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.

Toward the end of the meal, Osman got up and said to Virta, “Go ahead and finish up, I’ll go vape outside.” He kissed her on the forehead and walked out the door. 

When Virta came out of the restaurant a few minutes later, she saw Osman talking to two men. Initially, she thought they were talking about parking spots. Then one of them grabbed his arm and started dragging him into a car.

Virta tried to get to Osman but the car sped away, leaving her standing on the side of the road with his family.

Virta, who is originally from Finland, knew that Osman had been making YouTube videos about human rights violations in Egypt, but it was a part of his life she knew little about. Osman left Egypt in 2004 after becoming frustrated with the corruption he witnessed within the government while serving as an air force captain. He is now considered a deserter. Two years after leaving his home country, he set up a YouTube channel, @SherifOsmanClub, where he routinely criticized the Egyptian government. Today, the channel has more than 40,000 subscribers. 

A few weeks before traveling to Dubai, Osman had posted a video calling for Egyptians to capitalize on COP27, the United Nations climate conference due to be held that month in Sharm El-Sheikh, to protest the state’s dismal human rights record and the rising cost of living.

In the car, Osman’s mind was spinning. When they approached a turn on the highway that leads to the international airport he began to panic, fearful that he was on a one-way trip to his grave.

“I have seen very, very, very high-ranking Egyptians that have lived in Dubai and opened their mouths with a different narrative on Egypt, and they were actually put on a flight and shipped out to Egypt,” he said, referring to former Egyptian prime minister Ahmed Shafiq, who was deported from the UAE just days after he announced he was running for president in 2017.

Osman soon realized that he was being taken to the Dubai police headquarters.

He was escorted through the back entrance of the building. Osman waited for hours while officers moved frantically around the room, giving him no information. When he asked for clarity, they told him to wait and promised to bring him coffee.

“They actually made me coffee,” he told me, laughing. Osman’s sardonic sense of humor comes out in full force when he recounts the ordeal.

Osman was eventually taken from police headquarters to the Dubai Central Prison where he was made to wait while the authorities decided if he would be deported to Egypt. On November 15, Charles McClellan, an officer in the U.S. Consulate in Dubai, told Virta that Interpol had issued a red notice and extradition case number for Osman.

A few days later, Virta sent an email to Radha Stirling in Windsor, a town in southeast England, pleading for assistance. “Sherif’s deportation to Egypt is a death penalty without a fair trial!” Virta wrote.

Stirling, the CEO of an organization called Detained in Dubai, was no stranger to these kinds of cases. Knowing that the United Arab Emirates could extradite a U.S. citizen to Egypt in the dark of night, Stirling acted quickly. She contacted the American embassy to offer advice, tried to rally support from U.S. politicians and sought media coverage of the case.

And then something strange happened. McClellan told Stirling that he’d gotten new information: According to the UAE, Osman was detained on a “red notice” issued by a less well-known organization: the Arab Interior Ministers Council. An Emirati official speaking to The Guardian confirmed the same.

When Osman learned it was not Interpol but rather the Arab Interior Ministers Council pursuing the case, his heart sank. “That’s when I was like, I’m fucked,” he told me.

A body made up of the interior ministries of all 22 Arab League states, the Arab Interior Ministers Council was established in the 1980s to strengthen cooperation between Arab states on internal security and combating crime. In recent years, it has played an increasingly visible role in extradition cases between Arab countries, particularly in cases that appear to be politically-motivated.

Experts I spoke with say that the shift has occurred as some of the Council’s member states, including the UAE and Egypt, have become notorious for abusing Interpol’s system. Although it is often portrayed in the media as an international police force with armed agents and the power to investigate crimes, Interpol is best understood as an electronic bulletin board where states can post “wanted” notices and other information about suspected criminals. Arab League states are increasingly posting red notices via Interpol in an effort to target political opponents, despite Interpol rules expressly prohibiting the practice.

Ted Bromund, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, thinks tensions surrounding Interpol may be driving increased cooperation within the Council, especially in politically-motivated cases. “My suspicion is that this Arab Ministers Council is basically a reaction to the fact that Interpol is maybe not quite as compliant or as lax as they used to be,” Bromund told me.

It was around 2018, shortly after Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi-born U.S. resident, was murdered in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Turkey, that Abdelrahman Ayyash first heard of the Council. Ayyash is a case manager at the Freedom Initiative, which advocates for people wrongfully detained in the Middle East and North Africa.

Ayyash told me that over the past year he has identified at least nine cases in which the Council was likely involved in the extradition or arrest of political dissidents, with some of them dating as far back as 2016. In one case, Kuwait extradited eight Egyptians to Cairo in 2019 following accusations that they were part of a terrorist cell with links to the Muslim Brotherhood. Ayyash suspects their arrest and deportation stemmed from a notice from the Arab Interior Ministers Council.

In a case highlighted by other advocates from 2019, Morocco extradited activist Hassan al-Rabea to Saudi Arabia after he was arrested on a warrant that The New Arab reported was issued by the Council. Hassan’s brother Munir is wanted by the Saudi government due to his involvement in the country’s 2011 protest movement. Their older brother, Ali, is already in a Saudi prison, where he is facing the death penalty. Another of al-Rabea’s brothers, Ahmed, told me over the phone from Canada that he is now extremely careful about where he travels: “For me, like all my brothers, it is extremely scary to go to any Arab country,” he said.

Agreements enabling more extradition cooperation among Arab states and other nearby countries also are being adopted widely. In 2020, Morocco, Sudan, the UAE and Bahrain signed an agreement with Israel known as the Abraham Accords, which established official relations between the signatories. Since then, Morocco and the UAE in particular have increased their use of repressive technologies developed by Israeli companies when targeting dissidents abroad. Last year, 24% of Israel’s defense exports were to Arab Accords signatories. In 2021, Egypt signed an agreement to strengthen military cooperation with Sudan after years of tensions, including a border dispute. 

Members of the Arab Interior Ministers Council are signatories to the Riyadh Arab Agreement for Judicial Cooperation and the Arab Convention for the Suppression of Terrorism, which prohibit extraditions if the crime is of a “political nature.”

Three U.N. special rapporteurs in June wrote a letter to the Arab League stating that red notices issued by the Council do not comply with member states’ commitments under international law, such as non-refoulement, non-discrimination, due diligence and fair trial.

A few weeks after Osman’s arrest, Virta returned to the U.S. for her job. She adjusted her schedule to work different hours, so she could be awake for part of the night working on his release.

Behind bars in Dubai, Osman was struggling to sleep. “The second I opened my eyes my head would go numb, the exact second my eyes opened, I realized I am in deep shit,” he told me. “I can count the days that I had a full night's sleep on one hand and have left over fingers.”

Virta was certain the UAE was going to extradite him to Egypt. But then, late one night towards the end of December, she got a call.

“I have some good news,” Osman told her. He was going to be released.

Osman was taken to the airport five days later, but it was not until the plane door closed that he allowed himself to believe he was actually going home. When the door clicked shut, he passed out from exhaustion. Osman had spent 46 days in detention.

This past July, Osman filed a lawsuit at the U.S District Court in Washington, D.C. against Interpol and its major general Ahmed Naser Al-Raisi, the UAE and its deputy prime minister, Egypt and its president Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, the Arab Interior Ministers Council, a UAE prosecutor and four other unnamed individuals. The complaint accuses them of international terrorism for their “kidnapping, abduction, imprisonment, prosecution, and threatened extradition” of Osman.

