Detained in Turkey: A Journal Reporter’s Story Foreign correspondent Dion Nissenbaum describes being jailed at a detention center for 2½ days, with no contact with his wife or colleagues
http://www.wsj.com/articles/detained-in-turkey-a-journal-reporters-story-1483721224
The knock on the door of our third-floor apartment, not far from Istanbul’s historic Taksim Square, came shortly after dusk on Dec. 27. Three plainclothes Turkish policemen stood by the winding marble staircase in the hall with a letter, under orders from the Interior Ministry.
“You are under investigation,” a polite young officer told me (through a translator he’d called on his cellphone) as my wife and 7-month-old daughter looked on. “You are going to be deported, so pack a bag. We don’t know how long this is going to take.”
In the 14 months that I’d been based in Istanbul as a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, I had covered a dizzying series of events, including the failed July 2016 coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. We were preparing to move back to Washington in early January. But I knew that a visit from Turkish police was an ominous development.
More than 80 Turkish writers, journalists and editors are now behind bars under the country’s counterterrorism laws, which have grown more expansive since the coup. Turkey has sent high-profile journalists to maximum-security prison and shuttered more than 140 media outlets since the failed coup. Turkish authorities say that journalists often cross the line into promoting terrorist propaganda in stories about Turkey’s fight against Kurdish separatists or its campaign against those accused of links to the alleged coup plotters.
Western reporters aren’t immune. In 2015, two Vice News reporters from the U.K. were detained for a week after being accused of working with a terrorist organization while reporting on Kurdish insurgents in southern Turkey. An Iraqi colleague of theirs was held for 131 days. All three could face 50 years in prison after being charged with aiding Kurdish separatists—a charge that they deny.
My own case seems to have been in reaction to a tweet. Three days before Christmas, Islamic State released a gruesome 19-minute video that showed two men whom the jihadist group said were captured Turkish soldiers being burned to death. It instantly struck me as major news, likely to trigger a storm of outrage in Turkey. As I began to report on it, I retweeted a still image from the video that showed the shackled men in their military fatigues as the flames crept toward them.
My retweet set off a torrent of Twitter rage. “Do not forget this son of a whore’s face Istanbul,” one man wrote above a screenshot of my profile picture. The editor of a prominent pro-Erdogan newspaper (who has 72,000 Twitter followers) called for me to be deported. Angry Turkish nationalists accused anyone who spread the story of helping to promote Islamic State’s twisted agenda. Within minutes, I undid the retweet, but the damage was done. CONTINUE AT SITE
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