China, Russia and Belarus are all prolific in targeting people through this method. Yalcin was arrested and spent three months in a Spanish prison before he was released.

A report by Freedom House from February 2021 found that "The Turkish state’s current campaign of transnational repression is remarkable for its intensity, its geographic reach, and the suddenness with which it escalated.”

Following the coup Turkey allegedly tried to upload sixty thousand names into Interpol’s notification system.

I was sitting in Ahmet Donmez’s kitchen, light seeping in through the windows. Pictures of Donmez, his wife and two smiling kids are scattered across the fridge. Despite his shaggy hair and graying beard, which makes him look somewhat chaotic, Donmez is measured. For years he worked at one of Turkey’s biggest newspapers, and spent a significant portion of that time as a reporter at the heart of Turkish politics. He met Erdogan several times. Donmez remembers him as being “a very rude person, very angry and very despotic, he doesn’t tolerate your different views or opinions.”

In the months prior to the car attack, Donmez used his extensive connections and knowledge of Turkish politics to produce a series of online videos unveiling corruption in the Turkish state. They centered on mafia groups and their government connections, including Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu.

Donmez believes these videos, alongside some earlier work he had done for the Stockholm Center for Freedom, were why he was attacked. Sources in Turkey told Donmez a video of the attack was sent to Soylu, and one journalist told Donmez the video was sent directly to him by Soylu. Another journalist had told Donmez that an Ankara police chief had told him they carried out the attack. Other sources told Donmez that Soylu and the police chiefs had a secret meeting about him, and talked about his videos.

The journalist Erk Acarer, who was himself attacked outside his home in Berlin in July 2021, obtained a sinister six-second video from a mafia source. In it Donmez’s house can be seen on a gray day, snow covers the ground, and the green trees I saw stood naked and bare.

Finding out for sure who the true perpetrator of the attack was may never happen.

“I thought that I was safe here and that they couldn't cause that kind of attack,” says Donmez. “But I was wrong, here in Sweden you cannot feel safe. Erdogan or the Turkish intelligence Service, MIT, they have very long arms and they are quite successful at creating new groups for attacking. For example, nationalists or jihadists or religious groups who believe they serve the religion or the country. Erdogan or MIT can very easily and quickly coordinate them.”

Donmez intends to start working again soon. If he were by himself, he says he would already be back at work. But he must also protect his family.

The post Sovereign borders lose meaning as Turkey’s violent campaign to intimidate Kurds reaches deep inside Sweden appeared first on Coda Story.

"He's running away from this Buk I think — or maybe to that side?" asks one drone operator, watching a black speck — a Russian soldier — on the screen. "Maybe something fell off and he went to check what it was. He's just running back and forth," says another, as the speck changes direction.

“Position” flashes at the top of the screen, before the Buk explodes into a voluminous cloud of black smoke. Applause and excited cheers break out in the control room. "Finally!" says one operator. "What fireworks," adds another.

The successful hit was one of a growing number of drone strikes conducted by the Ukrainian military against Russian targets using Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones. The footage, shared by the Ukrainian defense ministry and immediately spread online, has only come to enhance the idea of the drones stealthy power, sneakily bringing destruction to lines of Russian tanks or ammunition from afar and then displaying the grainy evidence for all to see. The Ukrainian embassy in Turkey tweeted footage of a Bayraktar TB2 exploding a column of Russian artillery in a white sparkling cloud alongside a phrase that roughly translated means “thank God for Bayraktar.”

This kind of publicity is a boon for Turkey, which has long held ambitions as a global drone superpower, eagerly demonstrating their use of this homegrown technology across the world, from Nagorno-Karabakh to Libya and northern Syria. But through drone sales, Turkey is also developing an international reputation as a country that will step in with easily available, cheaper and reliable drone technology where other nations like the United States enforce export controls, or at the very least ask questions about how their technology is used. 

Ukraine has transformed if not rehabilitated the image of Bayraktar TB2s, with the drones now seen as an essential tool in the fight for democracy on the edge of Europe rather than a flying predator employed in asymmetrical warfare or by governments willing to use them to attack civilians. 

