Melon, you say? The Prosecutors say this is Crypted Talk and Evidence you were trying to topple the Goverment

American journalist Claire Berlinski writes about how "[t]his week, ten journalists—including the two most famous ones, Ahmet Şık and Nedem Şener—are on trial. They’re not being tried for journalism, of course; they are, according to the indictment, members of Ergenekon, a shadowy, ultranationalist group that has been endeavoring to foment a coup against the Turkish government." While calling attention to the odd reasonings in the indictment and Turkey's overall atmosphere of criminalization of expression and association, Berlinski resorts to an Orwellian language play to describe this dynamic.

Subtergenekon and Other Crimes
In Turkey, alleged terrorism requires a brand-new vocabulary.

City Journal

Claire Berlinski

January 3, 2011

"It’s relatively fortunate to be a famous arrested journalist: at least there’s hope that someone will notice you’re in jail.

[...]

This week, ten journalists—including the two most famous ones, Ahmet Şık and Nedem Şener—are on trial. They’re not being tried for journalism, of course; they are, according to the indictment, members of Ergenekon, a shadowy, ultranationalist group that has been endeavoring to foment a coup against the Turkish government. This crime, too, cries out for a name of its own: subtergenekon, say. It is exceedingly subtle, you see, because Şık is best known in Turkey for having written the definitive two-volume exposé of Ergenekon. That, according to the indictment, was his cover—an interesting example of prosecutorial subtergiversation. The indictment focuses on Şık’s latest, unfinished book, The Imam’s Army, which claims that the followers of Fethullah Gülen—a Turkish preacher living in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania—have infiltrated the police. Şık describes a close relationship between the AKP (Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s party) and the Gülenists, arguing that the former has used the latter to bring the security forces under its control. The government seized and banned Şık’s draft of the book, but it has since been published in Turkey. If the writing of the book is an act of subter, as the indictment claims, it is a very subtle subter indeed; I myself read a good deal of it without suffering any harm at all; it is even available now in the Atatürk Airport bookstore, an odd place to sell such a lethal weapon. Yet Şık remains in jail.

Şener, too, has been charged with subtergenekon. He is best known for researching the murder of the Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink and for proposing that the police and the state were involved in it. Şener’s trial coincides with the trial of Dink’s alleged murderers.

The subter trials commence with the reading of the indictment aloud, a particularly lengthy process in the case of these journalists, as it contains several years’ worth of quotations from the journalists’ tapped phone conversations, including every detail of their vacation plans, weight-loss regimens, and grocery purchases, which the prosecutors claim are cryptic descriptions of their plot to topple the government. Prosecutors, for example, found damning evidence in this comment: 'He brought watermelon and bananas. You send the melons, then eat the bananas.' Evidence of subtermelonkon?"


To read the rest of the article, please visit:

http://www.city-journal.org/2012/eon0103cb.html

Also, for a translation of Minister Şahin's speech on terrorism, which Berlinski mentions in her text, see:

http://gitamerica.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-definitions-of-terrorism-from_26.html

To read more about the continuing trial of award winning journalists Nedim Şener and Ahmet Şık, visit Hürriyet Daily News. You can read selections from Ahmet Şık’s book which led to his arrest on Human Rights Foundation of Turkey (the book has since been published in Turkish under the title of OOO Kitap).

Unmanned News Vehicles

On Wednesday, December 28, around 10 pm, Turkish air forces bombed and killed 35 civilians near Uludere. Turkish TV channels concealed this massacre for more than 12 hours, long after the news had actually hit the internet.

"İnsansız Hava Aracı" (İHA) is the Turkish term for an "Unmanned Aerial Vehicle," or a drone. It was İHAs that provided the "intelligence" leading to the massacre of 35 Turkish citizens near Uludere. Ahmet Meriç Şenyüz, a journalist who writes for the daily Birgün, calls the news agencies, which did not broadcast or publish anything about the massacre for more than 12 hours and then came close to blaming the civilians who died for being there, İHAs as well. Şenyüz calls such a news agency an "İnsansız Haber Aracı," or Unmanned News Vehicle (UNV in English) because "just as the İHAs turn all things alive into targets without differentiating civilians from PKK [militants], Unmanned News Vehicles serve all pieces of news that the state brings to their attention without distinguishing correct ones from false ones."

UNVs also distinguish themselves by not publishing anything before the state serves them the news in the form it deems appropriate. Around 11 AM on Thursday, December 29, Ayşenur Arslan had just started her show "Medya Mahallesi" (Media Neighborhood) with her guest Can Dündar. In the very first minute of her show, she mentioned what happened in Uludere the previous night, citing the press release of the governor of Şırnak, the province where Uludere is located (watch it online in Turkish on CNN Turk). She stated that they will cover it in detail later during her show. This announcement apparently prompted a CNN Turk administrator to send orders to Arslan's earphone and eventually come down to the production room during the live show. Arslan did not give in; but the incident is now recorded as one of the clear examples of self-censorship in Turkish media administration (read about the incident in Turkish on Gazeteciler.com).

What were the "Unmanned News Vehicles" waiting for? They were waiting for the press release of the office of the chief of staff. The "military guardianship" that the Turkish democracy was supposed to have gotten rid off continues to be felt strongly in the mainstream Turkish press when it comes to reporting on Turkish Kurdistan (read Yıldırım Türker in Turkish on Radikal).

While this case of self-censorship is alarming, it is actually not surprising since Turkey has the worst record on press freedom among all member states of the Council of Europe (read more on TrustMedia).