ANKARA: A Turkish court formally arrested two opposition newspaper employees late on Friday, the state-run Anadolu news agency and the newspaper said, as part of a media crackdown that has alarmed rights groups and Turkey’s Western allies.
Last week, Turkey issued arrest warrants for the owner and three employees of the Sozcu newspaper, accusing them of committing crimes on behalf of the network of US-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, blamed by Ankara for masterminding last July’s failed coup. Gulen denies the charge.
The two employees arrested were Mediha Olgun, Sozcu’s Internet editor, and Gokmen Ulu, its correspondent for the Aegean province of Izmir, said Anadolu and the paper, which is fiercely critical of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his AK Party.
Since the failed coup, Turkish authorities have shut more than 130 media outlets and a press union says more than 150 journalists have been jailed, raising concerns about media freedom in a country that aspires to join the EU.
The arrests of Sozcu’s staff came days after a court jailed the online editor of another opposition newspaper, Cumhuriyet, pending trial, on a charge of spreading terrorist propaganda.
About a dozen journalists from Cumhuriyet, long a pillar of Turkey’s old secularist establishment, are already in jail facing sentences of up to 43 years, accused of supporting Gulen’s network.
The two jailed Sozcu journalists face charges including “knowingly aiding and abetting the FETO terrorist organization without being part of its hierarchical structure,” and “aiding the assassination attempt of the president,” Anadolu and the newspaper said.
The Turkish authorities call Gulen’s network, which it labels a terrorist organization, the “Gulenist Terror Organization (FETO).”
Sozcu’s financial director, Yonca Yucekaleli, was freed late on Friday. The paper’s owner, who is abroad and whose house was searched last week, was charged with having “extensive ties” with firms shut down after coup investigations, Anadolu said.
Anadolu said a story and photographs in the paper revealing where Erdogan was spending his vacation a day before the coup, and a crossword puzzle with the president’s name hidden in it, were specifically checked as part of the investigation.
Besides the media crackdown, Turkey has also suspended or dismissed more than 150,000 judges, teachers, police and civil servants and has arrested nearly 50,000 others suspected of links to the Gulen movement.
While Turkish officials say the purges are necessary due to the gravity of the coup attempt which killed 240 people, critics in Turkey and abroad say Erdogan is using the coup as a pretext to muzzle dissent and purge opponents.
Turkey arrests newspaper staff over suspected coup links
Turkey arrests newspaper staff over suspected coup links
Algeria parliament to vote on law declaring French colonization ‘state crime’
- The vote comes as the two countries are embroiled in a major diplomatic crisis
ALGERIA: Algeria’s parliament is set to vote on Wednesday on a law declaring France’s colonization of the country a “state crime,” and demanding an apology and reparations.
The vote comes as the two countries are embroiled in a major diplomatic crisis, and analysts say that while Algeria’s move is largely symbolic, it could still be politically significant.
The bill states that France holds “legal responsibility for its colonial past in Algeria and the tragedies it caused,” according to a draft seen by AFP.
The proposed law “is a sovereign act,” parliament speaker Brahim Boughali was quoted by the APS state news agency as saying.
It represents “a clear message, both internally and externally, that Algeria’s national memory is neither erasable nor negotiable,” he added.
France’s colonization of Algeria from 1830 until 1962 remains a sore spot in relations between the two countries.
French rule over Algeria was marked by mass killings and large-scale deportations, all the way to the bloody war of independence from 1954-1962.
Algeria says the war killed 1.5 million people, while French historians put the death toll lower at 500,000 in total, 400,000 of them Algerian.
French President Emmanuel Macron has previously acknowledged the colonization of Algeria as a “crime against humanity,” but has stopped short of offering an apology.
Asked last week about the vote, French foreign ministry spokesman Pascal Confavreux said he would not comment on “political debates taking place in foreign countries.”
Hosni Kitouni, a researcher in colonial history at the University of Exeter in the UK, said that “legally, this law has no international scope and therefore is not binding for France.”
But “its political and symbolic significance is important: it marks a rupture in the relationship with France in terms of memory,” he said.