Part of this transformation rests on the drones’ ability to record strikes, making them an essential eye in the sky for Ukraine’s information war as much as their aid to action on the ground. Though Ukrainian forces are clearly maximizing the drones’ effectiveness, taking out columns of Russian artillery or even using cheaper commercial drones to help them aim at enemy lines, Ukrainian authorities have so far declined to release clear data on how many times they have successfully employed Bayraktar TB2s or precisely where the strikes took place, including when asked for this story.  

Ukraine’s drone arsenal numbers at most fifty. Yet the drones are the only piece of military hardware that comes with an inbuilt camera, setting them apart from the Javelins and MANPADS also used to fend off the Russian advance, and allowing Ukraine to display footage of the strikes to boost morale and galvanize international support for their fight.

Turkish military analyst Arda Mevlutoglu compared the drones' fight against larger Russian equipment to a David versus Goliath battle. "This might be the reason why the Ukrainian military gives them so much emphasis in their public relations campaign," he said. "Footage showing destroyed equipment, particularly sophisticated equipment or slain enemy troops multiply the psychological effect. Even if not much equipment is destroyed, the dissemination of such imagery through social media creates a snowball effect, which is very useful for propaganda warfare."

Aided in no small way by Clash Report, a Twitter account with 169,000 followers believed to have links to the Turkish military due to its unique access to battle footage, suddenly the name Bayraktar has become a rallying cry for Ukrainian freedom. The Kyiv zoo named a baby lemur Bayraktar, days before Ukrainian police forces named a German Shepherd puppy "Special Bayraktar," for his ability to bark and warn others of incoming explosions. The Ukrainian Land Forces composed an ode to the drones, featuring spoken word praise over a kaleidoscope of jingly electronic xylophone sounds.

Clash Report took what was previously a low quality video accompanying the song, showing a Bayraktar TB2 drone cruising over a blue sky, and tweeted a replacement showing footage of drone strikes timed to the beat, an instant viral hit.

Sinan Ulgen, director of the Istanbul think tank the Center for Economics and Security Policy, labeled the drones a “matter of national prestige,” for Turkey, one so domestically popular that it transcends contentious local politics. The drone program, he explained, has helped Turkey propagate an international image as a technologically astute and ambitious power that has successfully manufactured a cheap but highly effective piece of technology. “There, Turkey can compete in the big leagues,” he said.

Bayraktar TB2s are estimated to cost $1 million to $2 million each, up to a tenth of the price of a U.S.-produced Reaper drone. “There are more able drones in the world, these are not the most capable. There are also cheaper ones,” Ulgen said. But with its drone program, “Turkey has found and developed a soft spot in terms of combining price and capability.” 

This makes Turkish drones cheaper than American or Israeli drones, but more capable than Chinese drones, according to Ulgen. “It’s also one of the armed drones that now boasts considerable warfare experience, it has a proven track record,” he said.

Turkey, a NATO member with ties to both Russia and Ukraine, has been trying to navigate how to promote the drones’ success without angering Russia, even after Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, visited Kyiv in early February and expanded an agreement to manufacture Bayraktar drones in Ukraine. Turkey imports almost a third of its natural gas from Russia, depends on Moscow for foreign currency inflows, and even provoked U.S. sanctions in 2017 by purchasing Russia’s S400 missile defense system. The threat of any kind of backlash from Moscow looms over the Turkish government, which is trying to manage the fallout from an ongoing economic crisis that has seen the lira lose half its value in just one year. Foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu put it bluntly in a recent interview with Turkish television: “We can't afford to take sides," he said. 

Footage of Bayraktar TB2s blowing up columns of Russian targets seems unlikely to smooth the Kremlin’s grievances with Turkey and risk damaging Turkey’s position as a negotiator between the two sides. Deputy Foreign Minister Selim Kiran felt the need to emphasize recently that Turkey's drone sales to Ukraine remain, in his words, private sales not "aid from Turkey."

In 2005, on a bleak airstrip surrounded by cornfields, a young engineer and MIT graduate named Selcuk Bayraktar attempted to convince an assembled group of observers that Turkey could become a great drone power. After providing them with a demonstration of his small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or UAV's, bumpily taking off and landing on the small runway, he gave a passionate speech arguing that Turkey had the capability to lead the world in drone production if they invested in his vision.

