Turkey in the International Media

The Turkish telecommunication authority blocks web page of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo – just the latest restriction on the public’s right to know.

“Turkey is not Charlie” leads the German newspaper taz, just one of the foreign publications to report the Turkish authority’s blocking of the Charlie Hebdo web page. As of last Friday, anyone trying to access the French magazine’s website from inside Turkey would have been greeted with an error message. The Turkish court had prior to this administrative decision banned publications attempting to reprint Charlie Hebdo’s caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed on grounds of insulting religious feelings.

According to Engelliweb.com, a platform that monitors internet censorship, more than 67,000 web pages are blocked in Turkey. Most are pornographic sites but political organizations are also affected and even the country’s only atheist association has had access to its site blocked.
With the government cracking down on critical social media postings and the growing number of detentions of journalists and citizens offending President Erdoğan, the foreign press continues to publicise violations of the freedom of speech in Turkey. The Süddeutsche Zeitung gives prominence to a recently published study by P24 founding member Yavuz Baydar. In it Baydar labels 2014 the “annus horribilis” of freedom of press in Turkey continuing a trend which started with the 2013 Gezi Park protests. Waves of redundancies and detentions of oppositional journalists forced editors and columnists to self-censor their articles in fear of meeting the same fate as dozens of their colleagues, explains Baydar. For him, the only glimmer of hope is to implement a “Glasnost alla turca” of transparent and open politics. The candidates are digital news platforms like T24 or Diken, run by critical journalists.
 
Demonstrations in memory of 15-year old boy killed during the Gezi Park protests take place all over Turkey.

Commemorating the death of 15-year old Berkin Elvan, who has been injured mortally during the 2013 Gezi Park protests, people demonstrated in the streets of Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir and 20 other Turkish cities.

Berkin had been hit at the head by a cartouche of tear gas fired by the police and died after 296 days in coma on March 11, 2014. The boy, accused by Erdoğan of being a member of a terrorist organisation, got into a rally when he went out to buy some bread, according to his parents. He became a sad example for police brutality and a symbolic figure for the dead and injured people during the rousing protests.

One year after the boy passed away demonstrators claimed justice for the victims of police violence throwing stones and Molotov cocktails to emphasize their point. The police used water cannons and tear gas to disperse the demonstrations and arrested 11 people in Ankara, according to the local press.
 
Turkey in between Ottoman tradition and modernity with AKP-candidates attempting to appeal to both their conservative voters and a secular society.

A new trend among candidates hoping to have themselves selected as candidates for the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in forth coming parliamentary elections is to dress up in the ancient Ottoman robes in their campaign posters.

It is not certain how seriously candidates take their historical roles or whether they are simply trying to attract the attention. Some critics see the costumes as proof of AKP’s plan to Islamize Turkey and to abolish its secular system. These fears have been fuelled by President Erdoğan’s recent proposal to introduce compulsory Ottoman language classes and increase the hours of religious instructions at school – all in the interest of having pupils return to their “cultural roots” and of raising a “pious generation”.

Not everyone agrees that Turkey is becoming more Islamic. Al-Monitor columnist Mustafa Akyol writes about Volkan Erit’s new book “The Age of Anxious Conservatives: Turkey, That Moves Away From Religion". Conceding that the Turkish state is becoming less secular due to AKP’s policies the academic insists that the influence of religion in Turkish society is on the decline. A greater visibility of LGBTQ-people attending gay pride parades, social acceptance of pre- and extramarital relationships and the decrease of people’s belief in supernatural beings and their healing powers are all evidence of the growing secularisation of society, according to Akyol.

Not to be caught between the increased visibility of the gay community and the revival of a conservative Ottoman-era culture, The Wall Street Journal reports about the renewed popularity of male belly dancers in Istanbul. The tradition of the so called “zennes” stems back to the Ottoman times, when women were largely prohibited from performing on stage. Despite the revival, the androgynous performers and gay men still face general discrimination in Turkey’s patriarchal society.
 
President Erdoğan fined for insulting a monument dedicated to Turkish-Armenian friendship.

Sculptor Mehmet Aksoy sued the Turkish president for insulting him by calling his “Monument to Humanity” a “monstrosity”. The 35m-high sculpture depicting two human figures, who face each other in conciliation with one holding an open hand towards Armenia, was commissioned by the municipality of Kars, a city in north-eastern Turkey close to the Armenian border.

