Daily Times

The future of journalism is at stake in Turkey. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) places the country at 151 on its world press freedom index for 2016. This is a drop of two places from the previous year.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been most audacious in his relentless witch-hunt against the country’s dissenting media. This is something that journalists at Turkey’s oldest secular national daily – Cumhuriyet – know only too well. Last year its chief editor, several columnists and cartoonist were picked up on charges of “aiding terrorist organisations”. This is a veiled reference to Fethullah Gulen – the US-based imam believed to be behind last summers’ failed coup to out Erdogan – and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). Last week came the confirmation that a court had accepted an indictment of all charges against them. The paper is known to be a vocal critic of the president.

Pakistan’s media has some experience of this. Back in 2004, we had our own dictator – one who happened to be enamoured with the Turkish founding father – who oversaw the Defamation Amendment Act aimed at, among other things, protecting the image of public figures of the state. It was, however, rather enlightened in its moderation given that journalists could be prosecuted for insulting the both the prime minister, the COAS and a handful of others, all in addition to the president.

Erdogan has already made clear that he has in his sights an extension of emergency rule as well as the reintroduction of the death penalty. We cannot sufficiently emphasise how ill this bodes for Turkey’s journalists. Thus we call on all quarters of Pakistan’s media to show solidarity with them.

As RSF puts it, in the abortive coup’s immediate aftermath, a vast number of journalists faced imprisonment without trial, thereby “turning Turkey into the world’s biggest prison for media personnel.” This is no exaggeration. The global watchdog for press freedom finds that Ankara has prosecuted more than 1,000 journalists for insulting the president. In addition, Erdogan oversaw the closure and expropriation of 102 media outlets by decree: 45 newspapers, 16 television channels and 23 radio stations.

The call for solidarity ought to go beyond symbolism. Journalists from both sides experience similar narratives of state intimidation. In Turkey, too, social networking sites are subject to heavy monitoring and outright censorship. Here in Pakistan, there has been no let up in the persecution of dissenting media voices. The state’s fixation on monitoring social media for ‘blasphemous’ content shows no signs of abating even as the memory of the brutal murder of Mashal Khan remains etched in the collective psyche. Thus there is no time to waste for journalists and human rights defenders in both countries to come together in the shared struggle of living under increasingly authoritarian regimes that pay little more than lip service to the idea of media freedom. If not, the world will continue to think that only western journalist lives matter. *