The lawsuit accuses Interpol of colluding to shift the justification for Osman’s detention from an Interpol red notice to one issued by the Arab Interior Ministers Council. An Interpol spokesperson said “there is no indication that a notice or diffusion ever existed in Interpol’s databases,” but Osman’s lawyers say otherwise.

Osman hopes that the case will push Interpol to agree to reforms, such as improving its system for reviewing cases in order to determine whether they are politically motivated. If his lawyers can prove that what the Arab Interior Ministers Council did was an act of terrorism, Osman expects this will make it much harder for Arab states to justify their participation in its functions. “Funding it would be very hard at that point,” he said, as it would effectively mean that the Arab league was funding a terrorist organization. One of Osman’s lawyers also is seeking an agreement from the UAE to stop accepting red notices for U.S. citizens by way of the Council.

Osman and Virta now live in a small city in Massachusetts, where they largely keep to themselves. “The speed limit is 35 miles and people don't say hi to each other. It’s New England, so everybody’s an asshole,” said Osman. “There’s even a word for it: ‘Massholes.’”

He sees a psychologist who specializes in post-traumatic stress disorder. Osman says it is helping him understand what feels like a “new self.”

Osman is trying to launch a cannabis cultivation business, which missed out on some vital funding when investors heard about his arrest. He stayed quiet for six months after his release, but recently went back to posting about Egypt’s human rights record online. 

“I'm back again, talking and tearing down the president and his regime and military regime without mercy,” he said. “I got the news that they are worried in Egypt about my case.”

CORRECTION (09/29/2023): An earlier version of this article described Jamal Khashoggi as a U.S. citizen. It has been corrected to reflect that Khashoggi was a U.S. resident.

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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.

While Israeli companies are perhaps the most high-profile purveyors of spyware, several companies headquartered in the United States and in Europe also sell surveillance technology. And persistent regulatory inconsistencies and blindspots suggest that there is still considerable reluctance, globally, to legislate to prevent the misuse of such technology. In Europe, this week, countries including France, Germany and the Netherlands have been arguing for the need to install spyware to surveil journalists if security agencies deem it necessary. 

As governments vacillate over regulation, human rights abuses continue. Last month, Israel was reported to be using facial recognition technology software called Red Wolf to deliberately and exclusively track Palestinians. Journalist Antony Loewenstein was based for several years in East Jerusalem. In his new book, “The Palestine Laboratory,” he explores how Israel has turned Palestine into a testing ground for surveillance tools that Israeli companies then export to governments around the world. I spoke with Loewenstein, who lives in Australia, over the phone.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

When did the privatization of the Israeli defense industry begin and why was that an important moment?

For the first decade of Israel's existence after 1948, it was all state run. The Six-Day War [in 1967], when Israel, in six days, took control of the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem, really accelerated the defense industry. By the 1970s, there was a fairly healthy private Israeli arms industry. Some of the companies that had been public before were now private. But it's important to remember that both in the past, and also now, with organizations like NSO Group, most of these companies are private in name only. They are arms of the state. 

They are used by the state to forward and pursue their diplomatic aims. In the last 10 or so years, Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, and Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, have gone around the world to countries that are not friends with Israel and have held out Israeli spyware as a carrot. Basically, Israel is saying, ‘If you are friends with us, if you help us, if you join with us in the U.N. in certain ways, if you don't criticize us so much, we will sell you this unbelievably effective spyware.’ And since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there have been huge numbers of European countries and others desperately coming to Israel, wanting defense equipment to protect themselves from any potential Russian attack.

How has Israel’s tech industry changed borders across the world?

Maybe the most prominent example, although not particularly well known, is the Israeli surveillance towers on the U.S.-Mexico border. They were installed a number of years ago, and it doesn't make much of a difference whether it's a Democrat or a Republican in the White House. In fact, Biden is accelerating this technological border, so to speak, and the company that America has used is Elbit, which is Israel's biggest defense company. They have done a lot of work in the West Bank and across the Israel-Gaza border. And the reason the U.S. used Elbit as a contractor was because they liked what Elbit was doing in Palestine. I mean, the company promotes itself as being ‘successful’ in Palestine.

Does this border technology change the willingness of states to commit violent acts?

I don't think necessarily violence becomes less likely. But I think in some contexts, Israeli surveillance tech, what you see being tested on Palestinians, makes it far easier for regimes to not go down the path of killing people en masse. Instead, they just massively surveil their populations, which allows them to get all the information they potentially need without the need for the bad images, so to speak, of mass violence. However, I also think that with an almost inevitable surge in climate refugees and with global migration at its largest since World War II, a lot of nations will actually revert to extreme violence on their borders.

You can see what the EU has been doing in the last few years with the assistance of Israeli drones, unarmed drones. The EU has made the decision with Frontex, their border — so-called — security, to allow the vast majority of brown or black bodies on boats to drown. That's a conscious political decision. They don't feel that way about Ukrainian refugees. And just for the record, I think all people should be welcomed. But the European Union does not see it that way. And the idea that you could possibly in years to come have armed drones hovering over the Mediterranean, firing on boats, shooting boats out of the water, I think is very conceivable.

Does Israel’s defense industry pose a threat to its allies?

It does. To me, the relationship between Israel and the U.S. is like an abusive relationship. On the face of it, very close. I think they love each other. They're expressing admiration for each other all the time. Without the financial, diplomatic and military support from the U.S., Israel would arguably not exist. And yet, according to the most accurate figure that I could find, every single day the NSA, America's leading intelligence agency and the biggest intelligence agency in the world, has roughly 400 Hebrew speakers spying on Israel. Spying on their best friend. And rest assured, that works in reverse as well.

They don't really trust each other. More importantly, in the last few years, the Biden administration has talked about trying to curtail the power of Israeli spyware. A year and a half ago, they sanctioned NSO Group, the company behind Pegasus. A lot of the media was saying, ‘Oh, this is fantastic, the White House is now taking spyware seriously.’ But I think that’s misunderstanding the issue. America doesn’t want competition. They don’t want a real challenge to their dominance in spyware. They're pissed off that Israeli spyware, which has been sold to dozens and dozens of countries around the world, threatens their hegemony.

You wrote in the book about how the Covid pandemic has been a wake up call for Israelis to how they, too, are vulnerable to surveillance.

For many Israeli Jews, for many years, all the surveillance was happening over there. It was happening to Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Israeli Jews didn't really feel it themselves. They were being surveilled, but they were either unaware of it or didn't seem to care. During the pandemic, Israel had lockdowns like a lot of other countries. A lot of Israel’s biggest defense companies — Elbit and NSO Group — pivoted to developing various tools to supposedly fight the pandemic. But it was still mass surveillance, mass monitoring, which they now used within Israel itself. 

For the first time, a lot of Israeli Jews discovered that they themselves were being monitored, that their phones had been hacked. Eventually, the occupation always comes home. Slowly, Israeli Jews are waking up to the reality that what's happening literally down the road in Palestine will inevitably bleed back into their own world.

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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.”

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Yazidis gathered to demonstrate against the return of the refugees. Videos quickly circulated online claiming to show Yazidis throwing stones at a mosque, and the rumors soon turned into explosive accusations that Yazidis were burning the mosque.