The monument was built in 2006 after the AKP government made efforts to reach a reconciliation with Armenia. This resulted in the signing of bilateral protocols in 2010 assuring diplomatic ties between the neighbouring countries. However, the rapprochement stalled in 2010.

During his trip to Kars in January 2011 then-Prime Minister Erdoğan ridiculed the monument and ordered the municipality to demolish the statue dedicated to the Turkish-Armenian friendship.

Last week a Turkish court ordered Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to pay €3,500 to the artist, giving taz-correspondent, Jürgen Gottschlich hope in Turkey’s judicial system.
 
International pressure on Turkey grows as it seems to be a cakewalk for jihadists to cross the Turkish-Syrian border in both directions.
With so far 20.000 foreigners slipping across the Turkish-Syrian frontier to fight for Isis international pressure on Turkey to halt this flow and secure its porous border has increased.

Yesterday, Turkish foreign minister, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, announced the detention of a suspect, who allegedly helped the three British school girls to cross the border to Syria. The man facilitating the teenagers’ pathway to become “jihadi brides” for Isis is an employee of a foreign intelligence agency of the coalition fighting the terrorist group.

Despite Turkey’s efforts to close off its 800km-border British and US-American newspapers report about smugglers crossing “the wire” to take people and goods to Isis territory – sometimes under the threat of death or the loss of their livelihood.

But not enough of jihadists leaving for Syria; a World Post article tells about Turkish hospitals treating wounded jihadists of different terrorist organizations for months referring to rumours on social media about an IS fighter being airlifted to Turkey last month. However, it is unclear whether Turkey actively transported fighters as part of their assistance package to the rebel groups or if they made their way independently.
 
President Erdoğan has his food tested in a laboratory.

In an interview with the Turkish daily Hürriyet Dr Cevet Erdöl, MP and personal physician of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, revealed that the Turkish president has his food tested in his palace in Ankara. Five on-site experts work 14 hours a day in the laboratory analysing the Turkish leader’s food for radioactive materials, poison or certain types of bacteria to prevent an assassination attempt.

Critics see their accusations of the president’s extravagance proofed, whereas other analysts consider the measures reasonable given the alleged poisoning of President Özal in 1993. 
 
Giant construction projects in the periphery of Istanbul force the ecosystem off the rails.

A group of wild boars has been spotted in a luxury housing complex in Sariyer on Istanbul’ European side last week alarming ecologists and activists about the ongoing destruction of forests and wetlands around Turkey’s biggest city. As sightings of boars in the inner districts of Istanbul become more frequent, conservationists denounce the city’s giant construction projects of a third Bosporus Bridge and the world’s biggest airport north of Istanbul for shrinking wild animals’ habitat and forcing them to take refuge in urban areas.

Two weeks ago Prime Minister Davutoğlu announced the construction of a three-storey tunnel underneath the Bosporus. The 6.5 kilometres long tunnel connecting the city’s European and Asian sides will be finished by 2020 and is estimated to cost some three billion Euros.

This is cheap compared to the estimated 9 billion Euros for a canal connecting the Marmara Sea with the Black Sea to allow big vessels to bypass the crowded Bosporus Straits. Dubbed as one of President Erdoğan’s “wild projects” the 43 km long and 400m wide canal would turn Istanbul’s European side into an island.

“The ecological well-being of the area is gone. The incidents with the wild boars is just one of the indicators of what is happening” said Sedat Kalem, the Turkish conservation director for WWF, warning of future construction plans.
 
As President Erdoğan attacks central bankers the Turkish lira falls to an all-time low.
On March 4 the Turkish lira fell to a record 2.5773 against the dollar, following Erdoğan’s criticism of bank governor Erdem Başçı reluctance to cut interest. After intense political pressure the central bank cut the overnight rates by 50 basis points to 10.25 percent. This did not stem the lira’s losses and currency has declined further still. Its decline this year was exceeded only by the Brazilian real according to numbers tracked by Bloomberg.

The Turkish president has pointed a finger at a conspiracy by the “interest rate lobby”  and – in defiance of accepted economic wisdom – blames high borrowing costs for inflation. Most economists believe that high interest rates bring down inflation. What is clear is that the president, hoping to reflate the economy ahead of the coming election is concerned about stalled levels of private sector investments and wants to see interest rates come down regardless of the damage to the currency.

Whether it is the lira’s misadventures, fear that Turkish bank stocks will decline, or the need to comply with Basel III, US Citigroup sold its remaining 9.9 percent stake in Turkey’s Akbank– causing the shine on the Turkish economy to wane further still.