TURKISH DELIGHT. Shooting messengers

For years now, Turkey has been a favoured base for journalists covering West Asia. Istanbul is heaving with foreign journalists from correspondents to freelancers and photographers. In recent months, hundreds more have streamed in to cover the unrest in Turkey, particularly the attacks by Kurdish separatists from the PKK party. There’s also a vibrant and thriving local press.

But events of the last month are leaving both foreign and local journalists feeling jittery and persecuted. It began with the arrest of two British journalists, plus their Iraqi fixer, on August 28. The journalists, who worked for Vice News and were filming in the south-eastern city of Diyarbakir, near the Syrian border, were accused of engaging in terrorist activity on behalf of the Islamic State. The evidence was ludicrous: references to ISIS written in their notebooks. After international outrage, the British journalists were released, but their fixer, Mohammed Rasool, remains in custody.

Then on September 6, Frederike Geerdink, a well known Dutch journalist, who bills herself as the only foreign journalist living in Diyarbakir, was arrested. This was Geerdink’s second arrest. In January, she was acquitted of spreading terrorist propaganda. Geerdink was deported almost instantly.

Wrote Geerdink in a Dutch paper, “A lack of press freedom first and foremost hits the people whose stories remain untold. The Kurds again have two eyes less aimed at them.” But it’s not just the foreign journalists who are being targeted.

The government now appears to be engaged in a sustained campaign against all journalists covering the battles between PKK and the state — 32 Kurdish journalists were detained in the south eastern town of Cizre, then released after protests.

Apart from Kurdish separatism, anything journalists write, tweet or share on social media, even mildly critical, can be a reason to arrest them in the new Turkey. “Insulting” the president, Reccep Tayyip Erdogan, an offence that is loosely defined, is now a good enough reason to be jailed or assaulted.

In September alone, charges were filed against 20 columnists, journalists and cartoonists accused of insulting Erdogan. (According to Turkey’s criminal code, a person who insults the president can be sentenced from one to four years in prison).

In early September, the offices of the Hurriyet , a popular newspaper, were attacked for two nights in succession, after the paper tweeted a comment critical of Erdogan. And as this article went to press, Ahmet Haken, a journalist critical of the ruling AKP party, and a columnist for Hurriyet , was attacked and beaten by four men.

Just as in India, journalists are now being attacked as anti-national traitors for doing their jobs. Worse, Turkish journalists are being caught between the PKK and the AKP.

In Istanbul, my foreign correspondent friends are declining trips to Cizre for fear of being deported, arrested or worse. Others are exercising extreme caution on social media. An American journalist told me, “I am even wary of what I say on Twitter. You never know which government stooges may be watching.”

If more journalists are forced into similar self-censorship, the Turkish people will be abandoned to the lethal whims of the state.

The writer is a journalist based in Istanbul and Bengaluru

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