Metin Yıkar, editor-in-chief of the station, said cameraman Erkan Uysal was told to leave the compound by an official, probably a military official in civilian clothes. “He was picked from dozens of foreign and Turkish journalists covering the event and was told that he had not been accredited for the meeting,” he told Today’s Zaman yesterday. But Uysal had received his accreditation card from the organizers two days ago, he went on. When he insisted that he had the proper registration and authorization to cover the NATO meeting, he was told that he had received the permission by mistake.
According to Yıkar, the incident is an extension of the ban on Samanyolu and some other media outlets to cover military-related events and enter military facilities. “This is a reflection of the accreditation practice in an international meeting,” he said. Samanyolu is one of the media outlets, including Today’s Zaman, that are categorized by the military as non-accredited.
The ban is criticized as an infringement of media freedom.
“This act of censorship that targeted Samanyolu in front of the international community is indeed an act of censorship against the media as a whole. It should not happen in a democratic and transparent country,” Yıkar said. There was no statement from the organizers of the meeting when Today’s Zaman went into print.
Worst organization ever
NATO’s İstanbul meeting will be remembered for its poor organization, which caused many difficulties for journalists trying to cover the event. Some journalists called it the worst example of organization they’d ever seen, referring to a number of things that went wrong ranging from power cuts to excessive security searches. It took journalists 90 minutes to enter the compound where the meeting took place because they were sent from one gate to another by security officials before eventually granted entry. The police blamed the military for numerous security searches of journalists, while the military officials said they had acted on the basis of orders given to them. At one point, no journalists were allowed to enter a room where Jean-Francois Bureau, NATO’s assistant secretary-general for public diplomacy, was holding a press conference.
