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Turkish Police Swoop on Kurdish Journalists in Dawn Raids

October 25, 202211:46
Police seized computers and notebooks as they raided the homes and offices of Kurdish news agency reporters in six cities, detaining at least ten journalists for unknown reasons.
Photo illustration: lechenie-narkomanii/Pixabay.

Turkish police detained at least ten Kurdish journalists from the Mezopotamya and Jin news agencies in six different cities on Tuesday morning.

“As part of an investigation initiated by the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office, raids on houses were carried out in many cities,” Jin News Agency reported.

The news agency said that doors were broken open and journalists taken away handcuffed behind their backs.

The reason for the operation and the details of the investigation have not been announced by the Turkish authorities.

Mezopotamya News Agency said that its journalists were treated brutally by the police, physically and verbally.

“The police confiscated computers, notebooks, newspapers, Kurdish magazines, ID cards and more than 100 books found in a house,” the Mezopotamya reported.

The detained journalists are Diren Yurtsever, Selman Guzelyuz, Emrullah Acar, Hakan Yalcin, Berivan Altan, Zemo Aggoz and Ceylan Sahinli from Mezopotamya News Agency and Habibe Eren, Oznur Deger and Derya Ren are from Jin News Agency, the Journalists’ Union of Turkey, TGS announced.

In July, 16 Kurdish journalists were detained by police in the city of Diyarbakir and held in custody without any reason being given.

The prosecutor’s office has still not issued an indictment and the journalists remain in prison without knowing why they were arrested.

Journalists suspect that those detained on Tuesday could face a similar fate.

“Detaining journalists in dawn operations in these days when the censorship law came into force is an effort to criminalise the profession,” said Ulku Sahin, a lawyer from the TGS.

Sahin was referring to a new law on disinformation that aims to increase government control over the press and social media. Media watchdogs and rights groups have condemned it as a barely veiled assault on what remains of freedom of the media in Turkey.

Turkey remains one of the “world’s worst jailer of journalists”, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, and continues to exert pressure on the media through court cases, fines and prison sentences.

Turkey was ranked in 149th place out of 180 countries in the world in 2022 in the latest press freedom index issued by watchdog organisation Reporters Without Borders, which classifies the Turkish government’s control over media outlets as high.

Hamdi Firat Buyuk