The Sunni Endowment Office, the body that administers Sunni mosques in Iraq, confirmed that the reports were false and that no damage was inflicted on the mosque. It was too late. Muslim religious leaders in Iraq released dozens of videos referring to Yazidis as devil worshippers — a historical trope frequently leveled against Yazidis — and called for them to be murdered. Fear spread among the thousands of Yazidis still residing in refugee camps in Iraq that another wave of violence is on the horizon.

Much of the fomenting of violence against Yazidis occurred on Facebook, but hate speech also spread in WhatsApp groups. A member of one WhatsApp group, for example, said they would bring a machine gun to a refugee camp in Kurdistan and kill as many Yazidis as they could. The French Embassy in Iraq released a statement condemning the proliferation of hate speech.

In August 2014, the Islamic State attacked Sinjar, killing over a thousand Yazidis during the first day alone and enslaving thousands of Yazidi women. A coalition of state and non-state actors supported by the United States pushed the Islamic State out of the region, but some 3,000 Yazidi women and children are still missing.

Sinjar is officially under the control of the Iraqi government, but it is a disputed territory claimed by the authority in charge of the autonomous Kurdistan region. In 2020, the Kurdistan Regional Government and the Iraqi government signed an agreement to jointly manage Sinjar, but the area is effectively under the control of different militia groups, including the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (better known as the PKK), a Kurdish militant group, and an umbrella organization called the Popular Mobilization Forces, which has dozens of mainly Shia Muslim armed factions connected to both the Iraqi and the Iranian states.

Between June and December 2020, it was reported that 38,000 Yazidis returned to Sinjar. Around 200,000 Yazidis still reside in refugee camps in the Kurdistan region, unable to return to Sinjar because of a lack of security and financial resources. Human Rights Watch has documented how the Iraqi government failed to provide thousands of Yazidis from Sinjar compensation for the destruction to property caused by the Islamic State, which they are entitled to under Iraqi law.

Sinjar — which is about the size of Rhode Island in the U.S. — is rife with competing interests, said Bayar Mustafa, the dean of the School of Social Sciences at the University of Kurdistan Hewler in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan region of Iraq, putting Yazidis and other minority groups in Sinjar at heightened risk. The Iraqi government and its army are unable to guarantee security in Sinjar, and there is potential for a re-emergence of a movement similar to the Islamic State.

Islamic State was not just a military organization, but a social, religious and ideological movement, and there has been little effort to defeat the lingering influence of the terrorist organization, according to Mustafa.

Within the Kurdistan Region, Yazidis are under the protection of the Kurdistan Regional Government, which has largely welcomed Yazidis and shielded them from mass killings. But the government has not done enough to tackle hate speech, said Hadi Pir, the co-founder of Yazda, an organization that advocates for Yazidis and other minority groups in Iraq and Syria.

The fear that Yazidis may once again become the target of mass killings is compounded by the specter of chaos. “If a big political issue happens, for example the Iraqi government failed, or the Kurdistan Regional Government had some problems between the different groups in power, then again, there is a possibility Yazidis will be the target,” said Pir.

Yazidi activists say that efforts to educate the Iraqi public about Yazidis and past mass killings committed against them have largely failed. Meanwhile, international efforts to hold the perpetrators of the crimes accountable have been slow. Islamic State members have been prosecuted for terrorism, but the Iraqi justice system and international courts have been unwilling or unable to prosecute them for the crimes they committed against Yazidis. German courts have taken matters into their own hands, prosecuting one Islamic State member for aiding and abetting crimes against humanity. He killed  a five-year-old Yazidi girl, Reda, by tying her up in the sun as punishment for wetting her bed.

Attempts at transitional justice, the process whereby a society tries to come to terms with past acts of repression, are largely nonexistent in Iraq, and the current political system is failing to address these issues, said Zeynep Kaya, a lecturer in international relations at the University of Sheffield. “I think people really underestimate the long-term consequences of sexual violence, of conflict, of displacement. These things continue to simmer in societies, and then they just don't disappear easily,” said Kaya.

Many Yazidis face a choice of staying in camps in the Kurdistan region, where the Iraqi government has reportedly stopped providing aid, or returning to Sinjar where they face an insecure environment. Many now are considering leaving Iraq altogether.

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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.”

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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.

The human rights court had determined that states that are party to the European Convention on Human Rights, which includes virtually all European nations except Russia and Belarus, cannot extradite people to China unless the Chinese government can demonstrate that the extradited person will not be tortured or be subject to inhuman and degrading treatment. This shuts down extraditions to a country that does not allow international scrutiny of its penitentiaries, underscoring international concern over the Chinese government’s widening dragnet that tries to bring home dissidents and critics living in exile.

But China still has the capability to tie down its citizens in lengthy legal battles by issuing Interpol red notices — an international alert that requests other countries find and arrest suspects who have fled abroad for extradition or other legal actions — while also deploying an array of illegal tools of repression. Despite Europe's attempt to close the door on China's extradition campaigns, Beijing has ratified a spate of new extradition treaties with countries outside of Europe.

In Liu v. Poland, the human rights court, which is based in Strasbourg, France, ruled that extraditing Hung Tao Liu, a Taiwanese man who had appealed his extradition from Poland, would place him at a significant risk of ill treatment and torture. 

The judgment “substantially reduces the chances of extradition of persons to the PRC”, said Marcin Gorski, referring to the People’s Republic of China. Gorski is a Polish professor of law at the University of Ludz who represented Liu in the case.

China alleges Liu led a major telecommunications fraud. In an earlier case, the Spanish government in 2019 extradited 94 Taiwanese citizens to China as part of the same probe. The human rights court’s ruling covers anyone facing extradition to China, whether they are wanted for political reasons or for white-collar economic crimes.

China’s attempts to bring home dissidents and critics who are Chinese citizens living abroad have been intensifying over the past decade in tandem with China’s integration into the global financial system and its emergence as a world power, according to Nate Schenkkan, a senior director of research at Freedom House whose work focuses on authoritarianism.

Beijing has pursued dissidents in all corners of the world, triggering a response from the U.S. The White House has sought to control technology exports that can be used by China to conduct acts of repression while boosting the capacity of domestic law enforcement agencies to deal with the targeting of Chinese dissidents on U.S. soil. Members of Congress have introduced a bill that would define and criminalize transnational repression in federal law.

Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine last year was a wake-up call for Europe to the security threat posed not just by Moscow but by Beijing. But it has been left mostly to courts to protect people from China’s expanding reach.

European officials are failing to take action when it comes to the threat posed by China, often relying too heavily on the legal system to sort out the problem, said Laura Harth, the campaign director at the China-focused organization Safeguard Defenders.

While in many cases it is unlikely that China will be successful in its extradition attempts, the burden of defending themselves means the targets are quickly bogged down in costly legal battles, said Harth.

Europe’s human rights court has come under criticism from governments in recent years, accused of politicizing the domestic affairs of countries in Europe. The U.K. has made attempts to ignore the court’s rulings on granting prisoners the right to vote, and ministers have flirted with the idea of quitting the European Convention in response to the barriers it poses to the U.K.’s controversial plans on national immigration policy.

But for now, the court’s ruling on Chinese extraditions seems to be respected.

