Gulnoza Said / The European and Central Asian Program Coordinator of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)
Gulnoza Said has been doing her profession as a journalist and communication specialist in New York, Prague, Bratislava and Tashkent for more than 15 years. Said specialized especially to Central Asia, Russia and Turkey in politics, media, religion and human rights. Said currently serves as the European and Central Asian Program Coordinator of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. We touched on journalism with Said.
Can you introduce the CPJ and how it works? What are the CPJ’s your campaigns some of its recent challenges it faces in protecting journalists in your region?
CPJ is a press freedom advocacy organization based in New York where most of our employees, including myself, work. We also have an office in Washington, D.C., and representatives and correspondents around the world. As our name suggests, we are dedicated to protecting journalists worldwide. We do so by advocating for their rights to be respected, for their ability to report freely and safely, for their release, if they are jailed, for full justice in their cases if
they are murdered. That’s the most visible part of our work.
What’s less visible but equally important is the assistance we provide journalists in emergency situations. We help them pay for their lawyer if they are under investigation or jailed because of their works, pay their medical bills if they sustained injuries on duty, e.g. while reporting on protests that turned violent; we help jailed journalists’ families to visit them in prison; we provide journalists with temporary relocation support if they need to leave their home city or home country because their safety is jeopardized as the result of their journalistic activity. We also provide journalists with trauma support – that’s when a journalist suffers from psychological trauma sustained due to their work and needs counseling.
The most recent and ongoing campaign is, as you can easily guess, to assist Afghan journalists in and outside their home country with relocation and settling down in safe countries. When it comes to Turkey, it’s a very important country for us. The journalistic and media community in Turkey has suffered a lot under President Erdogan. We have a special representative based in Istanbul who is solely dedicated to reporting on press freedom violations in the country and helping Turkish journalists as well as other journalists who are in Turkey – be it journalists who fled their home countries, e.g. Syria or Iran and are currently in Turkey, or Turkey-based journalists working for foreign media outlets.
The CPJ receives criticism for not recognizing many jailed media workers including some well-known Turkish journalists as journalists. Could you please elaborate on the CPJ’s methodolog y for describing who are journalist and who are not, especially in this age of social media, and citizen journalism? Do you only call journalists who carry official press cards journalists? The CPJ’s database shows that only 37 journalists have been jailed in Turkey, but the actual numbers are much higher. How do you explain this difference?
Your question is spot on. CPJ’s numbers of journalists jailed in Turkey can differ from the numbers you may get from other organizations because of the difference in the methodology each organization uses. Whether a journalist has an offi cial press card or not doesn’t matter for us. In fact, CPJ has criticized the press card system in Turkey and asked the Turkish government to overhaul the process of issuing press cards because current policies hinder journalists’ ability to report freely and safely.
Once a year, in December, CPJ releases its annual report on journalists jailed worldwide in direct retaliation for their work. The list of journalists we publish is a snapshot of the situation in prisons around the world at 12:01 a.m. on December 1, in other words, whoever was in jail for journalism at that time is included in the list. The methodology section of our 2020 census reads: “CPJ defi nes journalists as people who cover the news or comment on public affairs in any media, including print, photographs, radio, television, and online. In its annual prison census, CPJ includes only those journalists who it has confi rmed have been imprisoned in relation to their work.”
Let me try to make it even more clear: CPJ includes a journalist in the prison census if they have ended up behind bars as a direct retaliation for their journalistic activity. When we do research on Turkey – or any other country, for that matter – we research all available related legal documents regarding the case, we also interview lawyers, colleagues and/or family of a journalist whose case we are researching before we decide whether to include it in our
prison census or not. If a journalist’s incarceration is not related to their work, we don’t include the case in the census
even if their profession is journalist.
If CPJ’s staff cannot procure any documents, e.g. indictments, or cannot speak to lawyers or family, we cannot include the case in the census. But if at a later point we do get access to any of the sources that give us a better idea of why a journalist is in jail, we retroactively correct the past
censuses.
CPJ’s numbers may also be lower than that of some other organizations because we do not include media workers, e.g. newspaper distributors, print workers and office staff, in the census although we do understand that their work is important. That’s our methodology. We use the same criteria in all countries of the world. For example, these days, I am also working on the cases of journalists imprisoned in Belarus. As you know, there are dozens of
those who have suffered under the repressive regime of President Aleksandr Lukashenko. But as I go over the list of jailed employees of some media outlets, I cannot help but take some names out of the list, because their role with the media outlet was not journalism, e.g. they were working in advertisement or fi nance, or they were lawyers of the media outlet. It’s clear that their imprisonment, just like the imprisonment of the outlet’s reporters, decapacitated the
media outlet. But we are not going to include them in the list because that’s how out methodology works.
In Turkey, CPJ stated “at least 37 journalists were jailed in direct retaliation for their work on December 1, 2020”. “At least” means those are the cases we have been able to confi rm – that a journalist has been imprisoned for his or her work – and there could potentially be more cases that we are not aware of or we haven’t been able to get a confi rmation for.
