The news was published in Mannheimer Morgen, one of the country’s influential newspapers. Editor Stephan Alter’s interview was titled “How a journalist was tortured under Erdoğan Regime”. Here is that article:
Kicking, punching and psychological violence:
On the night of July 15, 2016, weeks after the so-called coup attempt, journalist Cem K. (name changed) was arrested. He describes a country where freedom of the press no longer exists.
From the pen of STEPHAN ALTER:
He left behind a difficult and bloody period in Turkey’s prisons: Cem K. (name changed) does not want to remain silent about the conditions in his homeland.
When Cem K. arrives at the police station in Istanbul in late summer 2016, at the request of the judiciary, he suspects that he will not be in for a pleasant conversation when he enters as an innocent man and leaves in handcuffs as a terrorist of the Gülen movement.
As a professional journalist with years of experience, he had left his smartphone at home as a precaution, suspecting that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s long arm might reach out to him. But what the Turkish President and his authoritarian power apparatus actually took from him over the next six years was his freedom and human dignity.
Wild speculation: Was it actually a coup attempt?
Like this journalist, thousands of people in Turkey are still suffering the consequences of July 15, 2016. To this day there is wild speculation about whether that dramatic night was in fact a coup attempt. Or was it a grand theater by Erdogan himself to justify, in retrospect, an even more powerful streamlining of the entire government apparatus to Erdogan? In any case, the opposition in Turkey is talking about the “so-called” coup attempt. The journalist’s real name has been omitted in this article because of possible legal problems. Erdogan’s long arm – as experience shows – reaches all the way to Germany.
Tortures
In the meantime, Cem K. still gained a few pounds. He lives in a big city now. For now he must remain anonymous. When he talks in his mother tongue about the traumatic events he experienced after his arrest, his emotions are evident in the way he describes them. With hand gestures, she shows that a bag was placed over her head. He relives the kicks and blows to his body. He remembers the hours he had to stand still with his face to the wall. And he describes the small room where he and 14 others spent nights crammed together on the bare floor. He had to stick his nose between the bars to avoid breathing difficulties due to the lack of oxygen in the room.
A little water and two slices of bread – that was the only food. As he was transferred to different, ever-changing detention centers, he saw piles of people sitting on the floor covered in blood. “I was shocked,” he says.
How did it come to this?
According to his own account, K. first worked for a major newspaper and then for a state television channel. In 2013, after a protracted investigation into suspected corruption, corruption in Erdogan’s ruling AKP party was being exposed and the price of going after corruption was being paid very quickly.
Erdoğan saw that his power was at stake. Sanctions were imposed on the judiciary and the media. The most prominent example is Can Dündar, a journalist accused of publishing state secrets in 2016 and now living in Berlin. He fled to Germany and has since escaped Erdogan’s long arm. Cem K. was also affected by the purge. As a dissident, he was forced to leave his position in the editorial office and take on other work from now on. Purges increased rapidly in 2016.
Media outlets were shut down
He said thousands of judges, prosecutors and journalists had been forced from their posts and jailed. Erdogan had by then seized a large number of independent media outlets and closed six news agencies and 30 publishing houses. Except for a few opposition media, television and radio were under state control. In fact, there was hardly any separation of powers after that. Behind it all was Fethullah Gulen, the Turkish president’s longtime enemy and early supporter who, according to the narrative he has been spreading since 2013, lives in the US. There was allegedly evidence of this.
He fled to Germany to reunite with his family
But K. says that Erdoğan declared all opponents Gulenists in one breath. K. was tried on charges of treason and membership of a terrorist organization without being given the right to a defense and without ever being heard.
K. was paroled from prison in September 2022. Although he had to go to the police station every day, a few weeks later he fled to Germany, where his wife and two children had previously applied for asylum. In the meantime, an arrest warrant had been issued against his wife. As a journalist, he wants to draw attention to the persecution in his own country. Before 2013, he had never imagined that something like this could happen in his own country.