Does Hess' Deportation Mean Turkey's Tough on Journalists?

ISTANBUL, Turkey (Aug. 16) -- As U.S. freelance journalist Jake Hess waited today for the Turkish government to finish the paperwork necessary to deport him, his detention has prompted some to wonder whether press freedom has taken a turn for the worse in Turkey.

Hess was detained Wednesday in the Kurdish majority city of Diyarbakir only weeks after writing articles highly critical of the Turkish government's treatment of Kurds in the country's southeast. The government cited his alleged links to illegal Kurdish organizations in its warrant for detention.

Turkey fell to 122nd place in Reporters Without Borders' annual ranking of press freedom last year -- its lowest showing since the ranking began in 2002 -- after comparative gains in mid-decade. "The reputation has been improving, but the fear is that this is back to the bad old days," said Andrew Finkel, a British journalist and columnist at Today's Zaman, an English-language newspaper based in Istanbul. "It is a reminder that Turkey is a country where you can't access YouTube. The government does try to control the press; there is no doubt about it."

In Turkey, local journalists are routinely arrested and put on trial for a variety of reasons, including defamation of the state or military. In June, Turkish journalist Irfan Aktan was sentenced to 15 months in jail for "making propaganda for a terrorist organization through the press." Aktan had interviewed members of the Kurdish Workers' Party, or PKK, for an article that also included a quotation from one of the group's publications: "There will be no solution without struggle."

In the past 26 years, an estimated 40,000 people have died in fighting between Turkish forces and the PKK, which the United States and the European Union consider a terrorist organization.

The work of foreign journalists is rarely impeded, however. Nearly all foreign journalists living and working in Turkey have reported on Kurdish issues in the country's southeast, and many have met and interviewed members of the PKK.

Hess initially came to the attention of the Turkish government between October 2008 and January 2010 when he was working as an English teacher in Diyarbakir and as a volunteer translator for the Human Rights Association, an NGO that is highly critical of the Turkish government's policies toward Kurds.

As part of his work, he sent e-mails detailing alleged human rights abuses and the arrests of Kurdish politicians to international humanitarian organizations and journalists. He signed one such report, sent from his personal e-mail address, "Jake Hess, human rights activist and friend of Muharrem Erbey," the jailed chairman of the Human Rights Association.

Many of Hess' e-mails ended up in an indictment against individuals allegedly connected to the Kurdistan Democratic Confederation, an umbrella organization of Kurdish groups overseen by the PKK. Though Hess left Turkey for six months in January 2010 and returned in June to begin working as a journalist, he was viewed by Turkish authorities as an activist with ongoing contacts with people connected to illegal organizations.

Asked in a telephone interview whether he considered himself an activist or a journalist, Hess said, "Well I don't know, I suppose it is more of a mixture of them both.

"I think there is no such thing as impartiality, really," he added. "It's hard to explain that impartiality usually means parroting the claims of government officials and downplaying the claims of people who suffer because of their actions. I don't see any contradiction between reporting on the situation and trying to contribute in a small way."

A prosecutor has ordered Hess' deportation when the necessary paperwork is completed, a process his lawyer says could take up to 10 days. Turkish officials have declined to comment on Hess' case.

Hess said he did not want the U.S. embassy to intervene on his behalf. "I did not want help from the U.S. government because I disagree with the U.S. government's policy in Turkey and I did not want to deal with them," he said.

"Here's someone who sympathizes with what he sees to be the oppression of Kurds in the southeast of Turkey and is prepared to writes stories that might not be totally objective journalism, but that for itself should not be a crime," Finkel said.

Finkel, a journalist who has lived and worked in Turkey for over 20 years, was accused and put on trial in 1999 for "causing an institution of the Turkish state to be held in disrepute" when he wrote in an article for the newspaper Sabah that the Turkish military in a Kurdish region "was no longer behaving like an army of occupation."

The charge -- similar to the one leveled at Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk in 2005 -- was dropped later that year under a de facto amnesty declared for those accused of "offenses committed with the written word."

In what may be a sign that the government wants to minimize negative publicity, in opted to deport Hess, while Finkel was put on trial. "The government is sensitive about its image abroad," Finkel said. "It is one thing to try your own nationals and another thing to try a foreign national."