The reason Erdogan champions press freedom abroad
Defending Al Jazeera’s right to report becomes a double-edged sword for Erdogan, who suffocates free media in Turkey and struggles to remain friends with Saudi Arabia.
On June 22, Qatar received a list of 13 demands the Saudi-led coalition said must be met before they lift the regional blockade against Qatar. On June 27, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told the media that he supports Qatar’s refusal to discuss such demands. When asked about the most crucial items on this list for Turkey — requesting the closure of the Turkish military base in Qatar and ending any Turkish-Qatari military cooperation — Erdogan said these kinds of demands were against international law. Then he shrewdly brought the subject to another point on the list, which is not even remotely related to Turkey: the closure of Al Jazeera, Qatar’s state broadcaster. Erdogan said, “There is [global] talk of press freedom. Now I call upon all the global media networks, what are you waiting for? What are you good for? Right now, media freedoms of an international outlet [of Al Jazeera] are at risk, its activities are to be suspended. You [global media organizations] must make noise. But they are quiet.”
Erdogan’s sudden and angry outburst in defense of the Qatari network is perplexing for a couple of reasons. First, it is wrong: Al Jazeera’s reporting on June 23 shows that Erdogan is not even following the news. Several media outlets and rights groups have voiced their concerns about the demand that violates Al Jazeera’s freedom of expression. The Committee to Protect Journalists has called upon the Saudi-led coalition not to include Al Jazeera in their list of demands to normalize relations with Qatar. Daoud Kuttab, an International Press Institute (IPI) executive board member and Al-Monitor columnist, wrote a searing piece in The Washington Post opposing the attempt to silence Al Jazeera. Interestingly, Al Monitor’s columnist Kadri Gursel, who is IPI’s chair for Turkey and also an executive board member, is one of the jailed journalists in Erdogan’s Turkey.
It is rather ironic that on June 28, government-funded Anadolu Agency acknowledged and tweeted about UN Special Rapporteur David Kaye’s report in support of Al Jazeera, yet Kaye’s multiple warnings on press freedom and human rights in Turkey have been diligently ignored by the pro-government media for years.
To make matters more complicated, Erdogan’s love for the network is quite a change of heart. In 2011, Al Jazeera Turk was set up with high hopes and a significant amount of investment in Istanbul. It was gradually shut down in May 2017 because it failed to receive permission to launch properly and was only able to broadcast over the internet with a rather limited audience in Turkey.
