The journalist Ruşen Takva, who reported on the 16-year-old child who defaced Kurdish traffic warning signs in the Kurdish-majority city Van (Wan) reading, Hêdî (Slow) and Pêşî Peya (Priority to Pedestrians) at a pedestrian crossing and spray-painted over them with the words, “Turkey is Turkish, it will stay Turkish,” announced today that he had received threatening messages.
Takva’s investigation revealed that a lawyer and a police officer from the Anti-Terrorist Branch (TEM) had allegedly influenced the student.
Since the story broke, Takva has been inundated with threatening messages on social media. He disclosed that ‘troll accounts posing as police officers’ have systematically targeted him, attacking both his private inbox and public posts. “They organise under every post I share, after the news,” Takva explained. “The problem now goes beyond the news. They target everything I write and try to assassinate my reputation.”
Takva underscored that the threats are aimed at undermining his credibility as a journalist, noting, “They also know that the only power a journalist has is credibility. So they try to undermine that credibility by writing ‘this is fake news’ on every news story.” Commenting on the ‘trollls’ he quipped, “Even if they were dragons, it wouldn’t make any difference, there are hundreds of thousands of people who are fed up with them.”
This harassment is not an isolated incident for Takva. He recounted previous attacks and threats he faced, which resulted in little to no action from authorities. “Previous criminal complaints had yielded no results and that investigations had either been closed or left hanging,” he said. The current threats range from imprisonment to death, filled with insults and curses.
On the night of 26 July, a 16-year-old high school student had defaced Kurdish traffic warnings in Van, spraying over them with the words, “Turkey is Turkish, it will stay Turkish.”
The student involved in the vandalism confessed during an interview with Takva yesterday that he had consulted with a TEM officer before the act. The officer reportedly advised him to be cautious but assured him that there would be no significant repercussions.
