Seventeen staff from Turkey's opposition Cumhuriyet (Republic) newspapers, including Ahmet Şık, Kadri Gürsel and Musa Kart, went on trial July 24 with terror-related offences in the 27th Heavy Penal Court in Istanbul.
They rejected as absurd "terror" charges against them on the first day of a trial which has intensified alarm over press freedom under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In an extraordinary coincidence, the trial opened on Turkey's annual national day of the press which marks the end of official censorship in the Ottoman Empire in 1908 under Sultan Abdulhamid II.
Turkish prosecutors are seeking up to 43 years in jail for newspaper staff accused of targeting Erdoğan through "asymmetric war methods". They are charged with supporting in the newspaper's writings no less than three groups considered by Turkey as terror outfits -- the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), the ultra-left Revolutionary People's Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C) and Gülen's network.
The 324-page indictment alleges Cumhuriyet, which was set up in 1924 and is Turkey's oldest mainstream national title, was effectively taken over by the network of U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gülen, one of the masterminds of the failed coup attempt last July, and used to "veil the actions of terrorist groups".
"I am not here because I knowingly and willingly helped a terrorist organisation, but because I am an independent, questioning and critical journalist," one of the defendants, columnist Kadri Gürsel, told the court.
Gürsel, the columnist, denied he had links to Gulen's movement, saying he had in the past revealed ties between Erdogan's AKP party and the Fethullah Gülen's religious cult. "To say I was in contact with FETÖ [Fethullahist Terror Organisation or FETÖ]. members is illogical and against good sense. I exposed the current government's de facto coalition with this group and I foresaw the harm that this sinister cooperation would do to the country," he told the court.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has his roots in political Islam and was an ally of the cleric until a public falling-out in 2013.
Other defendants include Ahmet Şık, who in 2011 wrote an explosive book "The Imam's Army" exposing the grip Gülen's religious sect had on the Turkish state. Former editor Can Dündar, who is living in Germany, is being tried in absentia.
The 17 defendants from the Cumhuriyet daily were detained from October last year and a dozen of them have now spent more than eight months in jail without being convicted of any crime.
The newspaper has called the charges "imaginary accusations and slander". Social media posts comprised the bulk of evidence in the indictment, along with allegations that staff had been in contact with users of Bylock, an encrypted messaging app the government says was used by Gülen's network.