It could all be so simple, he explained, extending his hand in the air as if to show a smooth path to the future. "Turkey can be number one in the world in five years," he declared.

Bayraktar has become something of an Elon Musk figure in Turkey, with a fanbase obsessively following his creations and who view him a technological savant. His work is tightly bound up with his country's ambitions as a global power, particularly a desire to show that it can stand on its own and produce vital technology without depending on weapons imports, particularly from the United States. Bayraktar's prediction about the growing power of drones also turned out to be correct, aided by Turkey's decision to sell his drones to any country willing to purchase them and his 2016 marriage to President Erdogan's youngest daughter.

“The marriage possibly gave them an edge in the end phase, in terms of becoming a client of the Turkish government, but also having the strong international backing of the government,” said Ulgen, the analyst.

Bayraktar’s success has not always been well received internationally, including at his alma mater. Physicist Max Tegmark provoked outrage in Turkey earlier this year when he said of Bayraktar: "I'm ashamed we trained him here at MIT." Baykar, the company which manufactures Bayraktar TB2s and where Bayraktar is chief technology officer, did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.

Bayraktar’s ambitions have long proved in sync with those of his father-in-law, who has frequently declared that his aim is to see Turkey manufacture its own technology and eschew any reliance on partners like the United States. “Our goal is a fully independent Turkey in the defense industry,” Erdogan declared earlier this year at the launch of a new ship operated by the country’s intelligence services.

Turkey began by using Bayraktar's drones for strikes targeting Kurdish militants in northern Iraq and later Syria, where observer organizations such as Airwars found that strikes have also claimed civilian lives. Turkey states that in northern Syria alone, the drones clocked in 1,129 strikes over four months in 2018. The strikes quickly formed part of what some analysts labeled Turkish "techno nationalism," fuelled by heavily edited YouTube videos of the drones taking off from airstrips in southern Turkey, followed by drone footage filmed over the mountainous region of northern Iraq.

Domestically-produced drones, particularly TB2s, have since formed a central pillar of Turkish efforts to reshape warfare and alter the outcome of regional conflicts to see results favorable to Ankara.

In April 2020, opposing forces loyal to the Libyan warlord General Khalifa Haftar accused militia groups in Tripoli of using a Turkish drone to strike a food convoy, killing at least five civilians. In the same year, Tukey’s decision to provide Azerbaijan with Bayraktar TB2s enabled Baku to reclaim territory from Armenia in a war over the disputed area of Nagorno-Karabakh. International organizations opposed Turkey’s drone sales to Azerbaijan which reportedly updated online videos of its drone strikes and broadcast them on screens throughout the capital.

A report by the Armenian National Committee of America examining Bayraktar technology found American, Canadian, British, German, Swiss and French components, including American radio manufacturer Garmin, which responded that the technology was intended for civilian use only and pledged to prevent its further misuse. Last year, Canada withdrew export licenses to Turkey for optical sensors and targeting systems made by a Canadian company, citing the technology had been used inside Bayraktar TB2s deployed in Nagorno-Karabakh without consent.

But these controversies have not dented sales. "What armies want to do is use technology that's battle tested so they're not the ones trying to debug along the way,” said Sarah E. Krebs of Cornell University, a political scientist and former U.S. Air Force veteran who has worked with drones.

Qatar and Morocco acquired TB2's, while Tunisia recently acquired a small drone fleet from TAI, another Turkish drone company, despite a tense relationship with Turkey. Ethiopia, which has bought several kinds of drones including Bayraktar TB2s, is accused of using the drones in attacks that killed dozens of civilians. An investigation by POLITICO found photos of fragments of the MAM-L bomb exclusively carried by Bayraktar TB2s at the site of an attack on a school holding internally displaced people, including children.

While Bayraktar was facing scrutiny about the use of his drones in Nagorno-Karabakh, a burgeoning new Eastern European market was forming. Ukraine reportedly bought six Turkish drones and three ground control stations in 2019, but last year dramatically upped their demand and bought another twenty-four. That year, Poland became the first NATO member to purchase Bayraktar TB2s. As Russian forces began massing on Ukraine's borders, other countries concerned by Russian advances such as Lithuania and Latvia both publicly mulled purchasing Turkish drones.

