Transcript 0:00 [intro music] A happy New Year and welcome to Trendlines, a podcast on global affairs brought to you by World Politics Review. My name is Peter Durrie. 0:13 For the report, Nate Schenkkan of Freedom House joins us to discuss the Turkish government's crackdown on freedom of expression and its historical roots. 0:22 But first, I'm joined as always by WPR editor-in-chief Judah Grunstein to discuss some of the issues dominating global politics this week. What do you have for us, Judah? What was going on and at WPR this week? 0:35 Well, in addition to, uh, a couple of our columnists looking at Saudi Arabia and the US-Saudi relationship in the context of the executions, uh, over the holiday weekend, and also, uh, what we call an in-context piece by one of our associate editors, Maria Savell, uh, revisiting some of our coverage of North Korea in the context of the, uh, nuclear test, uh, earlier this week. 1:04 We also covered a few stories that, uh, are a little quieter but, uh, might have been lost in, in, in the glare, uh, of that breaking news, but also are pretty important. 1:16 Um, the first of those is, uh, is a briefing by Prashanth Parameswaran, um, wh- that... 1:25 who looks at a, a rail deal that was concluded, uh, between China and Thailand, um, late last year, uh, in the context of China's, uh, massive instr- infrastructure plans, uh, linking, uh, China with Southeast Asia, uh, and further on through, uh, rail and maritime, uh, transport, uh, routes, uh, to global trade. 1:55 Um, and it's the kind of story that, uh, that we like to cover because for me, infrastructure, uh, determines in a lot of ways, uh, international, uh, relationships. 2:08 When you have, uh, when you have, when you have hard infrastructure like a rail link or a gas pipeline that's linking two countries, uh, it creates a lot of incentive, uh, for, uh, ties to remain cooperative, uh, and a lot of disincentives for volatility in the relationship. 2:26 Um, so that one, especially in the context of Thailand's, uh, 2:31 more tense relationship with the United States, uh, since the military coup there, uh, was a quiet story, but an important one, so one I'm, I'm always happy to cover. 2:39 So the, the other tense relationship currently, uh, in global politics is that between the European Union and one of the, one of its member countries, Poland. Uh, what can you tell me about this? 2:50 Yes, there's been a lot of concern in Brussels and throughout Europe, uh, since the election, uh, last year, the return to power of the Law and Justice Party, uh, especially over certain measures that they've taken regarding the Constitutional Court, and, uh, increasing the government's control over state-owned media. 3:10 Uh, today we're running a briefing by Andrew McDowell that takes a, a close look at that, but also offers a very balanced, uh, look at, uh, where these measures fit into the context of Polish politics, um, and the ways in which, uh, the, the Law and Justice Party really does represent a constituency in Poland that feels or that has felt left out of some of the advantages of, uh, Poland's European Union membership. 3:37 So a, a very good look at, uh, what can seem very alarming from the outside, and, and does represent, uh, in some ways a, a s- a, a, a dangerous shift, uh, along the lines of Viktor Orbán in Hungary. 3:51 Um, but at the same time, uh, needs to be understood in the context of the, the domestic political, uh, landscape. So an interesting look, and a very balanced one on Poland. 4:03 Uh, and in addition, we ran, uh, two articles with a similar theme or a connecting thread on Africa, which I'm sure you noticed. 4:12 One on, uh, the, the f- prospects of an African Union intervention in Burundi, and the other on, uh, Paul Kagame's, uh, announcement that he will in fact be seeking a third term as president in Rwanda. 4:28 Yeah, and, uh, these are two countries I write myself, uh, quite a bit about and, uh, the articles, uh, were really good by Carina Pisa and Nina Wiellen. And, um, they, they, uh, made some really good points there. 4:41 On Rwanda, I think, um, I, the, [laughs] 4:44 the most interesting thing, uh, d- or one of the most interesting aspects was just at the top, a quote by Kagame in his New Year's speech saying, um, "I can only accept," meaning, uh, the renewed, uh, um, the renewed, uh, candidacy. 4:58 But I don't think what we need is a, an eternal leader when he has already been in power since de facto 1994 and is slated to be in power for 17 more years now. 5:08 And I think this is, uh, it also is a really interesting look at US relations and the US reaction, which has, which has been... 5:17 The US has expressed some disappointment with that devel- development, but in real terms there's still a very strong military alliance, uh, with Rwandan, with the Rwandan military and a strong military support from, from the US. 5:31 So there's a vocal disappointment but, uh, in, in the activities themselves are, are really supportive of, of Kagame's regime. 5:39 And on Burundi, um, this is also a very, very interesting thing, uh, whi- which, uh, which Nina Wiellen takes a look at here because the African Union has threatened an intervention, um, against the Burundian government for the human rights abuses it's, it, it's, uh, committing in the aftermath of the, uh, contested election last year. 5:59 And, uh, but there are some really interesting, um, problems with that, one being that Burundi has itself deployed thou- thousands of peacekeepers in African Union missions, so nobody knows what would happen with these soldiers, and also who would prov- provide the troops to march into Burundi, and there are some in, really interesting questions there. 