Without opening this lock, you cannot understand what happened throughout the history of the Turkish Republic. Be it the Dersim massacre or the İzmir assassination [an attempt to kill Atatürk] or the shooting of Ali Şükrü Bey or the murder of Topal Osman or the Kurdish rebellions or three military coups or the Feb. 28 incident. The bloody secrets of these incidents are hidden in ‘what the media did not report.’ With your permission, I would like to ask you a simple question: Would there have been any Feb. 28 without the involvement of the media? If there had not been TV channels which aired the images of a hundred Aczmendis every night, who would appear in one city after another with their long black robes, or the weird stories told by Fadime Şahin -- who disappeared after the memorandum -- about her love affairs with so-called sheiks or the strange raids made to catch them in the act, and if there had not been the newspapers who published news stories designed according to the memorandums, would the Feb. 28 generals and their supporters have been able to attain their goals?“Yesterday [Monday], in Hürriyet, Ahmet Hakan noted that three papers, Hürriyet, Milliyet and Sabah, ran the same headline, ‘Horrifying oath taken during Quran course,’ on the same day during the Feb. 28 period. The same title in three papers. Do you think it was a coincidence? Certainly not. Were there papers which revealed these unethical behaviors in the media? None, as far as I remember. Well, as for today, do you think that it is ‘coincidental’ that these papers and TV channels are silent about the Cage plan? The Cage plan is the most horrible plan this country has ever seen. They have even plotted to bomb children. The majority of those who prepared this plan are high-ranking military officers who are still on active duty. Seven of them were arrested. The weapons that were mentioned in the plan were found in the locations mentioned in the plan. Ten days after the chief of General Staff said that those weapons do not belong to the army; it was found that they do belong to the army. The bomb placed in the Koç Museum with the intention of killing children was discovered. They have made preparations for killing non-Muslims. They have obtained the list of subscribers to the Agos newspaper, and included this list in the plans. With all of its details, the plan was seized on the computer of an Ergenekon defendant and was made part of the case file. What is the media doing about this terrible plan? It remains silent.”
Altan continues: “Nobody in this country can set up a junta or conduct a coup without the help of the media. This is because those aspiring to overthrow the government first pave the way for it, and it is the media which assumes the primary task in laying the groundwork for the coup. They do this by showing something ‘bigger’ than they really are or by concealing something. Now, take a closer look at this media. Listen to their silence about the Cage. You will hear the hum of the junta inside that silence.”
Altan also wrote about this subject in his previous article: “If you wonder why this country has suffered from what happened to it, then you should obtain and read carefully the newspapers for the last three days. These papers will tell you all of our recent history. All of these papers survive not by telling, but by not telling. They owe their current status to what they did not tell or write or see.
“Our past and our state of being are hidden in their ‘silence.’ For the last three days, we have been publishing the plans of a junta that intended to blow up dozens of children in a bomb attack, kill non-Muslims and human rights advocates and overthrow the government by creating chaos. Now glance at these papers to see what they write about these plans. Have a look at Hürriyet, Sabah, Milliyet, Vatan, Radikal, Habertürk and Akşam [you can include Star and Vakit on this list -- note by Bülent Keneş]. The people who read these papers exclusively do not know that there is a junta which had prepared such a terrible plan in this country just eight months ago and that the high-ranking members of that junta are still on active duty.
“See also the TV channels associated with them. How many news channels covered this news or questioned this matter? So why do they refrain from running news stories about this plan? Do these media organizations think that an action plan about killing dozens of children is ‘unimportant’? According to journalistic criteria, can they regard it as ‘unimportant’? Tell me a country where the media would treat such news as unimportant. In France, the US, Netherlands, the UK, Portugal, Poland, Japan or India? In which of them would such a plan be regarded as insignificant? We all know that in all of them, it would be treated as breaking news. So why is it not considered so in Turkey? What’s Turkey’s difference? The difference is that there is the ‘secret power’ of the military in this country, and this secret power firmly controls the media. And the media attempt to boost nationalism in order to reinforce this power and conceal many truths. This is what happened as a rule throughout the history of the republic.”
How can one not share what Altan writes and the revolt he feels in the face of the silence of the caged media? But do you think that the powers-that-be in the junta media think like us or revolt against these developments? No, this is not the case in the least. These days, they are just busy undermining the credibility of the hair-rising conspiracy plans which some conscientious writers, such as Cengiz Çandar, Doğan Satmış, Hasan Cemal, Umur Talu, Emre Aköz, Hadi Uluengin and Mahmut Övür, whom they fail to silence, write about in their columns.
Although they refrain from publishing news about these junta plans, they do not hesitate a moment to immediately publish all sorts of denials or statements from the General Staff. Moreover, they tend to regard their readers or audience as stupid by publishing the General Staff’s refutations -- which in my opinion are not convincing in the least given the developments -- to the news stories and discussions they carefully avoid. They do one more thing, to be fair. They do their best to discredit the media organizations which write about and question these conspiracies, juntas and networks. Apparently, this country will suffer more from these junta generals, the caged media and the journalists who voluntarily entered that cage.