By last year, Bayraktar TB2s had acquired an international reputation as a cheap and deadly piece of technology, primed to become a pillar of Ukraine’s successful war narrative. Ukraine even paraded a TB2 through the streets of Kyiv during independence day celebrations last August, and later broadcast footage of a lone drone strike on a Russian howitzer, a large artillery weapon, in Donbas in October — the first salvo in their efforts to use the drones as messaging and not just weaponry.

Russia’s defense ministry began seemingly chasing the success of Ukraine’s drone videos weeks into their invasion, publishing heavily edited black-and-white footage that they claimed showed two of their helicopters launching missile strikes on Ukrainian military equipment. This included brief scenes showing the attack helicopters honing in on their targets, a fun-house mirror version of the videos produced by the Ukrainian side.

Russia, which possesses its own domestically-produced drone army estimated to number around 500, seems to have been caught unawares by Ukraine's drone fleet. "The Russians have been an amazing mix of arrogant and inept," said Peter Warren Singer of the New America Foundation, who has written extensively about how drones are reshaping warfare. Russian forces, he said, assumed a quick march towards Kyiv and so delayed deploying air power against the drones, initially giving them space to operate. "So there was open air for the Ukrainians to fly drones that move slower than a World War One biplane," he said. 

Drones like Bayraktar TB2s, Singer said, allow one side to quickly acquire an instant air force without the risk of human injury or the time required to train pilots and risk more expensive equipment. They have become part of Turkish efforts to show the many unconventional ways to deploy drones, normalizing their use beyond counterinsurgency or attacks on limited targets. “The uses shift from being counterterrorism, going after individual human targets, to using them in civil wars and conventional wars. That’s where Turkey was one of the key actors leading the way, because that’s how they’re utilizing it.”

Bayraktar himself, after tweeting a message of support for Ukraine, seems content. He recently posted a video showing the successful test flight of a new, far larger UAV, the Akinci B while Baykar has boasted of a design for an unmanned fighter aircraft. His drones may soon have company in Ukraine, after President Joe Biden announced that the United States would send drones to Kyiv, likely U.S.-made Switchblades. 

"What was once abnormal or considered science fiction is like the new normal of war," said Singer. Turkey’s rise to dominance as an international drone power may not change warfare alone, but it is increasingly showing how countries can deploy drones in battle while using footage of their strikes to wage war over the narrative.

The post Turkey’s drones had a bad reputation. The war in Ukraine has changed that appeared first on Coda Story.

Beijing recently ratified an extradition treaty with Turkey. Human rights groups say that the document could have devastating consequences for members of the country’s 50,000-strong Uyghur community. 

While the treaty has not yet been signed off by the Turkish government, critics worry it could lead to the forced return of Uyghurs to China. “If adopted by Turkey, the extradition treaty is likely to become another instrument of persecution for China, aiding the Chinese government in its coordinated efforts to forcibly return Uyghurs living abroad,” the Munich-based World Uyghur Congress said in a statement made in late December.

Originally promised in December, the delivery of the CoronaVac vaccine to Turkish authorities was delayed by two weeks, reportedly owing to customs issues. 

However, there has been speculation that China was withholding it to force the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to finalize the agreement. Now, as the first shipments are arriving, mistrust — both in the vaccine and Turkey’s ability to keep Uyghurs safe — is increasing. 

Turkey’s deal with Beijing promises the purchase of 50 million doses of CoronaVac, with Turkish authorities preparing to roll out the shot by Friday. Chinese officials have described the agreement as a sign of closer bilateral ties between the two countries.

According to reports, Turkish opposition politician Lutfu Turkkan of the secular centrist Iyi Party, has accused President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government of allowing China to use coronavirus immunization as a bargaining tool. “They will return Uyghur Turks to China to get the vaccine,” he said.   

Erdogan, leader of Turkey’s conservative Islamist AK Parti, has performed a diplomatic balancing act in his dealings with China, a key economic partner, over the Uyghur issue. Turkey continues to give sanctuary to Uyghurs fleeing persecution in Xinjiang, but has also been accused of cooperating in their deportation to China via third countries. Ankara has also remained relatively tight-lipped over Xinjiang’s arbitrary detention system, in which an estimated one million Uyghurs and members of other Muslim groups are held.

