Can Dündar, a journalist who fled politically motivated prosecution in Turkey for the safety of Germany, is one among the many guardians fighting the war on truth honored by TIME magazine’s “Person of the Year 2018.”
“This is the world of the strong leaders who hate the free press and truth. When you start defending the truth, you become the story itself,” Dündar told TIME.
Dündar, the former editor-in-chief of the Cumhuriyet newspaper, had been arrested in 2015 and jailed for 92 days along with colleague Erdem Gül for publishing a story on Turkish intelligence trucks carrying weapons bound for jihadists in Syria in early 2014.
Dündar and Gül were sentenced in 2016 to five years in prison for also publishing a video purporting to show the intelligence agency trucking weapons into Syria. An İstanbul court acquitted Dündar and Gül of charges of attempting to overthrow the government while ordering that charges of “knowingly and willfully helping a terrorist organization” be adjudicated separately.
They were released pending appeal.
Shortly after his release and an assassination attempt against him, Dündar quit his position as editor-in-chief and left Turkey as scores of other Turkish journalists under pressure have done.
“We all learned in our schools that journalists shouldn’t be the story itself. My government didn’t like this story, they put me in jail. I was attacked, and I’m in exile now. The story is not written by myself,” Dündar said.
In March 2018 Turkey’s Supreme Court of Appeals overturned the five-year sentence and ruled that the lower court should have convicted Dündar on espionage-related charges, which carry a 15 to 20-year sentence, rather than the lesser charge of disclosing confidential information.
“When I am disappointed or pessimistic, I always go to my library and read history books. Democracy and freedom of the press, they are fragile, but in the end, they will prevail,” Dündar said in a TIME video on its cover story.
According to a Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) report published in December 2017, Turkey was the world’s worst jailer of journalists for the second consecutive year, with 73 behind bars, compared with 81 in 2016, although acknowledging that other press freedom groups using a different methodology have higher numbers.
Worldwide, a record number of journalists — 262 in total — were imprisoned in 2017, said the CPJ. The committee has also reported that 52 journalists have been killed worldwide in 2018, including Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered inside the Saudi Consulate General in Istanbul on Oct. 2, 2018.
The post Turkish journalist honored by TIME: Democracy, press freedom will prevail appeared first on Turkish Minute.
from Turkish Minute https://www.turkishminute.com/2018/12/12/turkish-journalist-honored-by-time-democracy-press-freedom-will-prevail/
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