On the evening of May 31, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan publicly threatened journalist Can Dundar, the editor-in-chief of daily Cumhuriyet, a secularist paper that is no fan of his. Erdogan was interviewed on TRT, Turkey’s state TV, by three supportive journalists. “He will pay a heavy price for this,” Erdogan said, referring to Dundar. “I will not let go of him.”
Three days before, Cumhuriyet had published photographs of the cargo of the controversial “MIT trucks,” including machine gun ammunition and shells for mortars and other cannons. MIT is the acronym of Turkey’s National Intelligence Agency, and the trucks in question were chartered by MIT and stopped by Turkish police and gendarmerie on their way to the Syrian border in December 2014. It was the height of the intra-state war between the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government and the Fethullah Gulen movement, and many had assumed that pro-Gulen prosecutors were trying to expose yet another misdeed by the government in addition to corruption and other charges.
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