A Chinese businesswoman last summer was detained while passing through Italy. She was on her way to collect her kids from a holiday with their father in Greece. China had issued an Interpol red notice for her arrest and then requested her extradition.

Enrico Di Fiorino, a lawyer representing the businesswoman, said the European Court of Human Rights ruling was an important part of her defense and was likely to have played a role in winning the case.

Di Fiorino’s client is now free from extradition in Italy, but if she travels to other European countries, she is still at risk. If an Interpol red notice is issued against her while she is in a country that the Chinese government has an extradition treaty with, she risks being caught up in another lengthy legal battle. Hung Tao Liu, in the Poland case, spent five years in prison while litigating his extradition.

Formal extraditions comprise a small part of China’s larger campaign to silence and intimidate its dissidents into returning home. Coercion and harassment make up the bulk of China’s tactics. In fact, extraditions accounted for just 1% of the overall number of people returned to China. Involuntary returns, which include kidnappings, accounted for 64%.

Dissidents in Europe live in a climate of fear, frequently surveilled while their families back in China are harassed by the state. Several European countries have been investigating these more clandestine operations, most notably the use of overseas police stations, which can be used to silence Chinese dissidents living abroad.

Italy has been accused of hosting 11 overseas police stations. Chinese dissidents in the country are relieved by Italy’s court ruling while still fearful of China’s reach, said Harth.

In December, China ratified extradition treaties with Kenya, Congo, Uruguay and Armenia.

For Reinhard Butikofe, a German member of the European Parliament, this is concerning. But he cautioned that Europe should get its own house in order before European politicians can criticize other countries for cooperating with China’s extradition strategy. “I think before we can credibly approach anybody else, we have to clean up our own act first,” he said.

The post Europe cracks down on China’s abuse of extradition appeared first on Coda Story.

“Something shady is going on,” said the lawyer at one point.

Little about the atmosphere indicated the stakes: $11 billion, the fate of Nigeria’s economy and a decision that could legitimize the practice of assigning moral responsibility for one country’s corruption inside the courtroom of an entirely different country.

The court case originated in Nigeria in 2008, when the nation’s president at the time, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, decided to end gas flaring in the Niger Delta. Gas flaring involves the burning of natural gas associated with oil extraction and was responsible for heavily polluting communities in the region. Instead, Yar’Adua instituted a policy of channeling the gas into salvaging Nigeria’s perennially ailing electricity sector.

P&ID, a firm registered in the British Virgin Islands and controlled by two Irish nationals with no experience in the oil sector, a skeletal staff and no website, approached the Nigerian government with an unsolicited proposal to refine the wet gas released when extracting oil. According to an agreement signed in January 2010, the Nigerian government would transfer gas for 20 years to a facility which was to be built by P&ID. The company would refine the gas for Nigeria for free. Nigeria would use the gas for power generation and P&ID would make a profit by selling the by-products on the international market.

But neither Nigeria nor P&ID laid a single brick toward fulfilling their contractual obligations, resulting in a lengthy legal tussle that has divided opinion about where responsibility lies when foreign businesses engage in shady deals with former government officials in developing countries. The resulting case shines a spotlight on an international system that can be seen to favor Western companies over poorer nations.

A London tribunal in 2017 found Nigeria guilty of a breach of contract and awarded P&ID $6.6 billion as compensation for what could have been its profit if the deal had materialized. Nigeria refused to comply with the judgment. With interest, the payout ballooned to $11 billion, which amounts to one-third of Nigeria’s foreign reserves, or 10 times its current health budget.

The devastating potential liability that the lawsuit imposes on Nigerian citizens is not widely known by the public. But there is a generally held consensus among Nigerian experts and academics that the country is the victim and that P&ID was in cahoots with corrupt government officials to fleece the country’s resources.

“It is a scam, from the onset, the whole transaction from the beginning was enmeshed in an unclear situation which could be attributed to corrupt practices by both parties,” said Chima Williams, the executive director of Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria.

Nigeria’s central allegation in the case is that the initial contract was always a con in which neither party would perform their side of the bargain and then a sham arbitration would be held, according to Helen Taylor, a legal researcher at Spotlight on Corruption. Nigeria has insisted that P&ID officials — Michael Quinn, who is now deceased, and Brendan Cahill — deliberately worked with officials to defraud Nigeria and bribed the country’s legal representative who negotiated the contract and then again during the arbitration process.

“It is obvious that the so-called contract, coming from the background that the company lacks the profile, the experience, the pedigree even to establish such a kind of business transaction shows there is more than meets the eye in the whole transaction,” said Olarenwaju Suraju, the chairman of the Lagos-based Human and Environmental Development Agency.

In a 2020 U.K. High Court ruling granting the Nigerian government the opportunity to challenge the arbitration case, the judge, Sir Ross Cranston, said that there was strong evidence the contract was obtained through bribes as part of a scheme to defraud Nigeria.

Questions swirl around how a business deal that was supposed to revolutionize Nigeria's energy sector became a threat to the stability of Africa’s biggest economy. According to a detailed 2019 Bloomberg story, Quinn had been involved in numerous failed contracts bearing a resemblance with the P&ID contract.

Quinn circulated among top-ranking military officials in Nigeria including Theophilus Danjuma, Nigeria's former chief of army staff, and former Nigerian presidents Yar’Adua and Olusegun Obasanjo.

Through these connections, Quinn won a contract in 2001 worth tens of millions of dollars to upgrade British tanks for the Nigerian army, but the parts were never delivered. Almost a decade later, Quinn was involved in a 5-million-dollar contract to repair jets and aircraft for the Nigerian Airforce. The Nigerian Airforce reneged on the deal, and Quinn, who by then had become partners with Cahill, took the case to a Nigerian arbitration court. They lost.

In the P&ID contract, the seat of arbitration was the United Kingdom.

“Anti-corruption campaigners have long warned that courts and international arbitration tribunals in the U.K. and elsewhere are being used by criminals to launder money,” said Nick Hildyard, the founder and director of the Corner House, an advocacy group focusing on human rights and the environment. “This is achieved through seeking court orders that monies are due on the fake contract,” he said.

The idea that the fate of a huge chunk of the Nigerian economy can be decided in a Western court is seen by many in the Nigerian government as a legacy of colonialism. Outside Nigeria, experts say the case is less an extension of colonialism but instead points to culpability among those same Nigerian government officials.

Everyday Nigerians and business people understand that the case “isn’t about colonial legacy but about Nigerian officials and all their kleptocratic inklings,” said Matthew Page, an expert on Nigeria at Chatham House, an international affairs think tank in London.

And for Nigerian analysts and academics, it is a classic case of transnational businesses having too much sway in developing countries.

“This is the kind of scheme by some of these companies, that still operate with their colonial imperial mentality, to sign contracts with many of the developing countries and partners when they are very much aware that their process of contract agreement is actually a product of fraudulent concoction,” said Suraju of the Human and Environmental Development Agency.

Nnimmo Bassey, the former executive director of Environmental Rights Action, is in agreement. “Transnational corporations are quickly assuming imperial powers and actively procure rules that favor them against nations,” he said.

