Subject: In Turkey; Danger for Journalists and human rights workers

The Baltimore Sun, January 18, 1996

Speaking out perilous in Turkey; Danger: Journalists and human rights

workers who catch the attention of the Turkish authorities are lucky to

get long prison terms. The unlucky disappear and are found later, dead.

Doug Struck

ISTANBUL, Turkey -- In a bright modern newsroom in the center of Istanbul,

Gulsen Yuksel, 31, cooly contemplated the risks of being a journalist in

Turkey.

"There is a danger here," said the woman, with a toss of her long black

hair. "We all know it." Over her shoulder, the portraits of eight dead

colleagues at the newspaper stared from the wall.

Two weeks later, at 3:30 a.m. Dec. 3, 1994, her newsroom erupted in a huge

bomb blast. It killed a receptionist and injured 19 others still in the

building at that hour.

The blast reinforced the message. A journalist in Turkey can pay a high

price for trying to exercise freedom of the press.

Last week, Metin Goktepe, a reporter for the paper Evrensel, paid the

price. He was picked up by police while covering a funeral of two leftists

killed in a prison clash, according to colleagues. He died from a severe

beating; his head was crushed and a rib broken, according to the autopsy.

Yucel Gokturk, editor of a small, weekly newspaper called Express, hopes

the price he will pay himself will be only a prison term.

"People get shot. People are missing," he says. "We work late at night at

this newspaper. The policemen could come in here at night, and take three of

us away.

"Then our friends would write that these three people are missing. And two

months later, our bodies would be found. This is a possibility. It's real."

Tiny circulation

Mr. Gokturk edits the paper from a tiny office on a third-floor walk-up in

Istanbul and sends it to a printer who publishes 9,000 copies. He can sell

about half.

The Express is a left-leaning paper, full of praise for workers and scorn

for the establishment. Its political pages often focus on Turkey's abysmal

human rights record. There is plenty of material.

"When the state violates human rights, we write it. Sometimes people write

us with their own accounts. Sometimes we report it ourselves," he says.

"It's an issue to bring to the public's attention."

His interest in this issue bodes poorly for his future. Mr. Gokturk has

been indicted on six charges and ordered to appear before the state "security

court" to account for what he has written.

None of the trials has been held yet. If they had, he would not be

reclining on an old stuffed chair in the newsroom talking about his business.

There is a "50-50" chance he will be imprisoned after the first trial,

scheduled for next month, he says. And he is an optimist.

Turkey has used the state security courts, which are outside the normal

civil court system, to imprison hundreds of journalists and writers over the

past few years.

According to the Turkish Daily News, 432 journalists were detained last

year alone. Sentences against "freedom of thought" prisoners totaled 1,564

years, the paper calculated. At the end of November, 133 people were in

prison for what they had written, according to the Human Rights Foundation in

Ankara, the Turkish capital.

Most of the writers were charged with violating the "Law to Fight

Terrorism."

Turkey has been locked in a grinding struggle with its Kurdish minority.

Criticism as to how the government conducts that struggle, or even a hint of

sympathy for the plight of the Kurds, is interpreted by the government as

espousing "separatism," a crime akin to treason.

The charges against Mr. Gokturk, for example, involve his publishing

pictures of Turkish soldiers cutting off the ear of a Kurdish woman as a

battle prize.

Another charge involves his publishing an interview with a Kurdish leader

in exile. Another involves his writing about a man who refused to serve in

the Turkish army, claiming he was a conscientious objector. The other charges

were for reporting on human rights violations.

Little sympathy from public

"The state has created such an atmosphere, that to bring up human rights

violations is seen as supporting the PKK" -- the Kurdish guerrillas, he says.

"If you say the Turkish government is violating human rights, killing people,

burning villages, then the public's attitude is that you are wrong."

There is little pressure on the Turkish government from its own citizens

to change this pattern.

"Unfortunately, violence is one of our national characteristics," says

Seref Turgut, a human rights lawyer in Istanbul.

"The Turkish police are accustomed to treating people quite cruelly. A

police chief will openly say, 'If I catch a suspect, what can I do to get a

confession except to torture him?' "

Human rights workers hope this is changing. Thousands of Turks marched in

protest in Istanbul last week after the body of Mr. Goktepe was found.

Mr. Goktepe, who wrote for a left-wing newspaper, had been seen by other

reporters among the people arrested at the funeral of the two leftists. His

body was found in the sports complex where police had taken those detained.

Authorities denied he was in their custody. Such disingenuous denials are

not unusual.

Authority is ambiguous

"When you say the government is doing these things, it's very difficult,

because the term government really doesn't define the authority in Turkey,"

says Mr. Gokturk. "There is the state. There is the government. There are

wings of the state, and wings of the government.

"The authority is ambiguous here. It could be a political chief, an

officer in the military, a prosecutor. You have to think on a Latin American

model."

Human rights groups try to publicize abuses. But they, too, have found

their workers and officers imprisoned, dead or missing.

The mainstream press is a toothless watchdog; most of the major newspapers

and television stations are owned by a handful of families, all with

financial and political ties to the establishment, Mr. Gokturk says.

Foreign and local publicity has helped in some cases. Yasar Kemal, a

renowned Turkish writer, was acquitted last month when reporters and movie

stars flocked to his trial.

But less-known authors such as Ismail Besikci find themselves behind bars.

He is serving a sentence of nearly 300 years for writing a book that was

seized by authorities and never distributed.

The most important pressure for reform comes from Europe. The United

States, anxious to keep using Turkish air bases to overfly northern Iraq,

offers only rare and muted public criticism of Turkey's human rights record.

But the European Union demanded that Turkey change its Article 8 -- a

notorious law used to prosecute many of the writers -- before the country

would be granted customs concessions this year. Turkey amended the law in

October.

After the amendment, writers were given new trials, and nearly 100 were

released due to reduced sentences, according to human rights groups. But they

say it is a cosmetic lull.

Other writers are being imprisoned under different laws, such as one that

it a crime to "insult" the military.

"Someone can be released from trial on one article, and held in prison for

trial on another one," says Nevzat Kirac, an official of the Human Rights

Foundation. "The changes in Article 8 did not make much difference. It

provided only a temporary relaxation. In a year or two, there will be just as

many journalists in prison."

Mr. Gokturk, who at 40 has shoulder-length hair and a graying beard, says

he is not going to dwell on the prospect of joining other journalists behind

bars.

"I'll worry about it when it comes. Worrying about it now is not worth my

time," he says.

Of more immediate concern to him is the effect the charges -- and the

threat of other problems -- is having on his newspaper.

"It does cause me moral problems," he says. "We are more careful in what

we write.

"And sometimes, if you know there's no way to soften it, or that softening

it is not honest or ethical, you don't write it at all."

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