Erdogan shows his true, authoritarian colors
Turkey took a dangerous turn toward autocracy with the arrest of journalists critical of the government.
Early on the morning of Dec. 14, while waiting at an Istanbul airport for my flight to Amsterdam, my phone rang. It was Hasan Cemal, a colleague and a prominent veteran of Turkish journalism. He said he was on his way from Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, where he had delivered a speech on the occasion of the Armenian edition of his book, “1915: Armenian Genocide.” He was on his way to Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, to catch a flight to Istanbul.
He asked if I had heard “the big news.” I was still in Istanbul, and I did learn the news of a police operation directed against 31 people, among them Ekrem Dumanli, editor-in-chief of the country’s largest-selling daily, Zaman, and the head of Samanyolu TV. Both are affiliated with Fethullah Gulen, the religious personality in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania for more than 15 years now, who has been turned by his former ally, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, into “public enemy No. 1.”
