The Erdoğan government’s latest attack on freedom of the press silences numerous alternative voices, taking off the air everyone from metal factory workers to Alevis, Kurds and even Sponge Bob. As police move to close 23 TV and radio stations, press workers make plans for resistance

Turkish police have moved to silence up to 12 TV stations and 11 radio stations that were summarily closed with a decree made possible by the Recep Tayyip Erdoğan government’s counter-coup following the 15 July attempted putsch, raiding offices to seal broadcast rooms.

“This will go down as a day of shame in Turkey’s media history,” said Ercüment Akdeniz, who spoke on behalf of one of the closed channels, Hayatın Sesi TV, during a raid on the channel’s office on 4 October. “But this shame does not belong to us; it belongs to those who are sealing [our offices].”

Turkey’s cabinet passed a decree last week, closing the 23 media organizations, with police starting their raids to formally close the outlets’ offices in Istanbul on 3 and 4 October. The organizations affected include Hayatın Sesi TV, imc TV, Jiyan TV, Azadi TV and even the children’s channel Zarok TV. The shuttered media outlets were accused of “presenting a threat to national security” and duly ordered closed as part of the draconian measures imposed by the Erdoğan government since 15 July.

During the purges, at least 32,000 people have been arrested and many more have been forced from their jobs for alleged involvement in the Gülen movement, which was accused of masterminding the 15 July attempt, or due to sympathies with other “terrorist organizations,” such as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Most recently, over 11,000 teachers affiliated with the left-wing teachers’ union Eğitim-Sen were suspended for participating in a strike to denounce government operations and massacres against local Kurdish populations in Southeast Anatolia late last year.

“If the 15 July coup had been successful, they would have come to this channel with their combat boots on, but today we’ve seen things that are no different than a coup. It’s as if they’re completing the coup, coming here with police to seal the door,” Akdeniz said.

Police arrived at imc TV soon after to close that station – with the channel going off air as it was reporting on the attacks on Hayatın Sesi TV.

“Why are you hiding your faces,” imc TV General Broadcast Coordinator Eyüp Burç told police on air as they arrived at the station. “Long live hell for tyrants.”

Press workers beaten, dragged by their hair

Police also attacked employees at Özgür Radyo in Istanbul’s Kadıköy district later on 4 October, detaining 18 people. One detainee, Ali Sönmez Kayar, suffered head injuries after being beaten by police, while another unidentified press worker was seen being dragged by her along the ground by two police officers. Some of the detained press workers were released from custody following procedures at the Istanbul Police Department in Fatih.

In the evening, police also raided the offices of TV 10, whose programming is primarily aimed at Turkey’s Alevi community in Istanbul’s Esenyurt district, forcing it off air after first encountering resistance from Alevi dedes and others who conducted a sit-down strike.

One day earlier, police moved against Azadi TV, Jiyan TV and Zarok TV. Administrators and viewers of Zarok TV expressed incredulity that the channel, the world’s first Kurdish-language children’s channel, had been closed by the authorities.

“We are struggling to understand what sort of separatist and subversive activity we could have possibly engaged in [by] broadcasting cartoon movies by world-famous producers,” Dilek Demiral, Zarok TV’s chief broadcast coordinator, told Al-Monitor.

Editors said Zarok TV had no political content, noting that it only aired cartoons such as Sponge Bob, the Smurfs and Road Runner dubbed into the Kurmanji, Zazaki and Sorani dialects of Kurdish.

Also on 3 October, Turkish government pressure forced France-based satellite provider Eutelsat to remove Med Nûçe, a news channel which mostly broadcasts in Kurdish, from the air.

‘Won’t become court chroniclers’

Defenders of free speech rallied in Istanbul’s Galatasaray Square on the evening of 4 October to protest the attacks on the media.

Unions and political parties have accused the Erdoğan government of attempting to impose a “single voice” on the country in line with its rhetoric of “one language, one flag and one nation.”

“What does the [ruling Justice and Development Party] AKP want?” said DİSK Basın-İş, the media wing of the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkey (DİSK). “The AKP views the media as the most important vehicle for social engineering and is attempting to manufacture consent with lies and disinformation. To coin a cliché, it does not want the truth to be told. It longs for a media that will see everything in rose-tinted glasses and yearns for a time when journalists will herald the exploits of the palace like court chroniclers.”

The union, however, vowed to continue getting the truth to the public despite the moves to shut alternative media outlets.

“Necessity is the mother of invention. The more your close media organizations, the more we will find new ways. We will scrawl the news on the walls, we will broadcast from our cell phones and we will read our news out loud in the streets. Whatever the case, we will get the truth to the people,” it said.

Sendika.Org