Cumhuriyet trials set litmus test for Turkish democracy

It was an ironic coincidence that more than a dozen executives and journalists from the daily Cumhuriyet appeared in court on Press Freedom Day. Twelve out of 17 have been in prison since November 2016 and it took nine months for them to defend themselves in court.

Murat Sabuncu, the editor-in-chief of the daily, prominent writers Kadri Gürsel and Ahmet Şık, award-winning cartoonist Musa Kart, Turhan Günay, the editor of the literature supplement, and Güray Öz, the daily's ombudsman, are among those who have been accused on terror-related charges and of supporting multiple terrorist organizations, like the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and the Fethullahist Terrorist Organization (FETÖ).

The trial began on July 24 and is expected to be concluded by the end of this week with our sincere wish that all charges against them will be dropped and our colleagues will be freed.

As a journalist who started his career at the Ankara bureau of Cumhuriyet as a diplomatic reporter in the mid-1990s and spent an entire decade there, it has never been a surprise for me to observe government pressure on this newspaper, but I must confess that I'd never thought that it might one day be accused of supporting terrorist organizations.

As Turkey's oldest newspaper loyal to secular and democratic values, Cumhuriyet newspaper itself and its prominent figures had been subject to terrorist attacks in the past, leaving Uğur Mumcu and Ahmet Taner Kışlalı as the best known victims behind many others.     

I personally can testify that standing against any terrorist organization and condemning any kind of terrorist act were part of the well-established editorial line of the Cumhuriyet newspaper. None of the accused has anything to do with terror...

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