Will Turkish elections lead to greater press freedom?

It was 6:30 one morning last October when Kurdish journalist Servin Rozerin went to work in the office of Mezopotamya press agency in Ankara, Turkey. Scarcely had she arrived when police burst through the door, pushed her against the wall, took her phone and laptop, and held her for nine hours while they confiscated all of the files and equipment in the newsroom, Ms. Rozerin says.

The police eventually released the young woman, but the incident has had lasting effects. “I was really scared because I was a woman on my own with so many armed men,” she says. “They treated me like an enemy. Even to this day, I’m afraid that they could take me again.”

But she continues to report and write in the hope that the upcoming May 14 elections will bring a change in leadership after President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s two-decade hold on power. 

“I really want this government to go. If after these elections, they are not gone, there is going to be nothing called journalism in Turkey. This government has too much power, and they are using it against us,” Ms. Rozerin says on a phone call from the southeastern city of Diyarbakir, where she’s covering the election campaign. 

In the run-up to the elections, the global press watchdog Reporters Without Borders ranked Turkey 165th out of 180 nations in its 2023 World Press Freedom Index, describing the situation as “very bad.” Opposition parties, six of which are grouped in an electoral alliance, have vowed to allow more press freedoms than Mr. Erdoğan and his ruling party have over the past decade.

Legitimate criticism or disinformation?

It was not always thus. In the first decade of Mr. Erdoğan’s rule, the Turkish media flourished. But since the uprising against Mr. Erdoğan during the Gezi protests in 2013 and a foiled coup in 2016, most press outlets have become government mouthpieces; 90% of national media are now in the hands of government supporters, according to a Reporters Without Borders survey.

Those that have remained independent are constantly harassed by the authorities, incurring fines, suffering detentions, and going in and out of court, says Oliver Money-Kyrle, head of European advocacy for the Vienna-based International Press Institute (IPI). The group closely monitors Turkey’s media.

Mr. Money-Kyrle says the good news is that the number of jailed journalists has dropped in the last four years from 120 to 47, but journalists are kept on a judicial leash.

“There are dozens and dozens of trials going on, cases are postponed, journalists are trapped (in the court system) even if they will be found innocent,” he says.

The government passed a disinformation law last year, but rights defenders say it is another way for the authorities to censor and fine the media, and to jail journalists.

Broadcasters are regularly fined if journalists or guests on their shows criticize the government. The Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTUK) recently fined the opposition Halk TV for airing a claim by an opposition party adviser that people on ventilators in the city of Iskunderun had died in the aftermath of the Feb. 6 earthquake because generators did not work.

The allegation was judged “contrary to the principle of impartiality” by the RTUK.

“According to the RTUK, if you stand by the leadership you are unbiased; if you stand against it you are violating unbiasedness,” tweeted Ilhan Tasci, an RTUK member who belongs to the main opposition party.

Many independent journalists fired from their jobs now have YouTube channels with significant followings, but the government can shut down their online platforms. Freedom House, a human rights watchdog, notes in its recent “Election Vulnerability Index” that “thousands of websites are blocked in Turkey, including many independent media. This technical censorship hinders voters’ ability to assess accurate and diverse sources of information ahead of the vote” on May 14.

“Harassment of journalists and online activists is rampant in Turkey, limiting free expression,” the report finds.

Fahrettin Altun, Turkey’s communications director, insists that the government is only trying to curb disinformation that threatens national security, not censoring the media, as he told a National Press Club event in Washington last month.

That is not the view of many journalists. “For the past 14 years we have practiced more and more self censorship,” says one reporter who has worked for many years in mainstream government media and who asked to remain anonymous.

“I was censored many times, there were times when my news was not published, or I had problems after it was published,” she recalls. And the Turkish political scene has grown so polarized that “sometimes I think we spend more time and energy trying to stand between the poles [government and opposition] than doing journalism,” she adds.

Kurdish reporters special targets

Mr. Money-Kyrle of the IPI says that if Mr. Erdoğan wins again on May 14, it will get harder for Turkish journalists to work. But if the opposition wins, he says he has hopes that the censorship system that has throttled the independent media will end, and that violence against members of the press will be reduced.

The IPI reports physical assaults on 72 journalists in the last year, many of them Kurdish reporters accused of sympathy for the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), an outlawed guerrilla group fighting for expanded Kurdish self-governance in eastern and southeastern Turkey.

In the last two weeks, police have raided homes at dawn and detained actors, lawyers, and journalists in Diyarbakir, a base for Kurdish media. Among the more than a dozen arrested are Ms. Rozerin’s boss and two colleagues. The government claims that Kurdish media have ties to the PKK, but has yet to bring formal charges against many of them.

Ceylan Akça, a Kurdish parliamentary candidate for the Green Left Party in Diyarbakir, says attacks against Kurdish journalists have been common since the 1990s when they were disappeared, tortured, and killed during government crackdowns on the PKK.

Though such extreme violence against reporters has subsided, it has not disappeared, says Ms. Akça.

Even the foreign press is at the mercy of the Turkish government, although the hundreds of foreign reporters based in Turkey face minimal censorship compared with their Turkish colleagues.

Shadi Turk, a Syrian journalist who worked as an assistant to foreign journalists in Turkey and Syria, says that two years ago he was recruited by Turkish intelligence to spy on them.

“They wanted phone numbers, contacts, published stories, opinions of journalists and whether they were spreading propaganda against Turkey,” he says in a telephone interview from the Philippines, where he has fled. “I didn’t give them anything that wasn’t already public,” Mr. Turk says. 

Intelligence agents threatened that if he did not comply, he and his family would be deported to Syria, where they would have been in danger because they oppose the Syrian regime, Mr. Turk says. His Turkish residency was blocked for five years after he escaped, and he is seeking asylum in a Western country.

“My story shows the low level of press freedom in Turkey,” he says.

Despite Turkish journalists’ struggles, they continue to publish and broadcast, changing their platforms’ names when they are banned, or opening new media outlets.

“There are deeply talented and courageous journalists still doing the work,” says the IPI’s Mr. Money-Kyrle, “because of a long tradition of journalism in the country, and a strong appetite for information from the public.”