
The government-orchestrated crackdown on independent critical media outlets in Turkey took a turn for the worse on Sunday with dawn raids on Turkey’s largest newspaper Zaman and popular national TV network Samanyolu TV that led to the detention of top managers at the media outlets.

Turkish police raided media outlets close to a U.S.-based Muslim cleric on Sunday and detained 24 people including top executives and ex-police chiefs in operations against what President Tayyip Erdogan calls a terrorist network conspiring to topple him.

The raids on Turkey’s top selling newspaper Zaman and prominent TV organization STV are profoundly disturbing to all of us who value democracy, tolerance and the role of a free press in safeguarding both. Journalists who report about the suppression of human rights are not enemies of the state; rather they are documenting the actions of those who undermine the safeguards of a democratic Turkey.

The police reportedly came to detain Zaman daily editor-in-chief Ekrem Dumanlı. The officials said they could not “fulfill their tasks” because of the pressure and had to leave the building. Protesters chanted unceasing slogans such as “Free Media Cannot be Silenced.”

“The impression is that Turkey is moving away from a state of democratic, secular and social values and turning into a single party, and even further, a one man state,” noted Islamic preacher Fethullah Gülen, who lives in self-exposed exile in the US, echoing widely expressed criticism of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the current government.

The Journalists and Writers Foundation’s (GYV) Academic Thought Platform (ADP) came up with a remarkable program amid the ongoing heated debate over the use of the state authority and the relationship between the state and the civil society in our country.