In 2016, Argentina was forced to pay out over $4 billion to a group of hedge funds following a 14-year battle — which included the seizing of an Argentine military ship in Ghana — over a debt the country had defaulted on in 2001 during a disastrous depression. Argentina’s hand was finally forced when a U.S. judge blocked the country from paying other creditors until the hedge funds had been paid. The case was an example of the immense pressure that can be brought to bear on governments dependent on having unfettered access to the global financial system.

Reports that the VR Capital Group, a private equity firm specializing in distressed assets whose subsidiary bought a 25% stake in P&ID following their arbitration win in 2017, might go down this route by seizing Nigeria’s assets abroad has rattled Nigerian government officials.

International investment agreements are “highly problematic” because they strip “national governments of sovereignty and effectively give investors the upper hand,” said Hildyard of Corner House.

The Nigeria case is less about corruption in Nigeria and more about the U.K. legal system, said Taylor from Spotlight on Corruption. “This was an arbitration held in London, involving London-based lawyers, and it’s the legitimacy of that system which was allegedly abused to cover up and give a veneer of legal legitimacy to what is alleged to be a corrupt deal,” she said.

In 2020, the U.K. Home Secretary Priti Patel urged Nigeria to pay P&ID, infuriating Nigerian analysts. “I find continuities between this sham contract and previous sham protectorate contracts that were not only signed under dubious circumstances but also that exploited the significant power disparity and vulnerability of leadership unaccountability and poor oversight,” said Akin Oyewale, an assistant professor of international politics at the University of Warwick.

As Nigeria prepares for a crucial presidential election this month, the prospect of a debilitating payout will be a major issue to contend with. The next president is set to inherit a battered economy struggling with rising inflation, a heavily depreciating currency and an inability to service national budgets. But the posture that Nigeria is a victim of past corruption is also a message that is very well received by business people in the country.

The trial will end in March 2023 and it will be months before a decision is made. If the judge rules in favor of P&ID, it will no doubt provoke outrage within Nigeria. Anger is unlikely to deter P&ID and its backers, who have been dogged in their pursuit of a lucrative judgment. The case has garnered little interest in the U.K., which does not bode well for anyone seeking to reform the country's legal system that they see as facilitating the exploitation of poorer countries.

Correction: an earlier version of this story stated the court will come to a decision by March 2023. It is unknown when a decision will be made.

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This store on Copnor Road is part of the Southern Co-op chain, which has become embroiled in a battle with privacy rights campaigners over its use of real-time facial recognition technology. In July, civil liberties group Big Brother Watch filed a complaint to the U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office against Southern Co-op and Facewatch — the company providing the surveillance system.

Joshua Shadbolt, a duty manager at the Copnor Road supermarket, told me that high levels of theft have forced him and his colleagues to hide, for instance, all the cleaning products behind the till. Without the technology, he fears customers would be given free range to steal. Since Covid restrictions were lifted in the U.K. in early 2021 following a third national lockdown, shoplifting has been on the rise. This is likely to have been compounded by a cost-of-living crisis. Still, even if theft has not reached pre-pandemic levels, for Shadbolt, the biometric camera has been an effective and necessary tool in tackling crime.

For Big Brother Watch, the camera is a breach of data rights and individual privacy. Every time a customer walks into a shop or business that uses Facewatch’s system, a biometric profile is created. If staff have reasonable grounds to suspect a customer of committing a crime, whether it’s shoplifting or disorderly conduct, they can add the customer to a Facewatch list of “subjects of interest.” Facewatch’s policy notice says that the police also have the power to upload images and data to Facewatch’s system.

Anyone uploading the data, which includes a picture of the suspected person’s face, their name and a short summary of what happened, must confirm that they either witnessed the incident or have CCTV footage of it. But the policy does not indicate what the bar for “reasonably suspecting” someone is.

When a subject of interest is reported to the Facewatch system, it automatically shares that person’s data with any client within an eight-mile radius in London, a 15-mile radius in other cities and a 43-mile radius in very rural areas. This means that a person banned from one store in West London could walk into a store owned by an entirely separate company in East London and be refused entry. Every month, Facewatch also adds to their watchlist subjects of interest posted on police websites and on the website of Crimestoppers, a crime prevention charity.

The data of subjects of interest can be stored for up to two years, unless the police ask Facewatch to keep their data in the system, while everyone else’s data is held for three days.

Big Brother Watch’s complaint alleges that the Southern Co-op chain and Facewatch lack transparency about how they process people’s data and argues that they process more data than is necessary for generating and storing watchlist entries.

“It's really hard with private surveillance systems like this for citizens to really know what's going on, how their data is being processed, who goes on the watchlist and who doesn't,” said Silkie Carlo, the director of Big Brother Watch under whose name the complaint was made. “I feel very, very confident that this is not only unlawful,” she added, “but a significant breach of people's privacy rights and data protection rights and that this precedent setting is actually really, really important.”

The former Information Commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, in June 2021 raised concerns about the use of live facial recognition technology in public places, stating that “there is often a lack of awareness, choice or control for the individual in this process.”

The U.K. government has been slow to implement sufficient guidance on the use of live facial recognition technology, while the European Union has been better at dealing with the issue. One Dutch supermarket was forced to stop using facial recognition in 2019 due to pressure from the country’s data protection authority.

The EU is in the process of drafting new regulations on the use of artificial intelligence, including the use of facial recognition technology. But the AI Act has been criticized by consumer groups for failing to address the use of facial recognition technology by companies in public areas.

As customers filtered out of the Southern Co-op into an overcast afternoon in Portsmouth, they were largely unaware of, and did not care about, the presence of a biometric camera. Abbie Grove, a middle-aged woman clad all in black, told me: “I couldn’t give less of a shit, unless I was a shoplifter.”

A survey commissioned by the Information Commissioner in January 2019 found that only 38% of the public supported the use of live facial recognition technology by retailers. But when it came to policing, over 80% of respondents said that it was acceptable for law enforcement to use the technology.

Despite the survey showing that most people don’t support private businesses using facial recognition technology, much of the debate so far has focused on its use by law enforcement. In August 2020, the U.K. Court of Appeal found that South Wales Police’s use of facial recognition technology was a breach of privacy, data protection laws and equality rights. But since then South Wales Police have continued using it with some tweaks, and last year the Metropolitan Police, who cover most of London, ramped up its use of the technology.

One of the complaints made in the South Wales case was that the facial recognition systems pose the risk of subjecting people to racial bias. Studies have shown that the technology can be worse at identifying people of color than white men. In one recent case, a Black man in Georgia, U.S., was incorrectly matched with a suspect in a robbery and jailed for a week.

For Carlo, Big Brother Watch’s complaint is a landmark. “If it were lawful for private companies to create watchlists…of people that they don't want in their shops, without a criminal threshold,” she said, “especially in the moment of technological advance that we're living in, it would really open the floodgates.” While businesses argue that facial recognition technology is an essential aid to ensuring the safety of both customers and employees, there is mounting evidence in the U.S. that the tech is often used punitively and opaquely, and is frequently inaccurate.

As Carlo put it, the use of such technology by corporations is “privatized policing with the backing of extreme biometric surveillance.”

If Facewatch, whose systems are expanding into other stores, is absolved by the Information Commissioner of any wrongdoing, it will be a win for supporters of additional digitalization of security. For privacy rights campaigners, the commissioner’s decision is a first line of defense in a long battle to protect people’s right to privacy, to protect their right to be free of near constant surveillance.

