President
Abdullah Gul, Turkey’s head of state, has now joined Prime Minister
Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the government’s assault on free speech. On
Tuesday Feb 18th 2014, Mr. Gul approved a new law, passed earlier by Parliament, that
is intended to help protect Mr. Erdogan and his allies from a widening
corruption scandal by tightening government control of the Internet.
It would allow the authorities, without a court order, to block web
pages under the guise of protecting personal privacy, and to collect
users’ browsing histories.
Even
before Mr. Gul acted, Turkey already had tough laws blocking thousands
of websites, including gay dating sites and news portals considered
favorable to Kurdish militants.
Google reported in December that requests from Turkish authorities to
remove content from its sites had risen nearly 10 times during the first
half of 2012. In the first six months of 2013, Google was asked to
delete more than 12,000 items, making Turkey the No. 1 country seeking
to excise Google content.
The
new law is a transparent effort to prevent social media and other sites
from reporting on a corruption scandal that reportedly involves
bid-rigging and money laundering. In one audio recording, leaked last month to SoundCloud,
the file-sharing site, Mr. Erdogan is said to be heard talking about
easing zoning laws for a construction tycoon in exchange for two villas
for his family.
The
law is just the latest blow to Turkey’s democracy. After more than a
decade in power, Mr. Erdogan has become more authoritarian and, as a
result, increasingly embattled. The legislature has done little to stop
him. The Parliament, in a 20-hour session that involved a
bloody fistfight, approved a bill that would tighten the government’s grip on the judiciary. Mr. Erdogan had drafted a new law that would expand powers for his intelligence agency, including eavesdropping.
Freedom
House, a human rights group, has warned that Mr. Erdogan’s government
is increasingly employing a variety of strong-arm tactics to suppress
the media’s proper role as a check on power, including buying off media
moguls and forcing the firing of journalists whose coverage is viewed
as unfavorable. Turkey has more journalists in jail than Iran or China,
according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
The
European Union and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe have spoken out against these developments. The United States has
also weighed in but not strongly enough. President Obama, who once had a
close relationship with Mr. Erdogan, finally spoke to him after months of indirect communication. It was unclear
from a White House statement, however, whether Mr. Obama had explicitly
pointed out the perilous course Mr. Erdogan is on, a message he needs to
hear. His Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party’s vision of
inclusive democratic governance, which once found favor in the West and
among his people, has largely evaporated — imperiling Turkey’s stability
and economic growth and its compact with NATO.
After
he signed the Internet law, Mr. Gul reportedly lost tens of thousands
of followers on Twitter, while the main opposition Republican People’s
Party appealed to the Constitutional Court to overturn the law. If this
authoritarian trend is not reversed, the cost to Turkey and its
reputation as a Muslim democracy will be great — as will be the cost to
the West, which has valued Turkey as an ally.
