Cracking Down on Creative Voices: Turkey’s Silencing of Writers, Intellectuals, and Artists Five Years After the Failed Coup Thank you for joining us for Cracking Down on Creative Voices: Turkey’s Silencing of Writers, Intellectuals, and Artists Five Years After the Failed Coup Since the attempted coup d’état in 2016, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has elevated his attacks on Turkey’s civil society to unprecedented levels, becoming one of the world’s foremost persecutors of freedom of expression. In the five years since the attempted coup, dozens of writers, activists, artists, and intellectuals have been targeted, prosecuted, and jailed; 29 publishing houses have been closed; over 135,000 books have been banned from Turkish public libraries; and more than 5,800 academics have been dismissed from their posts for expressing dissent. PEN America’s 2020 Freedom to Write Index found that Turkey was the world’s third highest imprisoner of writers and public intellectuals, with at least 25 cases of detention or imprisonment. This repressive climate has left writers and other members of Turkey’s cultural sector feeling embattled and targeted, unsure of what they can say or write without falling into their government’s crosshairs. PEN America, the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED), and members of Turkey’s cultural, artistic, and literary communities discussed these trends and made recommendations on how policymakers might respond to Erdoğan’s campaign of repression. The discussion highlighted PEN America’s report on freedom of expression in Turkey, which features interviews from members of Turkey’s literary, cultural, and human rights communities to better understand how this society- wide crackdown has affected freedom of expression within the country. Introductory Remarks: Panel Discussion: Karin Karlekar is PEN America’s Writers at Risk director. She has two decades of experience in global free expression, press freedom, and digital rights issues, as well as advocacy and assistance work on behalf of writers, bloggers, and journalists. Dr. Karlekar has developed index methodologies and conducted training sessions on press freedom, internet freedom, freedom of expression, and monitoring dangerous speech; authored a number of special reports and academic papers; and conducted advocacy missions across the globe. Asena Günal is a cofounder of Siyah Bant, a research platform that documents censorship cases in the arts in Turkey, and executive director of Anadolu Kültür, a nonprofit that promotes art and culture production across Turkey. Günal currently is also the program coordinator of Depo, a center for arts and culture in the Tophane neighborhood of Istanbul, and was previously an editor at İletişim Publishing House from 1998 to 2005. Günal is a winner of the 2019 Franco- German Human Rights and the Rule of Law Prize. Burhan Sönmez is the author of five novels that have been translated into 42 languages. He was born in Turkey and grew up speaking Turkish and Kurdish. He worked as a lawyer in Istanbul before going to Britain as a political exile. His writing has appeared in papers including The Guardian, Der Spiegel, and la Repubblica. He received the Vaclav Havel Library Foundation’s “Disturbing the Peace” Award in 2017 and the EBRD Literature Prize in 2018. A Board member of PEN International, he divides his time between Istanbul (Turkey) and Cambridge (UK). Caroline Stockford is a translator of Turkish poetry and literature and PEN Norway’s Turkey adviser. She has translated the poetry of classic and contemporary Turkish poets at the Cunda International Workshop for Translators of Turkish Literature for the past three years and is currently translating two Turkish novels and co-translating the poetry of Küçük İskender into Welsh. Erol Önderoğlu is a Turkish-French journalist and representative of Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontières, RSF). In 2016, he was arrested by the Turkish government under the accusation of assisting terrorists for his work supporting Ozgur Gundem, a Kurdish newspaper. In 2018, Önderoğlu received the Roosevelt Foundation’s Four Freedoms Award regarding freedom of speech, which cited his “tireless and persistent dedication to defend the freedom of speech and expression.” Merve Tahiroğlu (moderator) is the Turkey program coordinator at the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED), a Washington-based research and advocacy NGO focused on human rights and democracy in the Middle East. Prior to joining POMED, Tahiroğlu was a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where she focused on Turkey’s domestic politics, foreign policy, and relationship with Washington. Tahiroğlu has authored several monographs on Turkey and published articles in various outlets such as Foreign Affairs, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, POLITICO, NBC, and HuffPost. Photo Credit: Hilmi Hacaloğlu / Wikimedia Commons Senate Human Rights Caucus Discussion: “The Human Rights Situation in Turkey” The Senate Human Rights Caucus held a discussion June 15, 2021, on the state of human rights in Turkey moderated by Nadine Maenza, Commissioner of United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, and featuring remarks by Senator Chris Coons and Senator Thom Tillis. Turkey is a strategically located NATO member state and regional power with an ethnically diverse population. