Immediately after the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris, world leaders flocked to the French capital to show their solidarity and collectively express that they “were all Charlie Hebdo.” The narrative soon turned towards the importance of freedom of speech, and how the attack was an attempt by “backward fundamentalists” to violently curb the type of press freedom that allowed for their prophet to be mocked.

However, the fact many people overlooked, while images of this unique gathering of global leaders, bravely linking arms on a cordoned-off Parisian street were shared far and wide, was that rarely had a bigger threat to freedom of press been captured in a single image.

One English student saw through the disguise and turned to Twitter to expose the hypocrisy of these “staunch defenders of free press attending the solidarity rally in Paris.” The long list that followed included the name of Turkish Prime Minister Davutoglu, who had the dubious honour of being the leader of a country that only two years ago had more journalists in prison than anywhere else in the world.

Ironically, but certainly not unexpectedly, days after Davutoglu had returned from Paris the offices of Cumhuriyet – one of the country’s leading newspapers, which, coincidentally, has also lost writers to terror attacks in the past – were raided by the police after it announced it would distribute a selection of Charlie Hebdo’s latest issue to express their solidarity with their French colleagues.

The issue at hand was the cover of Charlie Hebdo, which showed a cartoon of the prophet Mohamed holding a sign saying “all is forgiven.” According to the prime minister, this blatant attack on freedom of speech was nothing of the sort: “Freedom of press does not mean freedom to insult,” he declared, stressing that an insult of the prophet was worse than insulting anyone else, even calling it a “deliberate provocation.”

While the temporary closure of Cumhuriyet’s offices was a particularly ironic case in point, sadly enough it was by no means a unique event.

Here, the stories and experiences of Ercan Akyol, a caricaturist who has been drawing his anger and opposition to subsequent governments for more than 45 years, illustrate how censorship in Turkey has changed from government-imposed bans to self-induced silence; how humor can be a weapon in the hands of the oppressed; and how religious fundamentalism found its way into the highest echelons of power.

Suffocating Repression and Military Clarity

Despite the fact that attacks on press freedom in Turkey have now become a regular feature in the international media, it is by no means a new phenomenon. Many contemporary journalists and cartoonists refer to the 1980 military coup as the latest example during which freedom of speech came under severe pressure. Strangely enough, when comparing the era of military rule with the situation now, it is not always clear who were the bigger oppressors: the generals that came to power after staging a coup, or the current democratically elected government, headed by the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party, or AKP).

“During the military regime of the 1980s there was a very visible censorship,” recounts Ercan Akyol, a cartoonist with the Turkish daily Milliyet, who started his career as a caricaturist back in 1970, when he was just 17 years old. “The issue we’re dealing with right now is not the repression of rights and freedoms,” he continues, “that has always been the case – but the fact that now it is suffocating us.”

Akyol is referring to the insecurity many press workers experience on a daily basis, the arbitrariness  of the censorship and the vagueness of many laws that allow for the prosecution of government critics for as little as sending a tweet or speaking up in public.

Self-censorship has become the rule rather than the exception, something Akyol also applies to himself. “Back then I was feeling more free than today,” he says, referring to the period of the military regime. In those years, the censorship rules were clearly set out and the ones who broke them were the ones that would be punished.

“Back then, if I would draw something critical the government would have come and found me and make me pay. But today editors can get into neck-deep shit because of my actions. Because of this, long before I even draw my cartoons the editor will censor my ideas. That’s what I mean by feeling freer in the past.”

Back-Door Censorship 

In today’s Turkey, the government relies on two different strategies to maintain its control over the media. It avoids outright censorship in order to be able to maintain its image as a modern democracy to the outside world, but at the same time exerts extreme pressure upon publishers, editors, writers and cartoonists alike, which leaves them with little choice but to censor themselves if they value their career in any way.

Most newspapers are in the hands of a select group of conglomerates, or holdings, the biggest of which, Koç Holding, single-handedly accounts for an astounding 9 percent of GDP. Critical voices, raised in one of the publications linked to one of the holdings, could lead to the loss of government contracts in, for example, the construction or pharmaceutical sectors. For this reason, newspaper bosses are “voluntarily” exercising a certain amount of auto-censorship to protect their financial interest in other sectors of the economy. “By these means the government can easily control the agenda of a specific newspaper and redesign it in the way it wants,” Akyol clarifies.

Another way in which the government tries to control the media is by creating a climate of fear among those who dare to speak out. Every now and then, a journalist, editor or cartoonist is singled out and prosecuted, either for publicly insulting the president, or the prime minister, or using a set of trumped-up charges under the country’s loosely defined anti-terror law.