What do you want to say about female journalists in Turkey as Turkey has been listed as a country where women face the highest harassment?
Independent journalists in Turkey work in diffi cult conditions but female journalists face an additional set of challenges due to their gender – sexism, misogyny, and harassment both online and offl ine. When I was in Turkey in 2019 before the pandemic hit the world, I went to an all-women newsroom and listened to the stories about the challenges the journalists, especially street reporters face daily. During the pandemic, I had online meetings with Turkish journalists. I remember how at one point it was a Zoom-room full of women. In my interactions with female journalists from Turkey I know that Turkish women are strong, resourceful, independent and are ready to fi ght for their rights.
You may recall a case of a female journalist who was not provided with female hygiene products in a Turkish jail and had to use whatever she could fi nd during her monthly periods. But then she used her menstrual blood to create art. That’s how strong and resourceful she was.
Since we are talking about female journalists, let me mention you the case of Hatice Duman. According to CPJ’s research, she is the world’s longest imprisoned female journalists. She’s been serving a life sentence since 2003. In recent months, we’ve been trying to get any information about her state
and health. If your readers can share any updates with us, I’d appreciate it very much. Also, journalists like you and me should talk about her case in
different events and platforms. Imagine a woman who was thrown to jail for her journalism when she was in her 20s, and now she is in her late 40s, if I am not mistaken. She’s been battling for her release. In late 2019, the Constitutional Court of Turkey ruled that her right to a fair trial was violated and she should be re-tried. But that hasn’t happened. I don’t know why. The Turkish authorities are not telling us although they should have never imprisoned her in
the fi rst place.
Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) left no space for journalist to conduct their profession freely. The AKP government uses politically motivated judiciary to prevent any critical stories. The AKP affi liated paramilitary groups harass, torture, and beat critical Turkish journalists in Turkey as well as in Europe. Turkish police do not interfere against these groups’ violence against the journalists. What can the CPJ do in term of putting pressure on Turkish government to protect personal safety of these journalists and make sure that these journalists continue their jobs freely?
CPJ has been speaking out against the deterioration of the press freedom environment in Turkey for years, even before the attempted coup of 2016 when the authorities took the crackdown on independent media to a new – brutal – level. We have also been trying to have some sort of a dialogue with the
authorities to demand to stop violating journalists’ rights and allow greater media plurality. CPJ and several other press freedom organizations will have
a joint mission to Turkey next month and we want to meet with government officials to discuss exactly that. It will be the third media advocacy mission
to Turkey CPJ will do along with other organizations in a row.
On top of that, we make public calls to the authorities through our statements, through the Council of Europe’s Platform for the safety of journalists of
which CPJ is a member. Turkey is one of only few members of the Council of Europe that doesn’t respond to alerts about press freedom violations from the Platform members.
Our efforts also include lobbying on an international scale – from Washington to Brussels – trying to raise awareness on the press freedom problems of Turkey among the global community. I believe Turkey is a strong country that can overcome its press freedom problems and thrive with a free media
atmosphere that operates without fear of retaliation from the authorities. I also want to commend the journalists who still work in Turkey despite all the
obstacles and hope they will continue reporting independently. We stand ready to support them and help them whenever they need it.
What different methods did Turkish government use, besides political prosecution, to silence the critical media? How does the Turkish government
compare to other autocratic states in the world? Under the AKP government, Turkey lost the media plurality it once had. Several brave critical outlets are still operational in Turkey, and they are doing invaluable work, but it is clear that a lot less news and opinions are being freely voiced in media these days compared to, say, a decade ago. Television remains the top medium of receiving the news for people in Turkey, and the vast majority of the existing channels are openly pro-government. Some of Turkey’s critical media outlets were bought by pro-government actors and many were shuttered by government decrees after the failed coup attempt of 2016. This leaves us in today’s Turkey where most critical media can operate as online outlets, and the few remaining critical outlets on TV, radio and print are under constant pressure from the judiciary. In that regard, the Erdogan government is a very typical authoritarian regime.
Their tools may vary from the tools the Russian, Belarusian or Chinese authorities use in some nuances, but their goal is the same – to silence critical voices and have a tight control over media sphere. How can CPJ provide a road map for independent journalists living in exile abroad, many of whom are refugees, to adapt to the country they live in and do their jobs again?
That’s a very good question because adapting to a new environment after you are forced to leave your home country is not an easy or quick process. Exiled journalists are a big part of CPJ’s work. CPJ’s Emergency Response Team (ERT) provides rapid response and support to journalists who need urgent help, including help to relocate if journalists fear for their well-being and life. The team which can be contacted through our website cpj.org, for example, has been tirelessly working to help Afghan journalists to fl ee Afghanistan and settle down in new countries. In recent months, my team and ERT have also assisted many journalists from different countries – from Turkey to Belarus to Azerbaijan to Kazakhstan to resettle and fi nd a safe heaven.