Can Dündar - We Are Arrested: A Journalists Notes from a Turkish Prison

ON 6 May 2016, as I was leaving the house in the morning, I noticed something strange.

My bodyguard, who had been my constant companion for a while, wasnt in the car that had come to collect me. He had been officially appointed in the face of increasing threats; but for some reason, he had overslept that morning.

Yet, it was an important day. The court would announce the judgment on the case in which we faced two life sentences.

I rang him and asked him to come to court. He did.

We entered the chamber, quiet due to the order banning the public. We made our closing statements, reiterating that sentencing a news item whose veracity was proven and whose value to the public was evident would damage press freedom and trample on justice.

The judge took a recess before announcing his decision.

We went out. As we were leaving the courthouse to wait at the caf nearby, I noticed the bodyguard was for whatever reason absent once again. I was with my wife and a CHP MP, chatting to fellow journalists waiting at the exit when I spotted a sinister face rushing towards me.

I saw the glint of the barrel first and smelled the discharged bullet. And heard him shout Traitor! at the same time. This was the term President Erdoan was trying to ascribe to me. The bullet had to be the heavy price he wanted me to pay

This was supposedly the most secure plaza in Turkey: Not a bird would be allowed to fly, as the saying goes, never mind enter carrying a weapon. As the TV reporter shielded me, my wife reacted quite by instinct, grabbing the assailant by the arm as the MP seized him by the throat.

Plainclothesmen got to the scene just then and arrested the gunman. My fellow journalist sustained a minor graze on the leg; I got off lightly thanks to the heroism of those around me. But it was now evident that the threat wasnt just to my newspaper, journalism or freedom. Now my own life was under threat.

Soon afterwards, parting a group of friends who had rushed over at news of the attack, we entered the courtroom for the decision.

The judge started with, Sorry about the attack, before passing sentence: Five years and ten months imprisonment for divulging state secrets.

As we left the courthouse, I said, In the space of an hour, we have experienced two assassination attempts, one physical, the other judicial, and added that we would never be silenced.

The gunman later said in his initial statement that his aim was to scare me over the news report I had published. The court returned my passport on the same day it passed the custodial sentence.

Did they mean to say, Stay away from this country?

As this book goes to print, the decision of the Court of Appeal is still pending. The prison sentence hangs on our necks, and the smell of gunpowder is etched in our minds.

* * *

2016 was one of the most traumatic years in my life, but also in the history of Turkey. Precisely ten weeks after me, Turkish democracy also faced a grave armed attack.

On 15 July, the Glen congregation that had partnered the government for many years attempted a coup. There was a mutiny in the army: Parliament was bombed, troops fought the police and, in some areas, troops fought troops. Despite the enormous amount of blood that was spilt, thankfully this armed attempt failed.

The Turkish public had suffered so much under coups throughout history; this time, they went out into the squares and lay before tanks to save the country from a terrible catastrophe.

Sadly, in the aftermath of this brutal attempt, the Turkish government chose to increase oppression rather than channel this opportunity for solidarity against a coup. A state of emergency was declared. The European Convention of Human Rights was suspended. The government assumed Rule by Decree, effectively bypassing Parliament. Detention periods were extended. A campaign was launched to reinstate the death penalty. In a countrywide witch-hunt, thousands of journalists, writers, academics, judges, prosecutors, soldiers, police officers and civil servants were arrested. Dozens of newspapers and websites were closed down, and others were intimidated. Western reaction to these measures strained relations even more and things now appear to have come to a breaking point.

The military coup was foiled, but a civilian coup had suspended freedoms.

* * *

As for the personal consequences of the coup

The first officials to be dismissed in the higher ranks of the judiciary were Constitutional Court judges who had ordered our release. Then the entire structure of the Court of Appeals that was due to debate our appeal to the prison sentence was changed. The prosecutor who had asked for our detention and authored the indictment has been appointed as the Chief Prosecutor of Istanbul. A new case has been filed, claiming that by running the original news item that had caused my detention, I had assisted the Glen organisation alleged to have engineered the coup attempt. And the court that filed this case ordered the cancellation of my passport even before the hearings had begun.

2016 had started in a prison cell; halfway through the year, it continues with the smell of gunpowder, prison sentences, new court cases and the possibility of another arrest.

Just like me, Turkeys feeble democracy tries to find a way out, to breathe and create hope for the future amongst the coup attempts, witch-hunts, arrest campaigns and oppressive policies.

* * *

Every sentence written on a country in which everything changes by the day is sentenced to grow old rapidly All the same, I would like to be able to read these lines under better conditions tomorrow, to be able to say, Those were dark times; theyre gone now, as we document the era this book was written in.

As we present We Are Arrested to European readers, I would like to call out not only as a journalist fighting for the freedom of the press, but also as the citizen of a nation trying to sustain democracy on a perilous pendulum swinging between the barracks and the mosque:

Support the struggle for existence fought by Turkeys democratic powers.

This support is as crucial to Europe as it is to Turkey.

A Turkey without Europe will turn into an excluded, anti-Western, totalitarian country; but a Europe without Turkey will turn into an equally monochromatic, insular and ineffective continent.

Convince Turkey that Europe is not a Christian club, that it is a partnership of contemporary principles, and Europe will be able to defeat the increasing threat of Islamophobia by embracing the most secularist country in the Muslim world.

That is the only way to stop this dirty war tainting Islam with terrorism and the reaction that has triggered an escalating ultra-nationalism in the West.

C AN D NDAR

September 2016