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WHY I’M GOING TO PRISON


Ayşe Düzkan says she was given a jail sentence for defending honest journalism


I


am writing this in the last few hours before I submit myself to Turkey’s penal authorities. They will


admit me to prison and start the process of sending me to wherever it is that I am to be incarcerated for a year and a half. My crime? Defending honest journalism. The series of court hearings that


have delivered me to this point started in 2016, but my story really begins in the 1980s. I was in my early 20s and a friend went off to do his military service – then and now, a legal requirement of all men in Turkey. He was a musician. When he came


back, he seemed like a different person – troubled, angry, frightened and haunted by terrible dreams whose details he refused to share. What I did not realise was that, instead


of simply undertaking military training, as our circle of pals had imagined, my friend had been away to war. Few knew it at the time, but my country was engaged in a military conflict with Kurdish groups in southeast Turkey. I had a vague idea about what was going on but this was the first time I had come face to face with the reality of war. At the time of my friend’s service, post traumatic stress disorder and Vietnam syndrome were little known, but something like this had clearly affected him. That experience was one of the many things that sparked a life time of activism. I have worked for more than 20 years as a journalist, writing about culture, music and fashion for a series of newspapers and magazines. I have been a feminist since 1984 and have a lifetime’s involvement in both the women’s peace movement and the Kurdish issue.


But, if most people don’t know we


are at war, how can they call for peace? That is why a free press is essential. I was a member of the executive of the journalists’ union Disk Basin-Is. In 2016, some of my union colleagues and I took a modest stand. At the time, press freedom was under threat. Newspapers had been banned, reporters sent to prison and television stations forced out of business. The Özgür Gündem newspaper (it


translates as Free Agenda), although published in Turkish, has always been pro Kurdish rights. It offers a glimpse of Kurdish reality, not only the conflict but also the culture, music, literature, and everyday life. Most importantly, it worked to report news of the conflict in southeast Turkey accurately and quickly. It and many of its successors have


now been banned. The paper has long been a target. Its journalists have been assassinated, its editor arrested and its presses bombed. So savage had the government assault on press freedom been by 2016 that we knew Özgür Gündem would soon be in the line of fire. Its staff asked for our support and we agreed that journalists would stand together to resist attacks on free speech. Fifty-six of us were, each for a single


day, named on the newspaper’s masthead as ‘honorary executive editors’. I actually went in and did a shift. It was the Saturday before Mothering Sunday, so I pulled together a page about that. Within a fortnight, there were cases


against 50 of us. It was the start of a grinding process to prosecute us for ‘propagandising for a terrorist organisation’. At first, the prosecutors asked that I


be sentenced to 14 years. There have been many court appearances since,


and my sentence has now been whittled down to a year and a half. I will be one of the first few from our


Free journalism provides the best chance that people can access truth and reality about the societies we inhabit. Everyone deserves that


“ ”


group to start their sentence; Hüseyin Bektaş and Mehmet Ali Çelebi are already in prison. As well as showing that journalists in Turkey stick together, we also wanted to bring the treatment of the media in my country to wider attention – for which reason I am grateful to the NUJ for ‘adopting’ me. Free journalism provides the best


chance we have that people can access truth and reality about the societies we inhabit. Everyone deserves that. Strange as it may seem, my spirits are high and my mood is good. We have a saying in Turkish that might be translated as, “This will come and pass, too”. I am not brave, I am not a heroine, I try to do what seems right and doing that feels like happiness.


Ayșe Düzkan has started serving her sentence in Bakırköy prison in Instanbul. The NUJ has ‘adopted’ her as a mark of solidarity.


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