“Turkey buying the vaccine from China means it will now be really hard for Turkey to stand up for the Uyghurs,” said Nursiman Abdureshid, 32, a Uyghur activist who came to Istanbul as a student in 2015. 

The outlook for exiled Uyghurs certainly appears bleak. In December, China’s state-backed Global Times reported that Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu had pledged that Turkish authorities will not allow anyone in the country to “undermine China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.” 

"China has worked for years to strong-arm governments into returning Uyghurs from abroad, often using economic or other incentives to force their partners to capitulate,” explained Peter Irwin of the Washington D.C.-based Uyghur Human Rights Project.

Confidence in CoronaVac is already low in Turkey, with just 11% of citizens saying they would take it. Jevlan Shirmehmet, a 29-year-old Uyghur activist based in Istanbul, explained his Turkish friends have asked him whether they should trust the vaccine. “Our answer is always the same: we don’t believe China,” he said.

In recent weeks, Uyghur activists have kept a daily vigil outside the Chinese consulate in Istanbul, protesting against Beijing’s influence over Turkey and demanding details of missing family members in Xinjiang. 

Abdureshid said the resolve of the wider community is being tested by these new developments. “When people saw that Turkey is relying on China to get through the pandemic, because they need the vaccine, they kind of lost hope.”

The post Uyghurs in Turkey fear China is leveraging its Covid-19 vaccine to have them deported to Xinjiang appeared first on Coda Story.

On Monday, Oktay Candemir, a Kurdish journalist in the city of Van in eastern Turkey, was detained by local police for “insulting the memory of a dead person” — the supposedly wronged party being a 13th-century Ottoman sultan.

The charges stemmed from a tweet posted by Candemir on September 3, in which he made light of an upcoming series produced by the Turkish state broadcaster TRT. The show, which will dramatize the Seljuk conquest of Anatolia, is part of a trend of new programming glorifying Turkey’s past. Candemir’s tweet mockingly suggested prominent Ottoman sultans as characters for similar shows.

Authorities didn’t find it funny and Candemir now faces up to two years in prison. He was briefly placed under house arrest and, while his case is pending, remains subject to a foreign travel ban. According to U.S.-based organization the Committee to Protect Journalists, his computer was confiscated by police. 

“This is a clear abuse of power,” said Erol Onderoglu of Reporters Without Borders, adding that Candemir’s arrest reflects “the sensitivity of local authorities” around historical figures now being appropriated by the country’s nationalist movement.

The growing tendency towards the glorification of Turkey’s past, largely promoted by allies of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Justice and Development Party, is sometimes referred to as Neo-Ottomanism. In an online conversation with me, Candemir described the ideology as being in sharp contrast to the longtime national veneration of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey.

While the nation has faced increasing crackdowns on press freedom since an attempted coup against Erdogan in 2016, the charge of insulting the memory of a deceased individual is unusual. His lawyer told Abu Dhabi-based newspaper The National that the law under which Candemir was arrested requires a living relative to make a complaint, and that this was not done in his case.

“This is not a charge that we usually see used against Turkish journalists,” said Ozgur Ogret, the Turkish representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists.

“Turkey has been consistently among the worst jailers of journalists over the past years, and it’s very easy to end up in jail or prison in Turkey due to journalistic work. Therefore a brand new version of a charge is worrisome.”

Candemir — a writer for the pro-Kurdish publication Nupel — is no stranger to intimidation. “I was detained three times in the last three years and 40 lawsuits were filed against me,” he told me. Speaking of the adversarial attitude of the Turkish government toward the country’s Kurdish minority, he added, “The ruling circles see us as potential terrorists.”

Candemir’s case also underscores the potential dangers of a controversial new law passed in July regulating social media. The legislation requires large online platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to remove content at the behest of the government and to store Turkish user data locally, leading to fears of censorship and privacy violations.

While the law is not yet in effect, Onderoglu said it could curtail “the right of journalists to promote their story on social media, or to react on social media on a major case.”

The post Turkish journalist arrested for tweet making fun of a 13th-century sultan appeared first on Coda Story.

