Why Turkey Was the Scene of the Crime

The afternoon was abuzz with cameras clicking, as journalists gathered to observe a team of Turkish investigators arrive at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, reportedly there to figure out what happened to Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who disappeared on October 2 and has since been confirmed by Turkey’s chief prosecutor to have been gruesomely killed. “Turkey wants to get justice for a silenced journalist? Ha! It’s really a farce,” Fatih Ekram, a Turkish cameraman, told me recently, recounting the days when Turkish authorities were the ones harassing journalists.

In the purge following a coup attempt in 2016, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan sought to control the situation by controlling the narrative around it. His first target: the local media. Erdogan’s administration arrested reporters and editors and shut down news channels. Ekram told me that he spent those days filming the police as they arrested journalists, barging into media companies to destroy equipment and handcuff reporters. “This is surreal,” Ekram said, almost in disbelief, as he watched and recorded Turkish authorities’ seemingly proactive investigation into the killing of Khashoggi, only two years after the government-led purge.

Indeed, in a twist of irony, Khashoggi’s death and Erdogan’s attempts to link it to the Saudi government have again exposed Turkey’s own vicious treatment of the press. More bluntly, what looks like genuine concern for a journalist is anything but earnest—it’s downright hypocritical, and it reveals more about Turkey’s dangerous media landscape than it does about the Khashoggi case.

Erdogan, who has been pushing Saudi Arabia to provide answers to the Khashoggi killing, has created what could be a diplomatic nightmare for the Saudis. In fact, it’s plausible that the Saudis could have gotten away with killing Khashoggi had Erdogan not so aggressively insisted on making the investigation a national priority, instructing his officials to take the lead in uncovering the truth. “Where is Khashoggi’s body?” Erdogan publicly asked Saudi Arabia, putting immense pressure on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

And yet, even though Turkey was the country that leaked some of the initial details of Khashoggi’s disappearance in early October, it’s continued its pattern of arresting, detaining, and imprisoning multiple journalists, frequently labeling them terrorists.

For instance, during a large crackdown in Diyarbakır on October 9—a mere five days after Khashoggi disappeared—the police took at least six journalists and two newspaper distributors into custody. Most of them were detained at police headquarters due to their association with pro-Kurdish media outlets. Then, on October 11, almost a dozen more arrests were made. Sources in Turkey told me that detained journalists were asked pointed questions like, “What’s your connection to the PKK/KCK?”—referring to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a militant group located in southern Turkey and northern Iraq—and, “How many times have you exited the country illegally?” Çağdaş Kaplan, an editor at Yeni Yaşam, one of the targeted publications, tweeted that the police had broken into the office and confiscated computers.

Cihan Olmenz, one of the arrested journalists, claims that he spent four days detained in a Turkish prison—simply for doing his job. On his release, he told me by phone that he’d been accused of being a terrorist and an enemy of the state because he’d previously attended a Kurdish protest. Olmenz was astonished by the news of Erdogan’s pursuit of justice in the Khashoggi case: “Is this not what Turkey wants of its own journalists? For them to shut up?”

Such arrests and crackdowns aren’t unique to Turkey, but Erdogan has been consistently trying out new ways to silence members of the press who stand in opposition to the official government line, going so far as to reach beyond Turkey’s borders to quash dissent. On October 16, for instance, a Turkish court asked Interpol to cooperate in arresting journalists Can Dündar and İlhan Tanır, who now live in Germany. The court requested a red notice—“a request to locate and provisionally arrest an individual pending extradition,” per Interpol’s definition—for the journalists. Both are defendants in a state trial against Cumhuriyet, an opposition paper that’s been shuttered by the government.

Securing press freedom in Turkey, where more than 140 journalists have been imprisoned since the coup, is critical to creating any semblance of democracy in the country. Unfortunately, due to efforts by the Erdogan administration to stifle dissent, many cases of press harassment and violence aren’t even documented. Olmenz believes that, unless large-scale arrests take place, the media rarely reports on the day-to-day muzzling of journalists.

Today, Turkey is the world’s leading jailer of journalists—surpassing even China. For Turkish journalists, it’s indeed surreal to witness their country investigate, with non-existent bona fides, the same sort of crime that’s been committed against them with seasonal regularity.

As the Khashoggi case unfolds, international media has focused on the grisly details of the reported Saudi plot. Yet this is also a critical moment to ask ourselves why the Saudis may have thought that they could get away with slaying a journalist in Turkey in the first place—why a country with an inglorious record on human rights would be the ideal site of a killing.