İhsan Yılmaz
By only focusing on the Ergenekon cases’ seemingly problematic aspects, the establishment’s media has been trying to manufacture consent that the evidence against the suspects in the Ergenekon cases are superficial constructs fabricated by the AKP and the
Hizmet Movement to silence their critics.
What they have been trying to do is actually neither authentic nor original nor unique. Similar to almost everything in their lives, this tactic has also been copied, imitated and transplanted from the West.
Let us start with their big fuss about freedom of the press in Turkey. First of all, it must be noted that freedom of the press in Turkey has always been problematic. In Kemalistan, rulers have never shown a taste for critics, and they have spent all their energies and powers to suppress freedom of the press willy nilly or in one way or another. Turks in Ottoman times were only engaged in bureaucracy, military service and farming but almost never in business. Thus, the accumulation of wealth or the emergence of a Turkish bourgeoisie never happened. The nationalist Young Turks, predecessors of the Kemalists, tried to create or engineer a Turkish bourgeoisie by using state power in a top down fashion. The Kemalists continued the same policy. What happened was that an embedded, as it were, Turkish bourgeoisie emerged who also owned the so-called mainstream press. The Kemalist state’s customs and tariff policies, distribution of economic privileges and the meting out of favorable state contracts and tenders functioned as the carrot. And its ruthless press laws, criminal laws, etc., worked as the stick. In one way or another, the Turkish bourgeois with their press outlets have worked as part of the hegemonic state apparatus, and they have constructed an imagined normalcy, or doxa, sanctifying the Kemalist state vision, ideology and policies.
Even today, the Kemalists have been trying to marginalize the non-establishment press. Very recently, we witnessed once again that the military commanders did not allow journalists from several media outlets to a ceremony that was held for the funeral of 12 soldiers who became martyrs in Afghanistan. Zaman, Samanyolu TV, Bugun, Taraf, Vakit, Kanal 7 and so on are not on the military’s list of accredited media outlets. Previously, the list was longer but thanks to former Chief of General Staff Gen. Ilker Basbuğ’s tactic of enticing AKP-controlled newspapers to drive a wedge between the AKP and
Hizmet, some newspapers such as Yeni Safak and Star were added to the list, and nowadays, the majority on the list are the ones that are suspected of being affiliates of the
Hizmet Movement. It is a well known secret that behind closed doors, the Kemalist oligarchy’s men have been whispering in the ears of the AKP politicians that they do not have a problem with the AKP but want to get rid of the real danger,
Hizmet. So far, the AKP government has not fallen into their trap.
Back to the accreditation, it is obvious that this is against freedom of the press, is not just and is a way of disciplining the media. Here we are not talking about marginal and extremist media, which must not be discriminated against, either, but dailies such as the biggest daily,
Zaman, which sells 1 million copies every day, equal to the total circulation of the second, third and fourth dailies in terms of number of copies sold. This has been going on for years, and with the exception of a few very subtle, soft voices, the establishment media has never protested against this anti-democratic behavior of the military. If they did only 1 percent of what they did for Ergenekon, this practice would end. It would only take one action by all these outlets to end this.
It is no secret that the AKP government is also a child of Kemalistan, and they detest criticism. They are pleased to see that their critics are fired from their jobs, and in most cases, even without them asking, media bosses apply self-censorship and fire columnists of their own volition. But to say that the AKP imprisons its critics is a very great lie as the ones who are in prison on Ergenekon charges have not been the biggest critics of the AKP or
Hizmet; some of them were even unknown to the larger segments of society, and many who have strongly criticized the AKP and
Hizmet do not face any criminal charges. As the
recent European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) verdict on Tuncay Özkan versus Turkey agreed, there is plausible and serious evidence against some of these journalists, but the establishment media carefully hide this from their consumers.
Readers of Chomsky would know that their tactics were borrowed from the West. Yet, it seems that so few people both in Turkey and in the West give the impression that they have ever read Chomsky. Or have they?
Published on
Today's Zaman, 30 March 2012, Friday
Related Articles:
