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A court in Diyarbakır (Amed) sentenced Kurdish journalist Abdurrahman Gök to 18 months in prison for ‘terrorist propaganda’ over his news photos posted on social media.
Some of the photos he’d taken back in March 2017 document the instance a young man was murdered by the police during Newroz demonstrations in Turkey’s Kurdish-majority city of Diyarbakır (Amed). The others show the residents of Syria’s northern city of Kobane, while the city was under the siege of the Islamic State (ISIS) in 2015.
Gök replied to the questions of Medya News, commenting on the ruling of the court, and on the circumstances surrounding journalists in Turkey.
Would you please introduce yourself?
In 2004, while I was a student of journalism at Ege University, I began working as a journalist in Dicle News Agency (DİHA) in İzmir. After my graduation, I continued to work as a journalist in many cities of Turkey, mostly in İzmir, Batman (Êlih), Ankara, Van (Wan) and Diyarbakır (Amed). I also worked in some other countries in the Middle East. I’ve been in Iran, Iraq and Syria, I worked both as a war correspondent and as a reporter of cultural and political events. I currently work as an editor in Mezopotamya News Agency. I now have an uninterrupted professional background of about 18 years. I’ve been detained many times during this time, In 2009, while I was reporting on Newroz demonstrations in Siirt (Sêrt), I was arrested and incarcerated for about nine months. I learned in the course of the court hearings that my phone was tapped many times. I have been subjected to a serious pressure for capturing the moment of Kemal Kurkut’s murder by the police in Diyarbakır on 21 March 2017, on the day of Newroz. I was under police surveillance, my house was raided many times, and I was kept in custody for three days.
What happened in the course of the trial?
In 2018, 151 people were detained in a Diyarbakır-based police operation, and I was among the detainees. (…) I was released after three days in custody. However, two years later that investigation turned into an indictment, and a lawsuit was filed against me at the Diyarbakır 5th High Criminal Court over accusations of being a member of a terrorist organisation and making propaganda for a terrorist organisation. The trial was concluded after the final hearing on 30 June 2022. (…) A secret witness claimed that Kemal Kurkut was a member of a terrorist organisation, and that I was there, on the day of the incident, on instructions by a terrorist organisation, and that I had taken the photos to be distributed for propaganda. (…) The police, alongside the judiciary, are trying to take the state’s revenge on me because I’d presented evidence against the governor of the city, the police chief and the interior minister, who all stated that Kemal Kurkut was a suicide bomber, by publishing the photos in question. They had to prosecute the police officers involved when these photos came out in the light.
In your defence, you said that they began to focus on the photo of armed civilians in Kobane once they realised that they wouldn’t be able to make an allegation based on the photos of Kemal Kurkut.
They also realized that nothing could come out of the statements of the secret witness. So the prosecutor this time said that there were some other photos concerned, which had not been included in the indictment, and a new complaint against me was filed over those photos. The prosecutor’s office came forth with a new indictment, demanding that I am punished for making propaganda for a terrorist organisation. (…) Those were the photos I took in Kobane when I was reporting as a war correspondent. (…) This new investigation was launched with the allegation that I shared these photos as propaganda material.
Dicle Müftüoğlu, a journalist who was recently detained briefly on 3 June, said after the court’s decision, “In the person of Gök, everyone has been given the message that if you expose the crimes of the state you will face court. We will eventually all face judicial harassment at some point with the introduction of the new law on disinformation.”
In the 1990s, even as the authorities imposed oppressive measures on the press, there was still some freedom of information. During the 2000s, however, especially under the rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), things took a different turn. The AKP began to create its own media. (…) In countries of one-man rule, the governments want the people to be completely in the dark. In order for the society to remain silent, the press must be silenced first. As the administration [in Turkey] is unable to achieve this, that is, since it cannot totally silence the Kurdish press, it is unable to commit massacres freely neither. (…) The important thing here is to stand by journalists, regardless of their belief, identity or political affiliation, in cases when they are prosecuted for their journalistic activities. Standing by them means defending the people’s right to information.
