The new Turkey
Ahmet Memiş.
Journalist Haberdar, Rotahaber

18 October 2018:

25 August 2018:

“Forgotten” journalists pen letter from prison

Nineteen Turkish journalists who fear they have been forgotten in prison have penned a letter to call attention to their plight and demand justice.

The 19 journalists held in Silivri prison are among the hundreds held in Turkey, which this year remained the world’s most prolific jailer of journalists.

The journalists were charged with membership of the outlawed Gülen religious movement, which the Turkish ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) blames for carrying out the July 2016 coup attempt.

“(We) have been held in Silivri Prison for more than two years. We, who have no job other than journalism, want to say we wish to be remembered and we expect justice,” the journalists said in their letter.

The nineteen, most of whom are reporters with little public exposure, are still being held pending appeal after two years in prison. They were among a group of 26 journalists arrested in 2016 for alleged links to Gülen who were released by a court in March last year before being detained again on the same night.

However, while five journalists have been released, pending appeal or due to health concerns, the 19 have had to remain behind bars.

“There are no concrete charges in our files. That we were released after our first hearing in court demonstrated this fact. However, we have not been released although we received lesser sentences during our last hearing,” they said.

"As ‘forgotten journalists’ who are mostly reporters and who are not well known by the public, we have been held in Silivri Prison for more than two years. We, who have no job other than journalism, want to say that we want to be remembered and that we expect justice," said the journalists.

Turkey’s press was declared “not free” by the Freedom House organisation in its 2017 report, after harsh crackdowns under a post-coup attempt state of emergency that saw hundreds of journalists arrested and a significant number of press outlets shut down. Reporters Without Borders ranked Turkey 157th out of 180 countries in its 2018 World Press Freedom Index.

The 19 signatories of the letter are: Abdullah Kılıç, Ahmet Memiş, Ali Akkuş, Bayram Kaya, Cemal Azmi Kalyoncu, Cuma Ulus, Gökçe Fırat Çulhaoğlu, Habip Güler, Hanım Büşra Erdal, Hüseyin Aydın, M. Sait Kuloğlu, M. Erkan Acar, Mutlu Çölgeçen, Oğuz Usluer,  Seyit Kılıç, Ufuk Şanlı, Ünal Tanık, Yakup Çetin and Yetkin Yıldız. ***

Police detained Ahmet Memiş, news coordinator of internet news portal Haberdar, on July 24, 2016. Memiş, then 42, turned himself in to police in Istanbul when he learned that they went to his home to detain him in his absence, according to press reports.

According to court documents CPJ reviewed, the judge who ordered the journalist's detention pending trial on suspicion of being a member of a terrorist organization asked him about his work for Haberdar and for the news website Rotahaber, where Memiş worked as an editor from 2010 to 2015. Both websites stopped operating soon after a failed military coup on July 15, 2016, amid a sweeping crackdown on suspected followers of exiled preacher Fethullah Gülen. The Turkish government accuses Gülen of maintaining a terrorist organization and parallel state structure, which it calls FETÖ/PDY and which it alleges was behind the attempted coup.

The judge also asked Memiş if he had any involvement with a Twitter account named Fuat Avni (@fuatavni), which claims to be the work of someone from within Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's inner circle. Memiş denied any connection to the account.

Memiş was asked about news reports on Fuat Avni's tweets in Rotahaber and whether he was in any way responsible for publishing opinion columns in Haberdar.

Memiş's wife, Pınar Memiş, told CPJ that her husband decided to prepare his own defense for the trial because they could not afford legal fees. The Turkish legal system allows defendants to ask for a public defender if they cannot afford a lawyer.

"He was not a member of a [terrorist organization], he did not aide them financially. He was just a journalist," Pınar Memiş said.

Memiş is on trial with several other journalists. In the original indictment, all but one were charged with “being a member of an armed [terrorist] organization,” which carries up to 10 years in prison, according to reports. The indictment accused the defendants of manipulating public perception of FETÖ to turn people against the government, which, prosecutors argued, made them members of the group.

CPJ found the indictment to be similar to those presented at trials of other journalists in Turkey. Prosecutors cited as evidence journalistic activity or acts of free speech and communication, or cited circumstantial evidence such as being employed by a certain media outlet or having an account at a bank allegedly linked to Gülenists.

In Memiş’s case, prosecutors cited as evidence his employment at Haberdar and Rotahaber and alleged that he published content from, and reports about, the Fuat Avni Twitter account.

When the trial started in March 2017, an Istanbul court ordered Memiş and several of the other journalists to be released while the case was heard, according to news reports. Prosecutors successfully appealed the decision, and authorities ordered an investigation into the judges who had ordered the release and they were relieved of duty, according to the reports.

Memiş was being detained in Silivri Prison, Istanbul.

This page is licensed under Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)