Probably the most famous case in this regard was the trial of Musa Kart, a cartoonist working for Cumhuriyet who was sued by Erdogan after he drew a cartoon of him as cat tangled up in a ball of wool. Erdogan, who was still Prime Minister at the time, had pushed through a new law for higher education which had become so complex that no-one really understood what is was about anymore. The prosecution of Musa Kart drew a lot of attention both within, and outside of, Turkey, and, for Akyol, it exposed something more important than Erdogan’s lack of humor.

“In my opinion, [Erdogan’s anger] can only be explained from a fundamentalist perspective. In Islam, mankind is the apex of creation and everything else is inferior. So, from that perspective, being drawn as a cat can be considered an insult. His disproportionate reaction to such a naïve cartoon actually revealed his uncompromising attitude towards criticism.”

The Weapon of the Oppressed

Humor has always played an important role among the social and political opposition in Turkey. In the late 19th century, Sultan Abdul Hamid outlawed all forms of satirical publication because the caricatures undermined his authority. During the time of the military regime in the 1980s the satirical magazine Girgir was probably the only printed medium that dared to voice its opposition to the regime, which led to a surge in its popularity. At one point it was selling up to half a million copies per week.

“Humor is the weapon of a person who is in distress. It’s function is to warn people, the oppressed, for what’s to come, whether it’s bad governance or something more evil than that,” Akyol believes. According to the cartoonist, humor is able to destroy a certain evil by mocking it, thus destroying its charisma. “For that same reason, humor never hits home with the ignorant, merely draws the attention of the semi-ignorant and makes the smart ones laugh. Through this laughter he or she realizes the truth of the matter.”

Before the 1980 coup Akyol was a student; marching in the streets to show his opposition to the government. Soon after the coup he found a job with the Günes newspaper, which directed his activism away from the streets and into his pen: “I was young, and I liked to confront the existing forces of fascism at the time – I really didn’t care about the outcome of it.” As a relatively unknown cartoonist he still had the liberty of drawing caricatures that would have gotten other, more well-known cartoonists in trouble. His seniors complimented him on his “bravery,” making Akyol feel proud of his “sharp pen.”

However, in time – after the military regime handed over power to a civil government and a wave of neoliberal reforms washed over the country in the late 80’s en early 90’s – Akyol observed that many of his seniors and the old Leftists, who had led the extra-parliamentary opposition in the previous years, started working for big, profit-oriented companies. At this point he realized that the compliments he had received in the past had nothing to do with his personal bravery, but rather with the cowardice of those around him.

“The former Left in Turkey became the Liberals of today, and they’re still supporting the current government. They said ‘Yes, the government is doing bad stuff, but they’re doing some good things too!’, and that’s what they’re still saying to this day. The bastards became integrated.”

Death Threats and Dangerous Tools

Akyol is convinced that an attack similar to the one on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris could easily happen in Turkey too, “Just look at our president and how he deals with humor.” The cartoonist views the attacks on Charlie Hebdo as “a violent attack on humor by ignorant fundamentalism,” and it fills him with horror to observe how the same ideology is also taking root in Turkey. “This feudal, sectarian and fundamentalist perspective wants to oppress humor because it is unable to outsmart it,” Akyol adds.

After drawing a critical cartoon mocking a new law that allowed for lawyers to veil themselves, Akyol got in trouble himself. A case was launched against him, he was at risk of losing his job, and started receiving death threats. The same occurred on the website of Leman, one of Turkey’s three leading satirical magazines and a sister publication of Charlie Hebdo, after they blackened their website in the wake of the attacks. One person wrote in the comment section on the website “How many have been killed at Charlie Hebdo? 12? Great, we can do a better job at Leman.”

“I believe humor is a dangerous tool,” Akyol concludes, “that’s why the oppressors are always afraid of it. Because you can deflect certain political critiques, but in order to counter humorous critiques, you have to be smart and reply with humor. Power doesn’t have that smartness, it can only censor.”

In a country where people’s homes are raided by the police because they are critical of their leaders; where Charlie Hebdo’s website was blocked on charges of blasphemy – bringing the total number of blocked websites to almost 68,000; and where more than eighty journalists have been arrested in the last ten years; it should come as no surprise that people are asking themselves whether the current democracy is really so much better than the era of military rule.

Even though political satire is just one manifestation of a broad spectrum of critiques on the current government that has come under severe pressure, the challenges it faces are exemplary. Akyol ends with an expression of hope, arguing that there’s a positive side to the repression too: “The more oppressive the government becomes, the bigger the impact of a single cartoon will be. And even though one single cartoon cannot bring about a revolution, if we join forces, we can.”

Joris Leverink is an Istanbul-based freelance journalist with an MSc in Political Economy, and editor for ROAR Magazine. You can find him on Twitter at @Le_Frique. 

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