On June 8, I was sitting in Cafe Rossi in Heidelberg with my friend Christiane, peering out of one of the open doors looking out onto the restaurant patio when a man wearing a red flag as a cape caught my eye. The flag had a print of the Muslim white crescent moon and star.
I had been taking advantage of Cafe Rossi's internet and hiding from the rain for almost five hours now (you have to renew your internet password with the cafe every two hours and it had just stopped raining). It wasn't just one man, but a slew of people -- young adults, elder women, mothers with children and men --were marching down the street carrying signs and chanting mostly in Turkish, sometimes in German. What with the current protests in Instanbul, I grabbed my camera and backpack, left Christiane to pay for her carrot cake, and ran after them. She joined me later.
More than one hundred people were carrying signs in Turkish, German and English and marching throug hthe streets. A group of middle-aged women were holding corners of a cloth banner printed with the bust of
, Turkey's first President in 1923. The women waved the banner up and down like schoolchildren with a rainbow parachute. Protestors chanted and handed out fliers in German on one side and (thankfully) English on the other.
I grabbed a few and spoke to the young man who handed it to me. In broken English he tried to rehash what the fliers in my hands said.
"What's Happening in Turkey?" the first flier began. "Millions of Turkish citizens have been outraged by the violent reaction of their government to a peaceful protest aimed at saving Istanbul's Gezi Park."
What was a small protest in the park in late May to keep trees from being replaced by a large shopping mall snowballed into a rather large uprising of the Turkish people. Turkish police, trying to quell the riots, threw tear gas canisters and used high-pressured water hoses on the crowds. According to reports,
5,000 people have been injured.
"Outraged, yet not surprised," the flier read, the treatment of protestors in Gezi Park shows another example of how Erdogan has "mocked and trivialized his nation's concerns."
The flier continued, further slamming Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan for eroding the rights and freedoms of the Turkish people and calling out the "shamefully silent" media in Turkey.
"Arrests of numerous journalists, artists, and elected officials; restrictions on freedom of speech, women's rights, and even alcohol sales have all demonstrated that the ruling party is not serious about democracy," the flier read. "We demand an end to police brutality. We demand a free and unbiased media. We demand an open dialogue, not the dictate of an autocrat."
The group protesting was organized through a Facebook Group International Solidarity with Occupy Gezi which has also had protests in Los Angeles, New York and Boston in the U.S. and in Nairobi, Kenya, Geneva, Switzerland and other cities around the world.
The Washington Post reported a few hours ago that the square is calm but tense, and that local media has reported "Erdogan as saying in a closed-door meeting with a trade confederation that he had ordered security forces to put an end to the protests within 24 hours. The reports were not immediately confirmed publicly. If true, the result could be a possibly violent denouement to a series of protests."
It seems, however, that the local media isn't very trustworthy at this point.
The Guardian reported on June 9 that Turkish journalism is predominantly controlled by media companies and the government.
"Apart from shaping the content of broadcasts, the increasing frequency with which the prime minister's office has been communicating directly with senior editors is an influential factor. A high-profile case of this is a non-written request on part of the prime minister's office to keep President Abdullah Gül's state visits and public appearances in low profile in newspapers and on TV programmes. This is a clear indicator of the power struggle, which has been unfolding between the president and the prime minister; but it is also a worrying sign of the extent to which editorial independence in all mainstream media outlets has been eroded," The Guardian reported.
I find this news extremely troublesome for many reasons, but also in light of the FASPE fellowship. We walked through a news exhibit and participated in a media analysis of German newspapers under direction of Wolf Kaiser from the House of the Wannsee Conference, detailing the rise of propaganda and decline of journalism during WWII under Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels.
I have more to think about on this subject, but I do know that healthy and transparent journalism is necessary for a true democracy. Turkish journalists, you best step up.
From May 26 until June 6, 2013 I took part in a study of journalism ethics through the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics. Graduate students in Journalism and law met in New York, Germany and Poland to discuss ethical dilemmas in our professions during the Holocaust and the changing landscape of ethics today. I travelled on throughout Germany for two extra weeks to continue my study.