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Bird flu, as it is more commonly known, is the latest in a series of disease outbreaks that have plagued the U.K. over the past two decades. Outbreaks, including foot-and-mouth disease in the early 2000s, swine flu in 2009 and Covid since 2020, have been made worse by a political system that, at its best, treats science with indifference and, at its worst, with disdain.

In the midst of the bird flu outbreak, an October 2022 parliamentary committee report revealed that the main facility for the country’s Animal and Plant Health Agency, a site in the town of Weybridge, on London’s outskirts, is being underfunded. This puts the U.K. at risk of entering another deadly outbreak unprepared. 

This neglect is also deepening a rift between the scientific community, whose job it is to advise, and politicians, whose job it is to decide what course of action to take during public health crises. This neglect was laid bare in the government’s Covid response. In early 2020, members of parliament appointed a committee of scientists to advise policymakers on how to tackle the virus, known as the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies. But nearly every aspect of this process happened in secret — the names of committee members were not made public and meetings happened behind closed doors.

In response to the near-total lack of autonomy and transparency in the official advisory group, in May 2020, experts set up an independent advisory group (known as the Independent Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies or Independent SAGE) that works on a volunteer basis to provide independent scientific advice to the government and the public on how to minimize deaths and support the country’s recovery. In a March 2022 review of its work to date, Independent SAGE wrote: “Scientific advisers should be critical friends to governments, speaking truth to power.”

Other experts too have called for scientific advisors to be given more autonomy as a mechanism for ensuring politicians do not just seek out whichever advice best aligns with their other political goals.

But so far, this doesn’t seem to be happening. After the country steered itself past the worst of the pandemic, a separate parliamentary report criticized the U.K.’s approach to the crisis, saying it was “too reactive as opposed to anticipatory.” Ministers have been trotted out to reassure the U.K. public and global partners that the government is doing everything it can to prepare for future pandemics. 

Yet many such assurances have proven hollow, as the government also has stepped back from several vital research efforts. One is the Pandemic Sciences Institute, which was designed to improve bio-defenses by providing the U.K. with the knowledge and strategies required to respond to the next major outbreak and avoid the failures that defined the Covid response. According to the Telegraph, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson promised the institute over $175 million but never delivered. Whether the U.K.’s new conservative prime minister, Rishi Sunak, who came into power in October, will follow through on this and other bold commitments is yet to be seen.

Kate Bingham, who in 2020 steered the U.K.’s vaccine procurement and deployment as the chair of the Vaccine Taskforce, in late November told a parliamentary inquiry that the government was failing to prepare for a future pandemic by not supporting scientific research into variants and by allowing access to vaccines to wane. Baffled by this lack of leadership, Bingham said she is beginning to see it as “deliberate Government policy not to invest and not to support the sector.”

When conservative politicians ignored their own government’s advice by refusing to wear masks in the House of Commons, it angered scientists, with some frustrated by what they saw as a pervasive culture of prioritizing ideological concerns over scientific advice. For Kit Yates, a member of the independent advisory group and senior lecturer in mathematical sciences at the University of Bath, it was evidence that the U.K. has not learned its lesson from the Covid pandemic.

Scientists have also felt that the government is too willing to throw them under the bus when things go wrong — prior to becoming prime minister, Sunak said that scientists should not have been given so much power in responding to Covid. Yates himself sees a link between this rhetoric and attacks that he personally received online and in the press, as political frustration with scientists trickles down into society.

Natalie Bennett, a Green Party member in the House of Lords, says that the political right are more resistant to science and that the current government is worse at dealing with science than any other for the last twenty years. But beyond ideology, neglect is also underpinned by a lack of understanding of science across the political system.

“When you look at so many of the issues, whether it's Covid, whether it's the climate emergency and nature crisis, whether it's issues of public health, there's so few people from either side of the house, who know how to ask the right questions,” Bennett said.

The consequences of neglecting science are not just limited to the Covid outbreak. Bennet told me over the phone that future disease outbreaks could be far worse than Covid.

In October 2022, as concerns about the bird flu outbreak were reaching a crisis point, the Public Accounts Committee in the U.K. Parliament released a report warning that the U.K. government was failing to prioritize the significant threat posed by animal diseases to the country’s health, trade, farming and rural communities. It raised concerns about the state of the U.K.’s main animal health facility at Weybridge, which it said “has been left to deteriorate to an alarming extent,” leaving the country unprepared for high category animal disease outbreaks or to deal with more than one outbreak at a time.

After a long period of underinvestment and mismanagement, there is now a redevelopment plan to improve the site, but this will take more than 12 years, and the committee is unsure the government will cough up the billions of dollars needed to properly carry it out. The government is underestimating the threat posed by diseases such as rabies, bovine tuberculosis and African swine flu, said the committee. 

While bird flu has decimated bird populations, causing devastating effects on the livelihoods of poultry farmers, a swine flu outbreak could do the same to pigs and the pork industry in the near future.

The Weybridge facility and the government department that runs it have been essential in ensuring the U.K. catches animal disease outbreaks early, according to Paul Wigley, a professor of avian infection and immunity at the University of Liverpool. Wigley’s concerns are not just limited to known diseases such foot-and-mouth disease but also to “novel” ones.

“There is always a chance that something will leap from somewhere that we have not seen before or become a new variant of something that we have not really seen before,” Wigley said.

Such diseases could pose a significant threat to human life. We have had Covid. It is now widely accepted that another pandemic is not a question of if but when. Like a turkey voting for Christmas, the government’s neglect of science puts the U.K. at risk of sleepwalking into that crisis.

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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.

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“We are united by the rejection of the so-called ‘rules-based order’ that the former colonial powers are imposing on the world,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told the audience via video message. “Russia greatly appreciates the fact that despite unprecedented and crude pressure, our African friends, like the overwhelming majority of the international community, have not joined the anti-Russia sanctions but continue developing dialogue and cooperation with us.”

Lavrov was warming the small crowd up for the event’s headline attendee Kemi Seba, who took to the stage for 20 minutes to condemn the West and wax lyrical about the benefits of Russian influence across the African continent.

Seba is part of a growing network of self-styled pan-African influencers who enjoy a close relationship with the Kremlin in return for spreading Russian disinformation. Ranging from disseminating anti-French rhetoric to extolling the virtues of sanctioned oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group mercenaries, these diligent mouthpieces have also justified Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.

Just hours after the Russian invasion on February 24, Seba took to Facebook to argue that Moscow was “trying to reconquer Russian lands.” Another well known influencer, the Swiss-Cameroonian Nathalie Yamb, commented that Ukraine is “full of neo-Nazis” and suggested that Kyiv is responsible for causing the conflict. The ferocity and reach of this disinformation has become so widespread that in early November the U.S. State Department issued an extraordinary statement that lambasted both Seba and Yamb and drew strong correlations between them and Prigozhin. “Understanding and exposing the role of disinformation in the Kremlin’s Africa strategy,” the State Department told us in response to written questions, “is a key step toward limiting its potential impact on the continent.”

French–Beninese Seba has amassed 1.1 million followers on Facebook and almost a quarter of a million subscribers on YouTube. The former head of the Russian-backed Afrique Media, the 40 year-old has crafted a reputation for spreading visceral anti-French rhetoric and claiming the West is on a mission to “destroy Vladimir Putin, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East.” He is also the head of the organization Urgence Panafricaniste and the clout behind the relaunched media outlet Afrique Résurrection. 