All Nur needed to do, the man continued, was to attend meetings of other Uyghurs in Istanbul, make inquiries about certain people and then pass the information back to him.

Nur protested that he was too busy, that he was already loyal, that he might get caught by the Turkish police. Then he closed his WhatsApp. The messages frightened him and so did the man, who was now the only link to his parents in the autonomous region of Xinjiang, home to the majority of China’s 11.3 million Uyghurs.

The messages kept coming every few days, and soon their tone changed. “You are a smart man,” one said. “You need to think about your family. You are there, but they are here, and if you refuse to do this, you could put them in a very dangerous situation.”

Nur was trapped. One of 10,000 or so Uyghurs now living in Turkey, he had thought himself free of the Chinese state. Back in Xinjiang, authorities were intensifying a crackdown on Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities that held more than a million in vast internment camps, destroyed mosques and tarmacked graveyards. China’s communist leadership describes the camps as “vocational training centers”, but they are places of indoctrination and suffering designed to eradicate religious belief. 

As this repression spread, so too has intimidation and monitoring of anyone able to escape it. A number of Uyghurs now living in Turkey recounted their experiences for this article. Others confirmed they had been approached by the state but declined to meet with a journalist for fear of reprisals. All of the individuals quoted spoke on condition of anonymity and their names have been changed accordingly.

Uyghur exiles also found refuge in Kazakhstan, Europe and North America and Amnesty International China researcher Patrick Poon told Coda Story that he has heard similar stories from around the world. Many, he said, were told that if they did not return to China, their family members would be detained.

When Nur came to Istanbul to study in 2011, he spoke with his family every three or four days, either via phone or the Chinese messaging and social media app WeChat  — WhatsApp and Facebook are banned in China. WeChat is monitored by the state, but Nur’s family were secular and supported the party, so they talked freely for hours. If he went much longer than a week without calling, his parents would chide him for being distant.

Their conversations continued over years, even while authorities in Xinjiang began targeting residents who showed any outward signs of religiosity, like visiting mosques, wearing a headscarf or growing a beard. But towards the end of 2016, as a newly appointed Communist Party head in the province led still harsher policies, Nur's mother ordered him to delete innocuous pictures of his life in Turkey that he had posted on WeChat. 

Around the same time, a former classmate who had gone on to join the police messaged Nur with a warning: just contacting someone from abroad put them at risk of being sent to the expanding network of camps. Friends and family began to disappear from his WeChat contact list, likely aware of the danger.

In early 2017, Nur's parents told him they could only speak once a month, for no more than half an hour, and that he should not contact his siblings. They also advised him to shave and to cut his hair short. “I realized that there might be someone beside them or someone listening in,” Nur said, recalling the conversation while sitting in an Istanbul cafe. “So I told them okay.”

Then they told Nur not to call them at all. They added that a Chinese man would sometimes help connect them from now on, so he should accept the man’s request on WeChat. 

The request came and the messages began. The man went only by a common first name and said he was in charge of security in the district Nur’s parents lived in. He wrote in impeccable Chinese and finally got around to asking a series of simple questions: When did Nur arrive in Turkey, what was his address, how many children did he have, where did he study, and would he come back to China? Nur answered, mostly truthfully.

A week later, the man, unhindered by the ban, WhatsApped him from a Hong Kong number. Nur suspected that the man had obtained his contact details from his parents. “He said ‘I am the son of your mother and now I am going to my mother’s home,’” Nur recalled. He knew that probably meant the man was one of the million of mostly Han government workers ordered to spend time in Muslim households as "family" for the purposes of surveillance and indoctrination. Nur soon received a WhatsApp video call. The Chinese man’s face was hidden but Nur heard his voice, smooth and quiet and he saw his parents. They looked happy to see him, but they told him that the man wanted him to go to the Chinese consulate in Istanbul and affirm himself as a citizen. Nur nodded, scared for them and for himself.

During this growing estrangement from his parents, other Uyghurs in Turkey were being alienated from their own relatives and friends. Abdulla, a small business owner living in Istanbul, said that his brothers, sisters and friends had also begun to delete him from WeChat. Eventually, only his parents were left and their messages went from every day to once a week and became unusually terse and unemotional.

