There’s always a tipping point where democracy dies; and Turkey’s President Erdoğan reached it last week, when he dismissed another 10,000 civil servants, closed more media outlets and, crucially, arrested the editor and a dozen of his finest journalists on Cumhuriyet.
Secular, independent Cumhuriyet is one of the jewels in Turkey’s free press crown. Is it a mouthpiece for Kurdish terrorism and closet supporter of Gülenists plotting against Erdoğan? That’s ludicrous if you know the work of Murat Sabuncu, its stalwart editor, or fiercely independent columnists such as my friend Kadri Gürsel. These aren’t the plotters of some fevered imagination. They are fine journalists doing their job – just like Sabuncu’s predecessor, Can Dündar, jailed for three months in a Turkish prison for publishing an entirely factual story about secret arms shipments to Syrian rebels.
If you want to know what it’s like on the rough side of Erdoğan’s wrath, then Dündar’s book, We Are Arrested, (Biteback, £14.99) shows how the pen can emerge mightier than a prison door. But that was in 2013, not 2016, when the wrath seems unconfined.
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