Turkish journalists have become victims of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s hard-line reactions to the Gezi Park resistance that erupted as a societal explosion after the May 31 police intervention and that spread to the whole country. Erdogan chose to see the Gezi Park movement — which has lost its scope and intensity of the June events but whose effects and ramifications will continue — as an international plot spearheaded by the “high interest-rate lobby” that seeks to topple him.

The prime minister built his policy on an approach that criminalized the Gezi opposition. He tried to unite his followers around himself by sticking to this narrative and with it he silenced some critical voices from inside his party. Erdogan must have thought that his polarization policy based on charges of an “international plot” had provided him with an opportunity to exert even more pressure on journalists — hence the expanding of already substantive press freedom gap in the country.

According to a July 25 statement from the Press Institute Association, which comprises the Turkish National Committee of the Vienna-based International Press Institute (IPI), since the beginning of the Gezi Park protests —  as a result of the oppressive atmosphere formulated by the government — dozens  of journalists were fired from their jobs, some were sent off on compulsory leaves and some resigned. Many journalists reporting the events were subjected to police violence, and some were hurt and detained.

The latest example of journalists who were fired was the ombudsman of the pro-government daily Sabah and Al-Monitor writer Yavuz Baydar. On June 15 after the expulsion of the protesters from Gezi Park by a harsh police action, his newspaper came out with a front-page banner headline, “Good morning, Gezi,” which praised the police action, Baydar criticized this report by quoting readers’ complaints. But his article was censored, was not printed and Baydar departed on compulsory leave. Then it was reported that Baydar’s article of July 22, which was supposed to appear after this return from leave, was also spiked. He was then fired.