It must feel terrible to be the leader of roughly 75 million people yet as hypersensitive as an adolescent girl, but that touchiness has always been the personal trademark of Turkey’s new president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Now, after having largely crushed internal dissent in his 12 years as prime minister, he’s using his “thin skin” to stop honest foreign reporting on his country.
Last week, Erdogan and his allies launched a campaign of personal destruction against my former colleague, Ceylan Yeginsu, a Turkish citizen and New York Times correspondent, after she reported accurately on extensive ISIS recruitment inside Turkey.
But Erdogan isn’t just a thug, he’s genuinely (and famously) delicate.
After all, we’re talking about the guy who once sued seven high-school students for defamation after they called him “lightbulb Tayyip” at a demonstration. Because really, what’s more offensive than being compared to an inanimate object?
And he’s sued other private individuals for, you know, the obvious: booing him, portraying him as a cat tangled in a ball of yarn and throwing darts at a board covered with his image.
If only it stopped there, but it doesn’t. Turkey’s Ministry of Justice reported in 2012 that Turkish prisons held 2,482 students. The number may well be higher, since Turkey doesn’t typically make court records public.
Then, too, he’s largely muzzled the press. Part of it was as simple as threatening newspapers’ advertising, in a nation whose government controls or “influences” much of the private sector.
And part of it was classic thuggery: The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that Turkey now has 40 reporters in prison — more than China or Iran.
And now — after rewriting the Constitution to give great power to what had been a largely ceremonial presidential office, then winning a “free” election to the job and taking office late last month — he’s moving on to the foreign press.
Starting Friday, the pro-Erdogan press has gone ballistic, suggesting that Ceylan is a traitor and a “foreign agent.”
The last is one of Erdogan’s favorite charges. He’s used it frequently in the Ergenekon and Sledgehammer cases, both of which involved largely fabricated evidence of supposed military plots to overthrow the government.
Both sets of prosecutions were broadly condemned outside Turkey, but the “plotters” were still purged from the military, weakening what for decades was the main check on Turkish tyranny.
Since 2007, hundreds, if not thousands, of military officers have been arrested, prosecuted, forced to resign, etc.
In Ceylan’s case, Erdogan & Co. objected that she maligned the president (to quote the Times’ statement) “by insinuating that he is a closet supporter of the Islamic State, a group that Turkey, along with the United States and many other countries, classifies as a terrorist threat.”
On Tuesday, the Times published Ceylan’s piece on ISIS’ recruitment of fighters in Turkey. With it ran a photo of Erdogan visiting a mosque in Ankara, the Turkish capital.
Cue the attacks in the media, followed by threats via e-mail and Twitter to Ceylan’s safety.
The wild overreaction has a comic element: In complaining that Ceylan defamed Erdogan with that photo, his pawns are now splashing her picture on the front pages of newspapers across Turkey while personally defaming her.
The real travesty, though, is how Erdogan is using democratic power to destroy freedom. (As veteran journalist Melik Kaylan points out, it’s a formula perfected by Vladimir Putin, but now widely imitated.)
When he was sworn into office last month, Erdogan heralded his victory as a “trophy night for democracy.” Yet his politics and his hypersensitivity are in diametric opposition to it.
This is a government, after all, that in recent months has tried to ban YouTube and Twitter and deployed brute force by using water cannons and tear gas against peaceful protesters.
Free exchange of thoughts and ideas is the underpinning of democracy. Harassing and threatening those writing to preserve it isn’t any form of Turkish democracy — or democracy at all in the first place.
And really, when it comes down to it, all the time Erdogan and his allies have already spent trying to vilify Ceylan is time better spent going after what she reported about — and what the Turkish government readily admits is a “terrorist threat”: the Islamic State recruiting within its borders.