Mehmet, who has been in the city since 2010 and has a number of close relatives in Xinjiang who have been taken to internment camps, said that even his immediate family stopped replying to messages. His WeChat history with his sister is now just a series of unanswered pictures of his newborn daughter. Again, a government-operated WhatsApp number and intermediary became the only way to contact his family, and information about his life in Turkey—his job, his children, his address—was required in return.

As well as gathering information for the state, Amnesty’s Poon added, these requests also damage the cohesion of exiled Uyghur communities, making everyone seem like a potential informer. “[Students] told me they are concerned about how some of their classmates might have answered,” he said. “It sews distrust in the community.”

There was a time when Nur did not hear from his parents for more than two months. He began calling their mobile number every day in contravention of their instructions, but could never get through. Finally, they answered. When he asked what was wrong, they told him that everything was fine, that they had just taken a trip to Ürümqi, Xinjiang's capital city, and forgot to take their phone with them. He could not ask, and they could not tell him, but Nur suspected that during this absence, they had been held in a camp then released.

It was then that Nur started to receive demands to spy on other exiled Uyghurs. His excuses appeared to put the man off and the messages stopped for a month.

Then they began again, this time from a Russian number.

Nur’s monthly conversations with his parents always went the same way. They said his brother was rich now, his sister was doing well in her job. They told him how happy they were, and how happy everyone else in the district was. They had long before stopped saying “Allahka amanat” (“God bless you”) and always hung up with a simple goodbye.

Once Nur answered a WhatsApp video call facilitated by the Chinese man and saw only his mother. He asked where his father was.

“He’s here,” she said.

“Show me,” he replied, but she stayed where she was.

Then Nur heard another voice, a man he did not recognize, speaking Uighur.

“You can move,” the voice said.

Only then did his father appear on screen.

On another occasion, Nur received a photograph of his parents via the Chinese man’s WhatsApp account. The image was strange, he thought. There were multiple people in the room but only his father and his mother’s faces were visible; the others were cropped out.

Each time the man facilitated a call, Nur would thank him afterwards. “You’re welcome,” the man would reply, “I know you’re very busy. Enjoy your time in Turkey and take care.”

Requests for information began again, this time the details of Uyghurs Nur knew in Istanbul. He did not feel he could refuse, so sent a short list of names both real and fictional.

In July 2019, the Chinese police contacted Abdulla on WeChat and asked — politely — about his family and his job. Then they asked for his WhatsApp number and if he knew the Uyghurs around him. In an attempt to protect himself, he deleted WeChat entirely. Soon after, his parents called his wife’s account. The police had visited their home with a message. It warned that Abdulla had been uncooperative, that he should think about his family members and that he was now on a terror list.

Mehmet, meanwhile, was contacted by numerous security operatives. One sometimes spoke in Turkish and sent him pictures of the Bosphorus and Taksim Square, which he said he had taken during a trip to Istanbul. Once, when Mehmet ignored the man for a few days, he opened the chat and found an innocuous voice message from his mother sending her greetings.

All three men said that simply by carrying a phone, they felt that they were still in the grip of the Chinese state — that the government was always watching them, able to listen in, demand that they become informers or threaten their loved ones.

"The police can contact me whenever they want and ask me whatever they want," Nur said. "And the one thing that makes me very uncomfortable is that I always need to listen to them."

The post How China spies on Uyghurs in Turkey appeared first on Coda Story.

A senior executive from Turkey’s state-backed Anadolu Agency also spoke during the two-day meeting. Ural Yesil, explained how his team had built an electronic tracking device that shows where Anadolu photos are republished, specially by hostile pro-Kurdish media, as a way to fight “black propaganda.”

What he didn’t include in his presentation was the fact that Anadolu Agency, or AA, has become ground zero in Turkey’s information wars. Over the last four years it has reversed its editorial objectivity to provide ardently pro-government points of view, ranging from charges of electoral fraud, libelous accusations against government critics and publishing misleadingly optimistic economic data to its subscribers in 93 countries.

At the time Yesil was speaking, AA was embroiled in a roiling disinformation scandal of its own making -- one where it was accused of helping manipulate news in Turkey’s most recent election.  The agency stopped publicizing results in real time on election night when it appeared that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s candidate would lose the crucial Istanbul mayoral race to the contender from the main opposition Republican Peoples’ Party, or CHP.