6:18 So, uh, I recommend people taking a look at these articles. As I do. Perfect. Thanks for, uh, joining us today. It's been my pleasure. And we come to the report. 6:31 Nate Schenkkan wrote a feature article for World Politics Review titled Stop the Presses: Turkey's Long War Against the Media. 6:39 I had the chance to talk with him about the Turkish government's current crackdown on media and freedom of expression, and how it fits into the bigger picture of Turkish politics. My name is Nate Schenkkan. 6:51 I am the project director for Nations in Transit, which is Freedom House's annual survey of democracy and governance in the 29 countries of the former Soviet Union, former Yugoslavia, and former Eastern Bloc. 7:05 And I've also written a couple of special reports for Freedom House on Turkey's media and Turkey's internet. Erdogan wants all of us to say the same thing, and that pressure was ramped up after June elections. 7:22 Since then, we have seen a series of attacks on the media. Today in Turkey, anyone who published even so much as a sentence the government doesn't like could be accused of colluding with the enemy. 7:33 People can be arrested for things they've written on Twitter about the president, and none of us are ever very far away from being labeled as IS or PKK supporters. 7:47 What we see in Turkey is an extremely wide-ranging and extremely diverse crackdown on freedom of expression, things like prosecutions for, um, terror propaganda. 8:00 You have, uh, prosecutions against the establishment journalists, um, in some of the more mainstream newspapers. And then you also have this really, um, almost impossible to track crackdown on all sorts of speech online. 8:17 A- and, and then another thing I haven't even touched on is this very deep, um, and pernicious relationship between media outlets and the government and, i- in terms of the government using its ability to issue contracts or to influence contracts or to, um, privatize businesses, conduct tax inspections, all of these different levers that the government has, using those to manipulate the media and make sure that the media serves it. 8:43 One of the most recent ones was the, uh, seizure of the, um, Koza Ipek Group, which is a very large, um, business group actually built around gold mining, but which also owned, um, a number of, um, a number of media outlets, Bugun newspaper, Bugun TV. 9:03 Um, it has now been, um, basically placed into receivership, um, by the government. It's had new trustees appointed. 9:10 Um, and, um, y- when, when that happened, there was this very dramatic scene of police officers coming and taking over the office and evicting the previous editors and journalists, and literally overnight, the, the paper went from being very, very critical of the government on its front page to being, um, very differential and very positive. 9:30 Um, you've also got the imprisonment of, uh, Can Dündar, who's the editor-in-chief of Cumhuriyet, which is a, um, the oldest newspaper in Turkey, a, a secularist, nationalist Turkey kind of a bulwark of the establishment. 9:44 Um, he, Can Dündar, and his, uh, Ankara, uh, bureau chief are both in prison awaiting charges on releasing national secrets, um, which relates to stories that they ran on Turkey's National Intelligence Agency sending weapons into Syria, presumably to jihadist groups. 10:04 Um, then you've also got, uh, a whole range of, um, punitive measures being applied to Kurdish journalists, especially right now. Um, journalists seen as sympathetic, um, to or supportive of the PKK are being targeted. 10:20 Um, um, and th- that can include imprisonment. That includes websites being shut down, um, dozens of them. Um, it, it's a really wide-ranging crackdown. 10:34 Prime Minister Erdogan speaking at a rally in the east of the country on Thursday. Today, he and his community again uploaded something onto YouTube about national security. 10:51 A meeting is held at the foreign ministry about the tomb of Suleiman Shah in Syria. They even uploaded this video on YouTube. This is immorality. This is shameful. This is dishonorable. 11:10 Turkey has really extensive, um, blocking of the internet, first of all. Um, they, they block a very large number of websites. It's over 100,000 now. 11:20 They also file a huge number of takedown requests on social media platforms. Um, it's actually 92% of the global total of takedown requests on Twitter come from Turkish government, um, sources. 11:34 Um, and I think they're third in Facebook takedown requests. Um, they've, they've had a hard time, um, remaining online in Turkey. 11:42 They've been blocked, um, completely in Turkey in the past when they haven't complied with these rulings. 11:48 And so now they're quite cautious about when they challenge the government on whether that is content that should be taken down. 11:55 You've got very crude tools that things like website blocking, uh, which includes platform blocking in extreme cases, blocking YouTube, blocking Twitter, blocking Facebook. 12:05 Um, you've got, uh, quite strict insult laws that are impla- applied widely where government officials, um, will sue, um, or press criminal charges, um, relating to insult. 12:19 You've got anti-terror laws which are very broad and very vague, um, can make kind of any, um, any discussion of the PKK or of other, um, official terror groups can make any discussion of that, um, illegal and considered to be propaganda for those groups. 