Published by Al Jazeera on October 23, 2016
Silencing Kurdish media
As Turkey’s media crackdown continues, Kurdish media are feeling the heat.
Three months after the failed military coup in Turkey, media outlets there are still dealing with the aftermath.
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“The doors have been locked and sealed. The screens are dark. But will journalists just sit at home, scared. No. Because as the whole world is aware, there is a new media system.” Bekir Günes, reporter, IMC TV |
Late last month, 25 media outlets were ordered closed by Turkey’s broadcast regulator – but the purge is not limited to the Gulen movement as most of the outlets were Kurdish. As the national state of emergency is extended, more and more Kurdish journalists find they are being treated as enemies of the state.
“We should be doing broadcasting in our land, in Kurdistan, in Turkey, but we had to leave because there was so much oppression and punishment,” says Ferda Cetin, director at Med Nuce TV, a Kurdish TV station based in Belgium.
Kurds make up nearly 20 percent of the Turkish population. There are close to 15 million of them and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party has been locked in an on and off guerrilla war with the Turkish state for more than three decades.
These days, under an increasingly authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with a penchant for ruling by decree, it appears not many other than the Turkish state channel TRT are safe.
“A lot of the stories that could no longer be seen in Turkish media could still be seen in Kurdish media and, as a result, the repression of Kurdish media has intensified,” says Hatice Kamer, a freelance Kurdish journalist.
The Listening Post‘s Flo Phillips reports on the Kurdish media outlets struggling to survive in the aftermath of Turkey’s failed coup.
Source: Al Jazeera
The staff of the Kurdish television station IMC TV awaits an oncoming police raid. (photo AFP)
