Happy new year Turkey! With good intentions from the NYT

In Turkey, the recent two decades have seen a proliferation of “New Year’s” decorations in İstanbul’s stylish neighborhoods. They are, of course, actually Christmas decorations, but no matter! Even gift-giving for the New Year has been adopted, and has become a steadily-growing phenomenon. (1) Apparently with that in mind, the NYT has given us a New Year’s gift in the form of Şebnem Arsu’s 3 January 2015 article about the political caricature ‘zine sector in Turkey, and the oppression that sector supposedly faces from the AKP government.I’m sure that the NYT editors, and specifically whoever it is who decides to run articles such as Arsu’s, feels that they are “speaking truth to power.” I’m sure that they are confident of their good intentions. But we do know which road is paved with good intentions. The problem is that the NYT editors have confused who is powerful and who is not in Turkish politics and society. The AKP look powerful to foreign observers because they have been the ruling party for twelve years. In fact, they are not nearly as powerful as outsiders might guess. The reason is that the segments of Turkish society which have controlled Turkey for the past 90 years — the “historical bloc” of the military, the judiciary, the bureaucracy, and the left-secularist intelligentsia (2) — have not disappeared. They are still with us and are fighting desperately to retain their prerogatives, fundamentally anti-democratic in nature, over Turkish society. The people who publish and write in the ‘zines are representative of only a small portion of the traditional Turkish intelligentsia; in this specific case they are by-and-large driven by the markedly statist-nationalist “Kemalist-leftist” (ulusalcı) ideology of the past twenty years.Cartoons or caricatures have indeed been a part of the Turkish press since the 19th century — and they have always been extremely political. That is, the essence behind these and other caricatures has always been to attack the government, and not to provide measured, constructive, or clever criticism of the government’s policies in the sense that Europeans and Americans are used to. Cartoons are meant to politically attack government figures, and for entirely political objectives; to provoke, to insult, to defame, to demean. The caricatures in the ‘zines are not intended to provide alternative viewpoints or reasoned appraisal of the AKP’s policies. Rather, the entire intent is to assault the AKP for political ends.Furthermore, the artists producing the current generation of anti-AKP caricatures purposefully use idioms that are understood as extremely insulting in Turkish society. For the past ten years these artists have specifically been portraying Tayyip Erdoğan, whether as pm or president, as this or that kind of animal. Why? In Turkish culture this is such a grave insult that, on the street, it would be cause for fisticuffs. In other words, the aims of the cartoonists are in no way as pure as Arsu would have the reader believe. They are doing this basically in order to spite, anger, and goad Erdoğan Added to this is the often extremely juvenile nature of the cartoons — although mature dialogue is a quality that Turkish politics generally lacks, so that the cartoonists in question are by no means alone in this.Now, even though the cartoonists in question are not drawing caricatures with pure intentions, and certainly not with the aim of providing intelligent political commentary, one could still say that the government should not be suing them. One could also say that Erdoğan should have a thicker skin, and that he should learn to tolerate such attacks. All of that, of course, is very true.On the other hand, it is also true that Erdoğan and other leading AKP figures have been singled out by cartoonists for “special treatment” ever since the AKP was elected into office in 2002. To a large extent this is a matter of class hatred: Erdoğan comes from the culturally conservative working classes of İstanbul, while these cartoonists are mostly of middle or upper-middle class origin and have come to belong to the educated elites of Turkish society. At the core, their caricatures display class contempt. Turkish citizens do have the right, under Turkish law, to sue for slander or defamation, and that’s what Erdoğan has done. Whether one sees this as intimidation of the press depends on their viewpoint, but one should at least understand the entire context under which these events are taking place. Arsu does not provide this holistic context for her readers.In fact, it is clear that Arsu has her own political agenda to pursue that the NYT editors may or may not be aware of. This becomes evident through a closer look at the details in Arsu’s article. For example, the newspaper Cumhuriyet is innocently labelled as just an “opposition” paper in the second paragraph of the article. The fact of the matter is that Cumhuriyet, a paper with ancient and very strong ties to the Turkish military and the “deep state”, has for long been a preferred flagship publication for Turkey’s hard-core Kemalists; the newspaper’s daily fare is a barrage of anti-Erdoğan and anti-AKP articles that sometimes border on fiction and are frequently slanderous. In other words, Musa Kart, the caricaturist featured in Arsu’s article, is published by Cumhuriyet for a reason, and Kart’s ability to find an outlet for his cartoons in both Cumhuriyet and the ‘zine sector is no accident.Several paragraphs on, Arsu leads the reader to believe that defamation lawsuits against opposition journalists have been increasing in frequency. Actually, the great era of AKP defamation lawsuits was about 8-10 years ago when then-PM Erdoğan sued Penguen and other ‘zines for defamation. Erdoğan won some of those lawsuits, lost others, and eventually the law suits petered out as they began to be dismissed as frivolous. For the past eight years far fewer of these lawsuits have been opened.The same paragraph also leads the reader to believe that “dozens” of journalists have lost their jobs to pressure coming from the AKP government. (3) In reality, the