(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
I meet Mustafa Unlu i Kıraathane – Istanbul Literature House. Every ligger P24, a platform for independent journalism, which was established eleven years ago. Ünlü is chairman of the association that was established to support independent journalism in Turkey. They observe and report all legal proceedings against independent journalism – a fight for freedom of speech and press.
They also have the weekly podcast SpeakUp24. Their journalists write and make videos, raising awareness of all kinds of censorship. P24 also has more cultural material. Ünlü says that they have a website for book reviews, which is the most followed online in Turkey – Buck24. In terms of content, not entirely different from MODERN TIMES's line.
Coffee shop
The name Kıraathane meant 'coffee shop' in old Turkish, a place where your people came to read and write diaries.
In this neighborhood, people also come to play cards, chat and watch TV. Ünlü says that every week we have three to four activities with, for example, debates about books, poetry and actual politics: "We have a very independent environment here, where around 30-40 audience members come to participate – and our Arabic lectures and debates are taken also up for streaming on our YouTube channel. We also have an advanced sound studio.”
I wonder if they have ever been censored, like other sites. “Well, not so far. We are actually reviewed every year by the authorities, once or twice. Whatever we do, it is very clearly documented.” Are they financed by foreign funds? I ask: “Yes, we have no domestic or state funds, but American and European. It's not that suspicious. We report all the money that comes to our projects. The government is following along.”
Their debates seem critical, political issues are discussed, so I wonder, as Cemgil mentioned that websites are often closed – how they can have avoided this for over a decade: "Well, maybe we are too intellektuell to. We have a niche, the public seeks us out for the sake of the philosophical debate. We are not very popular. So maybe that's the point. And should we, for example, criticize religion here, we will leave the matter for the next two weeks. If we get too political, that can be a problem. But we have, for example, had Kurdishe language workshops for five years, and events in Kurdish on Kurdish issues."
World Press Freedom Day
Their annual conference – World Press Freedom Day – catches my interest. Here, formerly imprisoned critics speak openly. 3Tuğrul Eryılmaz3, the respected former editor of Radikal 2, for example, celebrated five decades of journalism by giving the eleventh lecture on World 3Press Freedom Day this year. And last year it was about the memory of journalist Mehmet Ali Birand. Every year it is about freedom of expression: "Yes, we usually have lectures from well-known journalists, who have some problems with the government. We have done this with the support of 3Sweden's embassy3, and often kept it there. What is being told is not something very marginal, not something radical, but the realities, about Turkey, about the world, about the whole of journalism... the universe.”
It sounds like P24 has the freedom to do what they want: “Well, yes. We do this, but close to the fire. For example, five years ago, a teacher participated via telephone, neither very radical nor with aggressive speech – she only talked about how, as a mother and teacher, she wanted more peace for the children – in a very popular talk show with a huge turnout. She was imprisoned. The program stopped for a while.”
I mention the girl P24 reported on recently, who was interviewed on the street in Istanbul: “Yes, she ended up in prison. There was a trial. She was first asked about books and other things, but then criticized the government's practices – about the fires, about the economy, about inflation. She uttered some aggressive words.”
The verdict was that she had offended the president: "We have thousands of such cases. You can be imprisoned for up to two years. The president is not necessarily informed about them. His lawyers open these cases automatically, as soon as they see that they need money …”
The Turkish 71-year-old woman Peri Pamir just got a suspended sentence with five years of probation left on Facebook just for linking to an article from The Guardian about a British woman who was killed fighting for Kurdish forces in Syria. Last year alone, 132 of these were reported for having 'spread terrorist propaganda', according to The Guardian.
According to Ünlü, 25 journalists and critics are currently imprisoned, while he believes that explicit torture is not used. But isolation often happens. And in connection with the protests in Gezi Park in Istanbul, they imprisoned young people as young as 16.
Idealism
What has happened in Turkey is that Erdoğans government has bought control over 90 percent of the media, according to Ünlü: "It is difficult to reach out widely in society. We could recently see that ten established newspapers came up with the same sentence or headline about the Egyptian president's visit. People are now looking for other sources of news.”
I finally ask what drives him personally, what kind of values - he also creates documentary film: “I think the spirit behind creating documentary film is to be idealistic and dig. It's a kind of public work – you can't just entertain people. You must also be optimistic about the future. I'm not very optimistic, but I still have the passion to work on this.”
A couple of weeks later, Ünlü went to Warsaw, for the fall's Eurozine conference (a network MODERN TIMES is also a part of). His talk was titled Points of resistance. Here he expressed, among other things: "The last time Turkish authorities intervened in social media was immediately after the massive earthquakes in February 2022. According to official sources, the earthquakes caused more than 50 deaths, making this the deadliest event in the country's history. The state immediately banned Twitter. They claimed it was being used to spread disinformation…”
See also the main interview from Istanbul with Can Cemgil.
One of the many yellow-colored book publications from P24 is the English-translated Media Self-Regulation in Turkey: Challenges, Opportunities, Suggestions. One chapter is «How may the Radio and Television Supreme Council's regulation prerogative infringe on the media's independence in practice?» View the PDF at https://platform24.org/en/publications/media-self-regulation-in-turkey/
