Gaziantep forced to snub NY Times journalist
President’s office cancels award to Stephen Kinzer – saviour of Zeugma mosaics
27.05.2015
The tickets were printed, the places at the banquet table were all but set, but at the last minute the municipal authorities of Gaziantep were forced to withdraw an offer to make a distinguished American journalist an honorary citizen of the city.
Stephen Kinzer, a former New York Times correspondent in Turkey and now a fellow at Brown University had actually made the trip to the southeast of Turkey when shame faced official told him that they had been forced to cede to a personal order from the presidential office to cancel the ceremony.
The award, scheduled for 26 May, was meant to acknowledge Kinzer’s role in saving many of the now fabled Roman mosaics at the Zeugma cite from being flooded by the Birecik dam project fifteen years ago. A front page story in the New York Times prompted an international rescue dig. The site and the resulting museum have become a principal attractions for a city that now attracts some million visitors every year.
The eleventh hour decision to snub this successful example of civic journalism was prompted by an editorial Kinzer wrote last January for the Boston Globe in which he bemoaned President Erdoğan’s transformation from reformer to autocrat.
“Once seen as a skilled modernizer, he now sits in a 1,000-room palace denouncing the European Union, decreeing the arrest of journalists, and ranting against short skirts and birth control,” he wrote. That editorial was faxed to the Gaziantep mayor’s office with a letter describing Kinzer as “an enemy of our government and our country,” according to local sources.
Earlier this week Erdoğan denounced the New York Times which for publishing an editorial board leader denouncing Erdoğan for attempting to “manipulate” the political process in a way that would further weaken the country’s battered democracy. It cited the president’s “long history of intimidating and co-opting the Turkish media.”
Kinzer, in an editorial for Tuesday’s Boston Globe also placed his rough treatment in the context of renewed pressures by the authorities to pressure the media. An excerpt from that article is reprinted below (with permission from the author) and the full text available here.
These have been a remarkable few days ın Erdogan’s escalating war on the press. Last week one of his faithful prosecutors asked courts to close two television stations for “promoting terrorism.” Then Erdogan denounced one of the country’s leading newspapers, Hurriyet, for printing a headline he found offensive. In reply, Hurriyet published an editorial asking, “Mr. President, you say we ‘live our lives in fear.’ Why should we live in fear? Why does the president of a democratic country tell his citizens that they live in fear? Are fear and democracy two concepts that can stand side by side?”
On Monday, during a speech ın Istanbul, Erdogan denounced The New York Times for publishing an editorial criticizing his “brute manipulation of the political process” in advance of parliamentary elections scheduled for June 7.
“You are a newspaper and you will know your place,” he snarled. “You are interfering in Turkey by running this story, and going outside the boundaries of your freedom.”
Those boundaries seem to be tightening in Turkey. For me, this means that the space on my wall reserved for my honorary citizenship certificate will remain empty. Perhaps I will hang an empty frame to remind me of the honor I almost won.