Seba’s closest confidant is Yamb, whom he has described as “my blood.” Powered by 233,000 subscribers on YouTube, the 53-year-old has styled herself as “La Dame de Sochi” after attending Putin’s Russia-Africa Summit in 2019. Her repeated verbal attacks on Franco-African relations led to the French Minister of the Interior banning her from French territory in January for “incitement to hatred and violence.”

“Some of these influencers have gained quite a following recently, but the way to think about them is that they are just part of a broader disinformation system that Russia is deploying in Africa through Wagner,” said Mark Duerksen, a research associate at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, an academic institution within the U.S. Department of Defense. “[They are monetizing their work] through YouTube ad revenue, speaking engagements at universities in Russia, or paid attendance at conferences in Russia. They fashion themselves as pseudo intellectuals adopting tropes from a deep history of Pan-Africanism to their purposes," Duerksen said.

Pan-Africanism, in its modern form, was established in the early 20th century in response to the enduring legacy of European slavery and imperialism. Supported by intellectuals such as the American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, Pan-Africanism, in its broadest form, seeks to unify all people of African heritage against racism and colonialism. Today, Russia has latched onto some elements of this anti-colonial feeling to generate support for the war in Ukraine. Using historical narratives that focus on Soviet Russia’s engagement with African nations and Cold War support for resistance groups in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, Moscow has successfully argued that, unlike its 21st century rivals in the West, it doesn’t have a colonialist past or attitude.

It is an argument that has popular resonance across much of Africa. According to the Zimbabwean writer and editor Percy Zvomuya, “in the minds of some people in southern Africa, Russia, not Ukraine, is the direct successor of the USSR, the state that supported us during our own struggles against colonialism and apartheid.” And, he said, “that Ukraine receives much of its weaponry and diplomatic support from Britain and America makes it easy for Russia to say ‘but, look, these are the people who oppressed you yesterday.’”

The West’s manner in dealing with Africa continues to grate. Naledi Pandor, South Africa’s minister of international relations and cooperation, complained in August about “patronizing bullying” by European countries over the war in Ukraine. Both she and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa took aim at the United States over a bill overwhelmingly passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, titled “Countering Malign Russian Activities in Africa.” They said the bill would punish the economic aspirations of Africans for doing essential business with Russia. The bill, reports suggest, is highly unlikely to become law but the language rankled. Pandor described it as “offensive” and disrespectful of African sovereignty.

In reality, though, it’s not clear that the Kremlin is any more respectful of African sovereignty. In many areas that have a high concentration of Russian disinformation, the Wagner Group is operating in the background. Reported to have been founded around 2014, Wagner is a Kremlin-backed private military organization that helps undemocratic leaders hold onto power in return for access to natural resources or strategic locations. A key factor in ensuring their (and the Kremlin’s) foothold in a country is a vast sea of disinformation that spews from social media influencers and Russia-backed organizations such as the Association for Free Research and International Cooperation, which supports many small African media outlets.

This network of positive coverage has allowed Wagner to destabilize entire regions of the African continent. In the western Sahel region, Mali’s ruling junta has moved from traditional assistance from France to support from Russia. In December 2021, Wagner mercenaries arrived in the country. Under the guise of tackling the landlocked nation’s warring militant groups, Wagner’s presence has resulted in alleged human rights abuses and shored up support for the country’s leadership.

“The [Russian] disinformation campaign in the region began long before the war in Ukraine. It really started when the Malian government had tensions with France and made an agreement with the Wagner Group,” Rida Lyammouri, from the Policy Center for the New South, a Morocco-based think tank, told us. “We know one of Wagner’s objectives is natural resources and Mali is rich in gold, but there is no evidence yet that that’s what they’re looking for.”

At the three-day US-Africa Leaders summit, which concluded on December 15, Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo alleged that Burkina Faso, one of the largest gold producers on the continent, had paid the Wagner Group with a mine to come into the country to contain insurgent violence. There have been two coups in Burkina Faso this year alone, the latest on September 30. Earlier this month, the recently appointed prime minister flew to Moscow on a Malian jet; his visit was reportedly “private.”  

Back online the depth of Russian influence over social media users does not just extend to top-tier influencers who have well-established links to Moscow. Other individuals are also jumping in on the game, especially on the issue of the war in Ukraine. Pointing to hypocrisy in Western criticisms of the Russian invasion, “whataboutism” has become a typical rhetorical strategy for those eager to parrot a pro-Russia line.

General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, the son of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and arguably the country’s tweeter-in-chief, said on February 28 that “the majority of mankind (that are non-white) support Russia’s stand in Ukraine.” Kampala has been drifting towards Moscow as the East African nation becomes increasingly authoritarian. In Nigeria, the burgeoning influencer Joseph C. Okechukwu has taken to Twitter almost daily to update his 38,000 followers on the war in Ukraine where he regularly alludes to Ukrainian soliders having Nazi sympathies. The Cameroonian influencer Franklin Nyamsi has railed against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, while praising Russia for supplying weapons to Mali. 

Some analysts argue, however, that the collective bark of these influencers is worse than their bite. Two reports by the Brookings Institution, a U.S. think tank, suggest that although Russia has targeted the African continent’s information sphere to shore up support for its war in Ukraine, Russian disinformation does not “gain the same traction or attention on Twitter” as narratives closer to the hearts of African audiences. 

“The same messages are being spread on Facebook and Youtube, but what we learned from our research on Twitter is that the disinformation about the war, even disinformation about grain, is not getting as much engagement as established grievances,” said Mary Blankenship, the author of the report alongside Aloysius Uche Ordu. “What I also found interesting was that it’s official channels that have the most effect, such as a tweet from the Russian Embassy, rather than accounts with a significant following.” 

It is unlikely that Moscow’s interest in the African continent will end anytime soon. Since 2020, Russia has been Africa’s biggest supplier of arms. Long before the invasion of Ukraine, Putin has been driving Russian foreign policy to engage more with African states, to piggyback on Chinese investments and to diminish Western dominance over the continent. However, even with Wagner’s malign influence, it is unclear if the Kremlin’s concentrated appeal to African anti-colonial sentiments, and pledges of support outside human rights frameworks, is actually yielding a return on both geopolitical and financial levels. According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, it is also not known if Russian influence across the continent will create a Russian power base that will “expand its influence in the years to come.”

Towards the end of his speech at the “Russia-Africa: What’s Next?” youth forum in October, Lavrov made sure to reference the second edition of the Russia-Africa Summit and Economic Forum due to take place in St. Petersburg next summer and to promote “peace, security and development.” There is little doubt that sitting in the audience will be Prigozhin’s influencers dutifully taking notes for their audiences back home.

A quotation from Mark Duerksen has been changed post-publication to reflect his intended meaning.

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“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.

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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.

Translators and interpreters like Mahmut have been indispensable for non-Uyghur journalists reporting on the Uyghur genocide. With more than one million Uyghurs imprisoned by the Chinese state, Mahmut’s ethnicity alone means that in Xinjiang she has a significant chance of being arrested and sent to a camp.