12:38 Um, you've got, uh, tax inspections and other kinds of financial, um, pressures that can be used against companies when you have larger, um, 12:50 larger media interests that may, that, that frequently also have other business interests, um, and those have been used very heavily. 12:58 Um, the most famous case of that is the, the tax case against the Doan Group, um, that started in 2007 and went on for three or four years until it reached a point where the, the, the fines for unpaid taxes against the Doan Group were actually larger than the company's entire market capitalization. 13:18 And the company was eventually forced to sell, uh, some of its most important assets and is sort of a, um, uh, a shadow of its former self. 13:27 Um, so it's, it's a, it's a whole lot of things, um, and you never quite know what the next tactic will be. 13:33 [Instrumental music] Protests against the prosecutions of journalists have been going on in Turkey for years, but they have intensified in the past year. 13:48 As many as 100 journalists have been in and out of jail in that time, waiting to be charged for serious crimes. It's, it's a tough question to say whether it succeeds. 13:58 Uh, there certainly is no doubt that there's a climate of fear in Turkey, in the media, and, uh, to a certain degree just in general, um, around expressing yourself critically. That said, Turks are, 14:14 and Turkish citizens are relentlessly, um, willing to express themselves. 14:21 I'm always struck by how, um, how much Turkish citizens will continue to go out into the streets, will continue to protest or to write, to criticize, to say, um, you know, funny jokes online about their government even when this stuff is going on. 14:36 I think it's, what it's doing is it's especially creating a space in which, um, a large plurality or maybe a majority get pro-government information, 14:50 but it doesn't, that doesn't mean it creates this totalitarian space where no sunlight enters. 14:54 And I think that's something that's hard for people coming from democratic contexts to wrap your head around is, is kind of the gray zone that Turkey's in, which is that it's not a totalitarian dictatorship, but there's also a climate of very aggressive, uh, repression and a climate of government propaganda that if you're not actively looking for those things, if you're not really seeking out critical information because you know it's there and you want it, that stuff is going to overwhelm you. 15:24 We have a tendency to look at the current ruling party, the Justice and Development Party, the AKP, to look at it somewhat ahistorically, as if the crackdown that's happening right now 15:36 has never happened before in Turkey, as if we've never seen this kind of censorship. 15:40 And the truth is, it is a very aggressive, very scary crackdown, but at the same time, it is very much rooted in practices and habits in Turkey's political culture. 15:53 The model that Ataturk created was one where the press should serve the state. 15:59 Um, the 1931 press law, which is the first press law in Turkey, um, dictates that the government can, um, ban newspapers, close publishing houses when they contradict state policies. And this continued for, 16:15 in different variations, for several decades, um, including into the, uh, as the one-party s- uh, period ended and we entered the multi-party period, a lot of those habits continued. 16:24 And then the next, um, sort of important landmark in this development is the, um, the 1980 coup. 16:31 Um, in the nin-- after the 1980 coup, the, um, military engineered the writing of a new constitution, which is the one that Turkey still has today. Um, and this constitution is very nationalist. Um, it's very secularist. 16:46 And it created a lot of the, um, or, or codified in more aggressive forms a lot of the tools that we've been talking about. 16:54 And, um, and, and people have been prosecuted for those, and they were prosecuted for those long before the AKP came to power, long before the AKP existed as a party. 17:04 And in fact, they were prosecuted by people who were deeply opposed to the AKP. There is this deeply rooted political culture of censorship in Turkey. 17:15 And while the AKP is, is certainly very aggressive in attacking the media and attacking, um, free expression in the public space, we can't allow ourselves to forget that they learned it from somewhere and that they're enacting many of the same patterns that they saw from the other side at the time when they were developing. 17:36 Um, all of that very much, um, uh, I think, and I think most people, most people looking at this closely would agree, really shaped how the AKP, um, looks at the media. 17:46 They see the media not as a disinterested or objective, um, pillar within society. They, uh, you know, the fifth estate. 17:55 They see it as another player that's trying to take power, um, and to gain advantage and to gain interest. And as a result, they've, um, sought to control it. 18:07 Um, they, they've, they've picked up where others left off and as soon as they've gained enough power, they've asserted their privileges, uh, the ones that governments in Turkey have historically had. 18:19 The, the politics are expressed through the media. [Instrumental music] More than 30 people have been arrested during raids on media organizations across Turkey. 