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Turkey, solidarity with Cumhuriyet journalists

ten people seek prosecution on same charges

Ten public figures asked to be prosecuted for declaring their support to the news reports published on Cumhuriyet daily newspaper by Can Dündar and Erdem Gül, as a sign of solidarity with the two journalists imprisoned on charges of revealing state secrets and espionage.

In the request to Istanbul Court House in Çağlayan the group, including Rakel Dink, the wife of the murdered Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, and the artist and human rights activist Sanar Yurdatapan, asked the prosecutor to file a criminal complaint against them on suspicion of support for the articles published by Dündar and Gül (respectively editor in chief and head of the newspaper’s Ankara office), who risk a life sentence and 30 years in prison. The petitioners said they were ready to assume any possible criminal liability similar to that of the two journalists.

Dündar and Gül, who are held in Silivri Prison, were arrested on Nov. 26, 2015 on suspicion of alleged espionage committed by revealing confidential documents and of being members of a terrorist organization. The two journalists in 2015 had published photos and videos of trucks belonging to the National Intelligence Service (MIT), which in January 2014 had been intercepted twice by gendarmes after tip-offs to the prosecutor of alleged illegal transports of weapons to Syria, maybe for extremist groups. The Turkish government had rejected this hypothesis saying they were supplies of aid to Syrian Turkmens and called the police interception as an act of "treason" and "espionage".

"If the act (by Dündar and Gül) is considered a crime, then we ask the same procedure to be launched against us. The prosecutor should do this because the Constitution provides for equality of all citizens. We are at the courthouse to prove that we were complicit in the crime allegedly committed by Dündar and Gül. They just did their job as journalists, but have been accused of 'revealing state secrets and espionage', "said Yurdatapan, quoted by the Today's Zaman.

Meanwhile journalists and academics continue to face investigations and trials. The last case happened in Ankara University, where Reşat Barış Ünlü, Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Political Sciences, is charged with "terrorist propaganda" for having asked students, during an exam, to compare two writings by Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Ünlü faces seven years in jail for a question regarding the comparison of a 1978 leaflet ('The Manifesto of the Path of the Kurdistan Revolution') and a 2012 piece (‘Democratic Modernity as the Construction of Local System in the Middle East') in order to analyze the changes in the Kurdish movement since 1978. The indictment against Ünlü states that his question is an attempt to "legitimize" Öcalan's ideas and this is "terrorist propaganda".

In Istanbul Özgür Mumcu, a Cumhuriyet columnist, faces a four years and eight months jail sentence for "insulting" Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Mumcu is accused for an op-ed on May 18, 2015 titled "Tyrant and a coward", in which he deplored Erdoğan’s criticism of Hatice Cömert, the mother of Abdullah Cömert, one of the Gezi protest victims. “It is well-known that tyrants are always fearful. They are so fearful that they would even file a complaint against someone like Abdullah Cömert’s mother,” the article said. In the first hearing of the trial at Istanbul’s Çağlayan Courthouse, Mumcu denied that the article included any kind of insult. “The article was a critical text referred to [President Erdoğan] complaint against the mother of Abdullah Cömert, after her statements following her son death. The article was written after Erdoğan’s complaint, which had been widely reported in the media. As a columnist, I exercised my right to criticize", Mumcu said, according to Hürriyet Daily News".

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