Freedom House and the problem of enlightening Gauck

Since the Gezi events, we have seen that the outside perception of Turkey is working like a separate front of opposition. From the moment this perception began to work against Turkey, it seems to have established an interesting supply-and-demand relationship between its receiver and its producer.

What reality is ceases to matter; whatever is wanted to be heard somewhere, our native orientalists carelessly produce and supply the news that fits it. In this way the cycle of the discursive construction of reality is completed.

After the bloodiest, most savage and most brutal military coup the Middle East could ever see, a few journalists were recently arrested in Egypt, and thereupon Al Jazeera, broadcasting in English, brought an academic from Turkey to comment on the events.

Our academician, whom we later learned from Istanbul had at one time been a CHP parliamentary candidate, instead of describing what is going on in a coup country where tens of thousands of arbitrarily detained people are on hunger strike in dungeons, hundreds of journalists have had to flee their country, dozens of newspapers and television stations have been shut down, and 529 + 683 people were sentenced to death within a span of 15-20 minutes, brought the matter directly to Turkey and said that what is going on here is no different from Egypt. What kind of conscience is this, what kind of academic ethics: it is incomprehensible.

One must have lost both one's conscience and one's reason to compare what is going on in Egypt these days with the existence of jailed journalists in Turkey. Normally, a warning ought to have come from the moderator of Al Jazeera English upon hearing this comparison, should it not? Yet he too pricked up his ears at what he heard as if it were something perfectly normal, and sighed and lamented over the state of Turkey. He did not even ask the simple test question: "If there is this much pressure in your country, how can you say these things from Istanbul, how is it that nothing happens to you?"

While the greatest brutality recorded by history is taking place in Egypt, what meaning can there be in muting the voice of Turkey, the only country that sincerely and courageously opposes what is happening by not letting this comparison pass, other than cutting off the possible helping hand to Egypt from this side as well?

Şahin Alpay makes a similar sally from his column in the Zaman newspaper over the bet Prime Minister Erdoğan opened on the death penalty for the person who brutally burned a child to death: he asks the ingenious question, "Is the prime minister only against the execution of Islamists?"

By asking this question, is he opposing the execution of a rapist and child killer, or is he defending the death sentences in Egypt and Bangladesh, which are entirely political and each in its own right a massacre of law and humanity? Take a guess yourselves.

Meanwhile, in Egypt people are deprived of their most basic rights. The coup-makers are suppressing even the faintest opposition voices, not halfheartedly but truly. Under conditions far worse than even Turkey's 12 September, Sisi is going to elections in 18 days and will be elected with more than ninety percent of the vote. While these events unfold right beside us, which the world watches with complete hypocrisy without lifting a finger, we have no words to say either to those who try to occupy the world's agenda with journalists in Turkey jailed entirely for non-journalistic crimes, or to those who listen to them.

Freedom House has also published a report and in the classification on jailed journalists and press freedom has put Turkey in the same category as Egypt. In fact, this shows at most that it is an accomplice to the real massacres and human rights violations in Egypt.

There is no point in saying where it collected its data about Turkey and that the truth is actually this and not that. Obviously this is a deliberate, ill-intentioned report that has no interest in the truth of the matter. If it heard the truth, would it say, "Oh dear, how wrong we were, so the reality is otherwise"?

Here is the German President Gauck... Did he have a problem with information? If he did, all the missing information has been supplied. All the hearsay he got wrong and expressed immoderately was corrected to his face, by both the esteemed President and the esteemed Prime Minister, to the extent of embarrassing a normal person fifty times.

Despite this, as if he had received no new information, Gauck went on speaking from his rote. At ODTÜ, where he went for a speech, he was protested so that he was almost not allowed to speak. Should not even the fact that he was given permission to speak there, when he was going to say oppositional things, have woken him up?

What kind of pressure is the opposition under, when at ODTÜ, where the government is criticized to the utmost by the opposition on the claim that there is pressure on freedom of thought, no one who is pro-government, or even not opposed to the government, has even the possibility or chance of speaking.

So it seems the problem is not one of missing information. Some people are happy to live with their own prejudices and do not want to be awakened. What is grave, of course, is the situation of those who feed this orientalist approach of theirs from inside, by telling them things they will be very pleased to hear.

Whatever this is called now.