18:30 Turkish police raided the offices of a television station and the Man newspaper, detaining executives, journalists, and broadcasters. Supporters gathered outside after rumors that the arrests would take place. 18:43 Both organizations are known for their ties to Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, a former ally of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. 18:52 Uh, the Gulen movement is this- movement of, let's say, uh, I compare it to kind of like the Masons. Um, it's kind of a religious movement, but quite focused on self-improvement and networking. 19:05 And under the AKP, the movement had, um, been very supportive of the AKP's rise, um, in general as a movement that was generally Islamist, um, somewhat Turkish nationalist in a way that agreed with the AKP's positions, and also was focused on kind of the rise of these outsider, um, uh, more marginalized classes within Turkey, people who'd been left behind in the Republican periods. 19:33 Um, and so they supported the AKP. They took a lot of government positions, especially in police and judiciary, and their media outlets, um, newspapers like Zaman, 19:45 later Bugun, um, these newspapers and these TV stations like Zaman Yolu were very supportive of the AKP. 19:54 Then though, when the Gulen movement broke with the AKP, um, which finally happened decisively in December 2013 in a very dramatic fashion when, 20:04 um, uh, an investigation was launched, um, and raids were launched, um, into corruption, um, at the very, very highest levels of the Turkish government, um, ministers and their sons, um, eventually reaching up to Erdogan and his family. 20:21 Um, when that happened, the Gulen media basically flipped on a dime. 20:27 Um, and you saw Zaman, uh, Bugun, Zaman Yolu, these, these places become really strident critics of the government, um, in ways that it completely ignored their previous positions. 20:40 [Instrumental music] You've reformed the penal code and strengthened laws that govern the freedom of the press and assembly. 20:48 You've lifted bans on teaching and broadcasting Kurdish, and the world noted with respect the important signal sent through a new state Kurdish television station. 20:58 Now, these achievements have created new laws that must be implemented and a momentum that should be sustained, for democracies cannot be static. They must move forward. The international community has 21:16 made some efforts to promote freedom of expression and freedom of the press in Turkey and continues to rhetorically. Um, a big part of that story is that 21:31 the US and the EU really bought hook, line, and sinker into the idea that the AKP was going to solve Turkey's problems, um, its democratic deficits, and put it on track for EU accession. 21:48 And, uh, official, uh, official policy in the US government, um, and in, um, the most important parts of the EU was that this, this was feasible and that it was kind... it was happening. 22:01 Um, and that, that was justified to a certain degree, especially in, in the earl- in, it was justified in the early period, in 2002 to 2007. Um, but that continued. 22:13 That position continued long past it was just- long past when it was justified. It's been, it's been on the agenda, but not a priority, and especially in the last, 22:25 let's say, three years, um, it's fallen further down the list, um, quite a bit. 22:30 The war in Syria, um, and now the war in Iraq and all across the Middle East has made it so that, uh, the relationship with Turkey for the West, um, 22:41 is very much about these geopolitical issues, which is again, uh, kind of the traditional role or r- traditional relationship with Turkey that the West has had, which is that, um, 22:53 domestic developments in Turkey are not of great interest to the international community, but Turkey's geographic position and geopolitical importance is. I 23:04 don't see much change being possible in, in the US or, or EU approaches. There have been some positive signs within Turkey. 23:14 Um, I don't want to exaggerate them, but there ha- there are things that have changed in the last 20 years and even in the last 10 years, um, that I don't think can be undone. I don't want to exaggerate them. 23:26 Frankly, the situation is, is very bad and, um, it is hard to imagine how, uh, this damage can be undone in, uh, any short period of time. Um, 23:42 if it is going to be undone, it's only going to come through the very active work of people inside Turkey who refuse to, um, 23:51 refuse to forget, um, how diverse Turkey is and refuse to accept the imposition or the re-imposition of some kind of, um, top-down unitary identity on Turkey, which has always been the great crime in Turkey, was the, the elimination and the destruction of the country's diversity. 24:13 [Instrumental music] My thanks to Nate for sharing these insights and thank you for listening. If you liked this episode of Trendlines, please consider subscribing to us. 24:25 The easiest way to do so is on iTunes or through your podcast app of choice. Just search for Trendlines and please leave a rating and comment while you are there, as this helps other people discover the show. 24:38 Trendlines is produced and edited by me, Peter Durrie. 24:41 You can follow me and World Politics Review on Twitter, and you can find links to pieces covering the issues we talked about in the show notes on worldpoliticsreview.com. 24:51 The additional audio used in the report was sourced from Al Jazeera English, Voice of America, the BBC, and the White House. Have a fantastic weekend and see you next week for a new episode of Trendlines. 25:03 [Instrumental music]
