Turkey, the largest jailor of journalists

Journalists have been rounded up and imprisoned to a level that makes Turkey the largest jailor of journalists in the world, according to Amnesty International, PEN and other groups.

In photos that activists said conjured up the murder of George Floyd in the US, police in Istanbul appeared to put their knee on the neck of photojournalist Bulent Kilic as they detained him. 

Police harassed people at restaurants and anyone filming their attacks on the pride protesters on Saturday. Nevertheless, many thousands of Turkish activists took to the streets and braved the police attacks.

On Tuesday four people in the northwestern province of Kocaeli attacked Mustafa Uslu, a reporter for the pro-government İhlas News Agency (İHA), while he was covering authorities’ demolition of ranch buildings owned by opposition politician Lütfü Türkkan.

The attackers hit Uslu, knocked him to the ground, kicked and hit him in the face, and also smashed his camera and drone, according to multiple reports. 

Turkish police feel impunity to attack journalists from organizations such as the AFP because Ankara has for years cultivated close ties with NATO, Western governments and human-rights groups, as well as think tanks in Washington, to prevent criticism of its policies.

There also appears to be a lack of coverage of the crackdown among major Western media outlets, some of which often appear to whitewash Ankara’s crimes or take junkets funded by the regime to cover areas of Syria illegally occupied by Turkey.

Turkey’s crackdown, attacks on photojournalists from major news networks and the assault on Pride Month appear to lack coverage worldwide. It is unclear how Ankara is able to achieve this silencing of media and human-rights groups.

Turkish journalists are often targeted and jailed for their journalistic activities. Turkey is one of the world’s biggest jailers of professional journalists and ranked 153rd among 180 countries in terms of press freedom, according to Reporters Without Borders (RSF).

According to the Stockholm Center for Freedom’s “Jailed and Wanted Journalists in Turkey” database, 172 journalists are behind bars in Turkey and 167 are wanted and either in exile or at large.