Spot the deliberate mistakes
When governments are not accountable
02.12.2015
Question: What is wrong with these pictures?
– A lawyer, a defender freedom of expression, is put on trial, for something that he says. He is even banned from leaving the country. Not to be silenced, that same lawyer remonstrates about gun violence at an open-air press conference in the historical centre of Diyarbakir, the city that he loves. Even as he speaks there is a shootout around the corner. A stray bullet goes through his neck and he dies. It takes days for the police to secure the crime scene against more shooting, even though this is the heart of one of the country’s largest cities. The slaying of the lawyer, Tahir Elçi, leaves its legacy of anger, bitterness and despair – will this be another of those unsolved political murders? Yes, if it’s up to the Turkish parliament, which rejects an enquiry into the death. The final words belong to Elçi’s wife: “At least now he is free to travel.”
– The editor-in-chief of a nationally respect newspaper appears in court, along with his Ankara bureau chief. The men are charged with the highest of treason. Their offence? To publish, in defiance of a court-imposed news blackout, a photo depicting TIR lorries smuggling munitions to the Syrian border with the apparent connivance of national intelligence. The prime minister, now president, had called for the men’s conviction and shortly afterwards the prosecutor opened a case. Yet the pictures were already in the pubic realm, having been published by Aydınlık newspaper and the whole story appeared in Radikal newspaper well before Cumhuriyet (where the editor-in-chief resides) defied the ban. So if there were treason, it was not stealing a state secret but trying to embarrass the government. However, then it is hard to embarrass a government that knows no shame. The final words belong to a pro-government pundit, a man who regularly calls for the trial and imprisonment of his colleagues: While it is right and proper that Can Dundar (the editor) should be in pre-trial detention (that would be the case anywhere in the world), Erdem Gül (the bureau chief) should be set free.
– The president of a country that is building a six (!) runway airport without any proper environmental impact study (which would allow a bank that respects the due diligence of the Equator Principles to invest) goes off to the Paris Summit on climate change. His attendance is watched closely not for anything he might say about reducing his country’s ever more careless carbon footprint but whether he will have meeting in the corridor with another president, one of whose aircraft his own air force has shot down. It is all part of a geostrategic quagmire, with each side using the pretext of fighting IS to bomb somebody else. The final words belong to Vladimir Putin who accuses the Turkish president in far blunter language than Cumhuriyet could ever muster of being involved in an arms-for-oil trade with Islamic radicals across the Syrian border. Or it could be the faux astonishment of his spokesman who “noted” that president’s son-in-law was the new minister for energy.
– There are many other pictures – from the OECD education league tables put Turkey at the bottom tier on the International Student Assessment (PISA), to the graphs that show Turkey with the highest income disparity and poverty rate in Europe.
Answer: Nothing, or so it would seem – since these pictures are glossed over or ignored by much of the country’s media. And they will continue to remain the norm for as long as that media fails to understand its obligation to hold government accountable and for as long those who govern bask in their own impunity.