Journalists — and advocacy groups, police-makers, and academics — are forced to rely on a small number of dedicated bilingual Uyghur-English speakers. Experienced translators estimate there are 10 to 20 people in the world capable of and willing to do public Uyghur-to-English interpretation, meaning to expose themselves to working in the view of the public —and under the gaze of the Chinese state. 

In the past several years, meticulously reported journalism has sent out global shock waves, and has fueled a movement to hold China accountable. Journalists have contributed essential reporting to public understanding of the scale of abuses in Xinjiang. Their ability to work, however, is hampered by the risks facing the Uyghur language translators they must hire to conduct their interviews and research. 

Journalists reporting on Uyghurs say they confront a growing risk to their physical safety from China’s security apparatus, online trolls, and numerous other sources. Uyghur language translators face these same risks –and more because of their families living in Xinjiang. Uyghur translators almost always have close family and other relatives and friends living in China and they, as much as the translators living abroad, are vulnerable to state reprisal, which can include torture and imprisonment.

That has meant that Uyghur translators are in a “dire shortage,” said Elise Anderson, an American scholar and Uyghur translator. Anderson is among an even smaller number of non-Uyghurs fluent in the language who are willing and able to work as translators. 

In fact, there are many fluent Uyghur-English speakers outside China. There is a growing diaspora of native speakers in both languages who have interpretation-level fluency, such as Uyghur university students studying in the West. There are an estimated 12,000 Uyghurs in Europe. Many are young, however, and Uyghur students say they are especially vulnerable. Many young Uyghurs study and work at universities and institutions where China has significant influence.

Mahmut is a well-known singer — a member of a group of London-based musicians from across Central Asia. She also runs the U.K. office for the World Uyghur Congress, an international advocacy organization founded in 2004. But she spends a lot of her time traveling internationally to interpret for journalists, academics and NGOs wanting to speak to former detainees about China’s sprawling network of detainment camps.

My eyes are weary from looking out for you.
My hands are sore from praying for your return
My heart bleeds from being torn apart,
My dear son, when will you return?
Everyday I wait on the road,
Yearning for your appearance all day long
the nights are sleepless until dawn breaks
My dear son, when will you return?
Without you by my side I am alone
No food can pass my lips as my throat is too dry
I worry if you have eaten or not
My dear son, when will you return.

Born in a town called Ghulja in Xinjiang, near the Kazakhstan border, Mahmut last returned home more than 20 years ago. Six years ago, the Chinese state prohibited her family from visiting her in the U.K. Five years ago, China launched the rapid construction of an enormous web of detainment camps under the Chinese Communist Party official Chen Quanguo. Four years ago, Mahmut heard from her brother for the last time. He said, "Leave us in God's hands. We leave you in God's hands too." Often dressed in stylish Uyghur-patterned clothing, Mahmut is a target of the Chinese state.

“When I had cancer in 2013, I sent a letter from the oncologist who stated the seriousness of the disease and said that I need family to look after me,” she said over the phone. “Even with that letter, they wouldn't allow any of my nine siblings to have a passport and travel.”

In late 2016, Mahmut’s family stopped answering her phone calls. Her brother informed her that any association was too dangerous. She says that some people she knows who traveled back to Xinjiang were stopped by state security police and enquired about her work in the U.K.

“The families of people who are active, they are considered to be significant people, and are surveilled more heavily compared to others, and so in order to avoid really severe punishment, the only thing they can do is to completely cut off or declare that she is not my sister anymore,” Mahmut said.

The Chinese state has a long history of oppressing its Uyghur minority, including a crackdown on Uyghur culture and religion during Mao’s 1966 Cultural Revolution, when longstanding Han prejudices against minority beliefs were reinforced. Repression of Uyghurs has accelerated in the 21st century, first as part of the United States’ post-9/11 War on Terror and then following 2009 riots in the city of Urumqi.

These events combined with some high-profile terrorist attacks, committed by Uyghurs, led to President Xi Jinping announcing a “People’s War on Terror” against Muslim minorities. A rapid build-up of surveillance in the region followed. By 2021, the independent Uyghur Tribunal had declared that China was committing a genocide against the Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities.

As pressure increases on Uyghurs within China, so too has transnational repression. The lawyer Rodney Dixon, representing two Uyghur advocacy groups, has repeatedly sought to bring a case to the International Criminal Court alleging that Chinese agents have been operating in Tajikistan to deport Uyghurs and convert others into being informants.

Deportations of Uyghurs to China have been occurring in multiple countries. In December 2021, a Moroccan court approved the extradition of Idris Hasan, who had worked at a Uyghur diaspora newspaper in Turkey and also worked as a translator. 

Among the few younger Uyghurs willing to take the risk of working as a translator is Arslan Hidayat, a 34-year-old Uyghur-Australian activist and YouTuber who speaks fluent English and Uyghur.

Pro-Beijing online influencers have tried to discredit Hidayat, who says that when he is not being accused of working for the CIA or the National Endowment for Democracy, he is accused of supporting ISIS or Turkestan Islamic Party, the loose successor to the obscure East Turkestan Islamic Movement, an organization that the U.S. had labeled a terrorist organization. “We are labeled as sell-outs and puppets of the West,” said Hidayat.

Hidayat says if he tries to respond to his online attackers, trolls will unleash a torrent of new allegations. The only successful tactic is silence. Still, he frequently posts videos on his channel Talk East Turkestan.

Hidayat believes public translation work forces translators into the role of activists, opening up translators to new risks. Hidayat has never received direct threats, but when he recently returned to Australia after living in Turkey, his mother received phone calls from several of her friends warning that her son was linked to terror groups around the world. She believes these friends had been contacted by the Chinese embassy in Australia.

Of greater concern for Hidayat, like all the ethnic Uyghur interpreters and translators I spoke to, is that he still has family in China who have been interviewed by police and have been forced to distance themselves from him. “I must be doing something impactful for them to approach my family in this manner,” he said.

Zubayra Shamseden has similar experiences, receiving messages that discredit her translation work, and since 2015 she has not spoken to her family back home. One of her brothers is a political prisoner and her entire family is under constant surveillance. “Because of my work my family is paying a heavy price, but they are willing to sacrifice for what I do.”

Other translators work behind the scenes. I spoke to two translators who anonymously work on testimonies.The targeting of translators working with journalists is a facet of China’s larger project to erode or even extinguish the Uyghur language, say scholars. The Uyghur language has been banned from schools, Uyghur language newspapers have closed, and Uyghur language books are largely missing in Xinjiang while intellectuals are being targeted for punishment.

“Many Uyghurs have found safe havens abroad, but they're still dealing with educational systems that do not have a space to accommodate the Uyghur language. Language is one means of intergenerational transmission of knowledge and ways of life,” said Elise Anderson, the Uyghur-speaking researcher at the Uyghur Human Rights Project. “People have been forced into a situation where no matter where they are in the world and no matter what they're doing, it's very difficult for them to pass on their native language to their children in the way they would most prefer.”

China’s repression of journalists: no more borders, no more constraints

China’s crackdown on Uyghurs reaches the Arctic

Isobel Cockerell

Immersive simulation attempts to pierce apathy over the Uyghur genocide

Emin Ozmen / Magnum Photos

Why targeting ethnic minority journalists is central to China’s crackdown on the press

Erica Hellerstein

The post Threatened, harassed, punished: The Uyghur translators defying China to tell Xinjiang’s story appeared first on Coda Story.