The overnight data blackout whipped up a conspiratorial belief among many of the president’s supporters that the election was rigged and fueled a legal challenge by the president’s party against the result, which showed Ekrem Imamoglu had won.

“AA’s pause in the flow of data on election night was a failure of its obligation to inform the public as prescribed by the Constitution,” according to Misket Dikmen, head of İzmir Journalists Association Organization based in İzmir, Turkey. “AA’s action dealt a serious blow to public confidence and its brand name.”

Over the last five years, Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, or AKP, has overseen a widespread media capture akin to the one in Hungary. Now, Erdoğan supporters control nearly 90% of the private media and Turkey is now one of the world’s leading jailers of journalists. The trend has imperiled Turkish democracy by undermining the most basic aspects of elections.

The increasingly partisan tone of AA has been part of that slide. AA has enjoyed a near-monopoly of publishing election results after its rival Cihan news agency was shut down shortly after the 2016 failed military coup that sought to oust Erdogan. The government accused Cihan of alleged links to the Gülen movement, a secretive Islamist sect formerly allied to the AKP that the government blames for the failed putsch.

AA’s current chairman Senol Kazancı served as chief advisor to Erdoğan when he was prime minister, prior to his election as president in 2014. For Turkish opposition candidates, his pro-government bias is clear and unequivocal, as AA and other media outlets routinely demonize Erdogan’s political opposition as terrorists. Dozens of members of opposition parties, especially the organization which traditionally has attracted Turkey’s Kurdish citizens, have been arrested on controversial charges, including support of terrorism.

On the day of the March 31 election, AA’s coverage adopted a less than neutral tone, according to opposition parties. The ground had already been set for the Turkish public who had been receiving a steady media diet of pro-AKP coverage and critical opposition stories.

When polls closed, AA took up its role as the moderator of electoral results. As it flashed poll results to subscribers and Turkish television outlets, Turkey’s Supreme Election Council (YSK) says AA was not getting the results from the electoral body.

Government critics contend that AA was publishing results given to it direct from the president’s party, making them unofficial at best. But the AA operation fizzled when one of the most watched races of the night — the Istanbul mayoral election — tilted against AKP. Suddenly, AA stopped updating results.

Overnight, the opposition CHP party rallied and declared their candidate İmamoğlu the winner of the mayor’s race, citing ballot tallies from the electoral council. Ergodan’s hand-picked candidate, former prime minister Binali Yildirim, refused to concede.

Meanwhile, government critics circulated a photo of AA Chairman Kazancı taken prior to the election in which he was wearing a hat with the president’s name, something they believe shows his personal political bias.

In the morning, the head of the election council declared İmamoğlu the winner by 28,000 votes. Ten hours later, AA resumed its election coverage, with stories focused on AKP members’ outrage and demands for a recount.

The chairman of the YSK, Sadi Güven, declared that he does not know where AA received its election data, and AA officials still have not explained the source of their tallies on election night. Local media outlets such as Odatv reported Kazancı had been ordered to pause the data flow in a phone call from “the top.” Under a bombardment of social media criticism, AA said it had been unable to obtain reliable data from the field so had opted to pause its feed.

Two weeks after the election, Turkish courts halted the AKP legal challenge to the Istanbul race, enshrining the CHP winner.

But on April 19, Turkey’s official gazette published a decree saying the president’s office was formally taking over AA for the next five years, giving it responsibility over its staffing, budget and administration and ending any pretense of neutrality.

For now, Turkey’s opposition CHP party says there is a glimmer of hope in the election outcome because the courts and Turkish citizens challenged the obvious attempt at manipulation.

“When AA was exposed and appeared to be a source of fake news and the results becam eobvious, AA could not help but report the reality. I think this will become the new benchmark. AA will have difficulty in getting the attention of the public from now on when it comes to reporting of election results,” said the CHP deputy chairman Unal Cevikoz.

The post Turkey’s once-venerable news source mired in election controversy appeared first on Coda Story.

The post Pressure at the Gates: Syrians Look to Germany as EU Deal Falters appeared first on Coda Story.