A PKK militant stands at a barricade in the city of Diyarbakir, Turkey. Murat Bay/PA Images. All rights reserved.ISTANBUL – The lights went out as we sat in the Istanbul offices of Punto 24, a not-for-profit set up to encourage independent reporting in Turkey, discussing the plight of local media facing the most intense crackdown for years. “This could be a wake for the Turkish press,” Andrew Finkel, a P24 founder, said gloomily as his colleagues placed trays of candles on the table.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s move to consolidate power just three months after his party won a fourth term includes an intense crackdown on media and a hostile work environment: TV stations taken over, journalists jailed, and a newspaper building attacked. Amid the physical destruction unfolding mostly unreported in southeastern Turkey with the resumption of conflict with Kurdish armed groups, a swift and steep decline in press freedom threatens the country’s health. And yet, Europe has done little to respond to the crisis, or even to sound the alarm. Emma Sinclair-Webb, Human Rights Watch’s senior researcher in Turkey, described pacing along outside the fortified walls of Diyarbakır’s old town to the sound of tank fire and explosions from within its narrow, winding streets, because she was not allowed into the city.
Who knows what stories are going untold in Turkey? Mainstream media coverage of the fighting in the southeast, where government forces are besieging Kurdish towns in their renewed conflict with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), trumpets military assaults that “render the terrorists ineffective” while mourning soldiers who are “martyred.” Every day, Twitter and Facebook users post dramatic accounts of wounded civilians, including children, trapped and untreated in cities in the southeast because ambulances can’t get in, and the injured can’t get out.
