I wrote here a few weeks ago that they keep talking about press freedom but this is something they never mentioned whilst their rivals were pressured by previous governments. I should also have mentioned the establishment, the judiciary and the military. Anyway, last week, we had a remarkable test case to see whether Doğan Media is really concerned about the freedom of the press or Aydin Doğan’s freedom of “purse” from legitimate legal obligations such as taxes, at the expense of the Treasury. Last week, we read in newspapers that one of Turkey’s most successful and energetic journalists, Adem Yavuz Arslan, who is both a columnist and Ankara representative of the Bugün daily, was arrested by the gendarmerie at 4:00 a.m.Not because he is a murderer but simply because he wrote a comment about the Ergenekon terror organization case. Everybody in Turkey comments on the case, and the leader of the opposition has repeatedly declared that he was an advocate of the suspects. What is different about Arslan commenting on the issue is that he is a pro-democracy journalist and is capable of providing us with credible evidence in the case as a result of his successful journalism. As far as I know, there are now about 30 court cases against him, all of them related to the Ergenekon case. It is obvious that our prosecutors are very active and dynamic when it comes to this case.
As I wrote here before, there is a kind of funny legal pluralism in Turkey. In addition to having Janus-faced laws, some laws are only applied to the establishment’s villains. What happened to Arslan was that an overenthusiastic -- probably pro-Ergenekon -- prosecutor wrote an indictment accusing him. However, the prosecutor “somehow” could not manage to reach Arslan and let him know about the case and ask him to give evidence and defend himself, which are legal obligations if one is officially accused by the prosecutor. According to the law, if the accused cannot be found or does not respond to the prosecutor, he shall be arrested. Arslan normally goes to court to defend himself, which has now become his part-time job!
There is no reason that he would not respond to the prosecutor. He says that he has never heard of the case and the prosecutor says that he could not find Arslan so that he could let him know of the indictment. Funnily enough, Arslan writes a column three times a week and presents a live TV program five times a week on national TV. What is more, he was on the prime minister’s plane and went abroad a few days before the incident. Anyway, prosecutors in Turkey regularly employ this trick, and they simply hide their indictments so that the accused is arrested. This is what happened to Arslan. At 4:00 a.m., he, his wife and 2-year-old daughter were woken up by the gendarmerie in his hotel room, and he was arrested. Somehow, they could not wait for a few hours until a more civilized time of day. He was taken into custody for about nine hours and later released by the court.
It is obvious that this is a great injustice to a journalist who is only doing his job. Can you imagine this happening to a Doğan Media columnist or Ankara representative? We would have a kind of earthquake, if not a coup d’état. Several Doğan columnists would remind Erdoğan, once more, of former Prime Minister Adnan Menderes’ fate, being hanged by a military junta. Eurocrats would release several -- not just one -- press releases to warn the government.
So, what was the reaction of the Doğan media to the Arslan incident? We know that they are not great supporters of press freedom, but to at least save face in these turbulent times when they argue that press freedom is in danger in Turkey, one expects that they would defend Arslan. Alas. Doğan’s Hurriyet daily did not care at all. His Milliyet and Radikal published more than a few identical sentences, based on news from the Doğan News Agency. But instead of letting us know what really happened and what Arslan said, they wrote, “Arslan was arrested because he did not respond to the prosecutor’s indictment.”
They did not bother to mention freedom of the press at all.
It seems that Hurriyet not mentioning the incident is a more honorable act compared to what Milliyet and Radikal did! Press freedom is irrelevant; long live the freedom of the purse (of Mr. Doğan).