situation is more complicated as journalists who have resigned from their jobs because their ideological predisposition brought them into conflict with their employers have been counted amongst those “martyrs.” Others, such as the former employees of Taraf, many of whom are now writing for this Serbestiyet web site, have not been counted amongst the “martyrs” because they were forced into resigning as Fethullah Gülen’s people were seizing full ideological control over the newspaper. In short, you are a martyr for press freedom only if you have been one hundred percent hostile to the government, but not if you have been purged because you were seen as an obstacle on the road to such militant hostility. Hence the situation is not exactly as Arsu would have one believe.Several more paragraphs down, Arsu refers to a caricature that Kart published after “peaceful environmental protests” in 2011. I assume that Arsu is referring to the Hopa protests that resulted in a demonstrator’s death from a heart attack. Exactly what happened in those protests is unclear, but we do know that the events took place when Erdoğan made a campaign stop in Hopa, that police officers were stoned and injured during the protests, that Erdoğan’s motorcade was stoned, that the police pepper-sprayed protestors (which has been blamed as the cause of the protestor’s death), and that the protestors included not just environmentalists but also militant leftists and CHP supporters. Furthermore the protests were not “peaceful.” (4) The reader has a right to wonder just why the author might be omitting all these details.Again, further down the article, Arsu makes a lot out of the arrest of a protestor for holding up a cartoon that supposedly insulted the Turkish flag. Such action is, in fact, mandated under Turkish law, and many such cases have occurred in the time that I’ve lived in Turkey. Usually carried out by over-zealous policemen and prosecutors, these cases are of course detestable, but at the same time are legal and are not anything new. The problem is that Arsu attributes the arrest uniquely to Erdoğan, and holds it up as an example of his dictatorial inclinations. when neither this phenomenon, nor the law it is based on, is something novel. But consider the case, for example, of Hulya Avşar, a prominent Turkish-Kurdish actress and talk-show host, who has recently been under attack for her outspoken support of the AKP government. Back in April 2002 Ms Avşar was subjected to a criminal case for nonchalantly kicking aside a Turkish-flag balloon on her talk show. (5) That happened many months before the AKP was elected to power. The PM at the time was Bülent Ecevit, but nobody thought of blaming Mr Ecevit for the charges against Avşar — even though Ecevit was a foremost representative of the Kemalist elite, i.e. of Turkish statist-nationalist ideology, throughout his forty-year political career.And so it goes for the rest of the article. In sum, the issue is that Arsu’s article is not an objective attempt to analyze political events in Turkey, but rather a kind of journalistic agitprop. Her political slant on the cartoons issue becomes clear only if and when you have more facts at your disposal about the situations discussed in the article. But of course, most international readers do not have those details and background, so that her article comes across as an appropriate clarion call about press oppression in Turkey, whereas she is really making yet another contribution to the old Kemalist elite’s efforts to damage the AKP’s international credibility in order to roll back the democratic reforms taking place in Turkey. NOTES/FAQ/ERRATA NOTES1) This entire phenomenon is in desperate need of academic analysis, but so far only Jenny White has devoted any serious attention to it. I’ve come to understand it as a Turkish version of how Japan has adapted to the Christian world’s New Year’s Day. There has also been some reaction from the more conservative sectors of Turkish society, but one doubts that the reaction will take on serious proportions when the avant-garde is Cübbeli Ahmet Hoca. Thus it seems that New Year’s, and all the holiday trappings that go with it, give the Turkish elites an occasion to pretend that they are in Paris or London or New York, and just to have some fun for the rest of Turkish society.2) This Turkish “historical bloc” (the term is Gramscian in origin) has been analyzed in depth by Hasan Bülent Kahraman in his series of books titled Türk Siyasetinin Yapısal Analizi. These books provide a socio-political analysis of the Turkish political classes as they have existed since the 1923 foundation of the Turkish Republic.3) Yıldıray Oğur happened to thoroughly deconstruct this theme just one day before Arsu’s article was published. See: “Kuveyt’te Gazetecilik Yapmanın Keyfi Üzerine” (The Joys of Reporting from Kuwait), Türkiye Gazetesi, 2 January 2015. See also my first “Understanding the Turkish Press” article written for Serbestiyet.4) One extremely frustrating aspect of the various groups who have protested the Turkish government over the years I’ve been here is their resolute refusal to engage in truly peaceful protest methods. They do not utilize the techniques that peaceful protestors in the U.S. do, for example. Instead, Turkish protests are usually about bumping chests with the riot cops and then complaining when they get batoned for it. Others relish the chance to throw rocks and Molotov cocktails, or shoot metal ball bearings at the cops, actions which would result in charges of assault with a deadly weapon in the U.S. Needless to say, such protestors receive very little sympathy from wider sections of Turkish society.5) Avşar has been a film and TV star in Turkey since the 1970s. However, it was only in the past several years that we all found out that one side of her family is Kurdish. The reason is that only under the AKP has it become possible to openly and freely discuss the Kurdish issue. Repressive measures against Kurdish identity, language, and culture, which were strongly enforced under the Kemalist ancien régime, have been greatly relaxed by the AKP government.