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the Justice and Development Party (AKP) has controlled the government in Turkey since 2002. Over time, President Erdoğan has increasingly exercised political power to silence dissent, detain opponents, and limit civil liberties. Following the July 15, 2016 coup attempt in Turkey, these activities escalated significantly. The ensuing crackdown resulted in the dismissal of nearly 60,000 law enforcement and military personnel, 125,000 civil servants, one-third of the judiciary, and the detention of over 90,000 citizens from 2016 to 2020, according to the State Department Country Report on Human Rights Practices. Freedom House’s 2021 Freedom in the World Report highlighted these illiberal trends by reporting that Turkey experienced the second largest decline in freedom of any country from 2011 to 2021. Panelists discussed the status of human rights in Turkey and how Turkish leadership can engage in reforms to protect and promote the fundamental rights and freedoms of Turkish citizens. Panelists: Ms. Merve Tahiroğlu, Turkey Program Coordinator, Project on Middle East Democracy Mr. Diliman Abdulkader, Co-Founder and Spokesperson, American Friends of Kurdistan Mr. Aykan Erdemir, Turkey Program Senior Director, Foundation for Defense of Democracies Dr. Suleyman Ozeren, adjunct faculty at George Mason University Remarks from POMED’s Turkey Program Coordinator Merve Tahiroğlu are as follows (read them as a PDF here): Thank you, co-chairman Coons and co-chairman Tillis, for holding this panel and for inviting me to speak. Turkey’s human rights crisis is today at a level unprecedented in the 19 years that President Erdoğan has ruled the country. I would like to focus my remarks on what this means for Turkey’s trajectory and why the United States must prioritize democratic values in its policy towards Turkey. Erdoğan’s blatant disregard for basic human rights is an alarming threat to Turkey’s social and political stability. Under his rule, the Turkish government is leveling an abhorrent crackdown on Turkey’s political opposition, independent media, and civil society—dismantling the fundamental building blocks of a stable democracy. Turkey’s top opposition leaders, who together represent more than half of the electorate, face constant harassment from a politicized judiciary. Erdoğan’s near- total control of the media and periodic bans on protests leave disgruntled citizens with very few outlets to express their frustration democratically. In a country as polarized along ethnic, religious, and political lines as Turkey, this is a recipe for social upheaval and civil strife. The most urgent issue that could trigger such unrest is the government’s effort to shut down the HDP, Turkey’s second largest opposition party. For years now, authorities have been jailing the party’s duly elected lawmakers and mayors without just cause or due process—in effect, disenfranchising millions of voters. Critically, a majority of the HDP’s voters are Kurds, Turkey’s largest ethnic minority. And for the last 40 years, Turkey has been engaged in a deadly war with Kurdish militants—a war that bitterly divides Turkish and Kurdish citizens. Erdoğan’s assaults on the HDP only fuel this polarization and severely damage prospects for peace. Another top concern for Washington is Turkey’s disregard for the rule of law, at home and abroad. Erdoğan’s control of the judiciary not only makes everyone in Turkey, including American citizens, vulnerable to arbitrary prosecutions; it also makes Turkey an irresponsible international actor. Today, Erdoğan’s Turkey is second only to Putin’s Russia in the number of cases it faces before the European Court of Human Rights. Despite Turkey’s legal obligation to follow the court’s decisions, it has been refusing to implement them—most prominently, by failing to release a high-profile political detainee, civil society leader Osman Kavala, for nearly two years. This is by no means the only example. Erdoğan is leading Turkey to undermine key multilateral institutions that are designed to uphold a rules-based international order. It is no coincidence that Turkey recently forced its NATO allies to water down a crucial joint statement condemning Belarusian dictator Lukashenko after he brazenly kidnapped a 26-year-old dissident from a Ryanair flight. Erdoğan’s authoritarianism is not just a domestic issue: It is also fundamentally changing Turkey’s global orientation. The Turkish republic has never been a full-fledged democracy, but for decades, it saw itself as part of a Western club of democracies, and strived to be a responsible member of the international community. These features played a central role in turning Turkey into a U.S. ally, and remain the top reasons why NATO still has a vested interest in keeping Turkey in its orbit.