In Turkey, state silence reigns over newsworker’s death

As they gathered by the hundreds in the Turkish city of Adana last week, the mourners of slain Kurdish newsman Kadri Bağdu demanded swift justice for his masked killers.
 
Bağdu, a 46-year old newspaper distributor for Azadiya Welat, Turkey's sole Kurdish-language daily, was gunned down by a pair of hooded assailants as he rode his bicycle to work on October 14.

A single, arresting image of the crime scene, which showed Bağdu's bicycle fallen to the curb, a satchel of undelivered papers scattered on the concrete, has since roiled Turkey's social media, stoking feelings of grief and outrage amongst the country's Kurds.  The pain should be shared by all of Turkey, which has not seen the targeted killing of a news worker since the assassination of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink on 19 January 2007.

More than six days after Bağdu’s death, however, the government has yet to publicly condemn the attack or promise justice for his grieving family.
 
That silence is particularly compromising for Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, who declared in May that a nation's media is free if “a journalist who asks questions can feel safe walking home at night.”
 
To Turkey's Kurds, the incident is a bitter echo of killings which scarred the country's southeast in the 1990s. In those years, thousands of civilians were murdered in a war between the insurgent Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), Turkish security forces, and Hezbollah, a state-backed Islamist militant group. Many of their victims, like Bağdu, were journalists.
 
Turkey relived that bloody period earlier this month, when at least 36 died during protests against Ankara's decision not to aid the Kurdish defenders of Kobane, a Syrian border town besieged by forces of the Islamic State.
 
Most died in street battles between pro-PKK demonstrators and Islamist Kurds, a bloody throwback to violence between PKK partisans and Kurdish Hezbollah in the 90s.
 
The violence now risks “reigniting a cycle of killings that took a decade to die down,” said Zeynel Bulut, a news editor at Azadiya Welat and one of Bağdu's colleagues.
 
Turkey's Kurdish journalists have historically been at the center of that vicious cycle. In 1992, shortly after Azadiya Welat opened in defiance of a Kurdish language ban, co-founder and prolific Kurdish rights activist Musa Anter was shot to death by a state-backed hit squad. Over the next three years, more of its journalists would meet a similar fate.
 
“The state never said a word about Musa's death. They never found his killer,” said Bulut. Twenty two years later, Ankara's silence about Bağdu's assassination leads Bulut to declare, “the state's mentality hasn't changed at all between these deaths.”
 
That ignores Ankara's real, if halting, steps towards peace. The government and jailed PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan have promised to continue a secretive round of peace negotiations, while Kurdish politicians have pledged cautious support for a roadmap of pro-Kurdish reforms unveiled by Ankara.
 
Most of all, under the grace of a 19 month ceasefire, Turkey's southeast has “become used to the comforts of peace,” said Hatip Dicle, a prominent Kurdish politician.
 
Still, peace has brought little relief to journalists at Azadiya Welat. Since 2006, the paper has seen five head editors jailed or flee abroad to escape imprisonment.
 
Dozens of the paper's journalists have been jailed in recent years under Turkey's wide ranging terror laws. Bulut, who was jailed in 2009 under the terror law, was released under a new press law in 2012. “But the terror laws remains a threat held over us,” he said.
 
Bulut adds that Azadiya Welat workers felt physically unsafe even before Bağdu's slaying. On October 2, Azadiya Welat journalist Bisar Durgut was stabbed eight times by a knife-wielding assailant at a protest in Diyarbakır.
 
Many Kurds worry that Ankara is doubling down on, rather than reversing, security-focused tactics of decades past. Citing this month's protests, Prime Minister Davutoğlu last week introduced a controversial security bill which would give Turkey's police dramatically expanded powers of search, seizure and arrest.
 
 
A better approach would be solving protesters' deeper angers, said politician Dicle. “The dust which once lay over these painful memories has been brushed away by recent events. Calls for vengeance have returned,” he warned, calling for Ankara to investigate the nearly 17,000 unsolved killings linked to war in the southeast.
 
Another assassination reminiscent of the 90s rocked the southeast on Sunday, when the former mayor of Suruç, a Turkish border town adjacent to Kobane, was assassinated along with his son by unidentified assailants.
 
Ankara needs to publicly condemn the incident along with Bağdu's murder, and should work to reverse its dismal record in solving such killings, said Dicle. "Kadri was a journalist murdered in a targeted killing. The killers should be brought to justice."

Tags: NULL