Today new police operations were carried out in many cities this morning: Diyarbakır, Istanbul, Batman, Mardin and Şirnak. The Minister Ali Yerlikaya announced that 231 people were detained in house raids conducted in 30 provinces.
Many kurdish writers and journalists were also taken into custody in the operations, including Erdoğan Alayumat (journalist), Tuğce Yılmaz (journalist), Bilge Aksu (journalist), Ahmet Sünbül (journalist), Roza Metina (Mesopotamia Women Journalists Association (MKG) President), Bilal Seçkin (journalist), Mehmet Ücar (journalist), Suzan Demir (journalist), Ardın Diren (translator-director), Doğan Güzel (cartoonist), Hicri İzgören (writer), Ömer Barasi (translator-writer), Suzan Demir (journalist) and Baver Yoldaş (publishing house coordinator), Havin Derya (journalist).
Dicle Fırat Journalists’ Association (DFG) made a written statement regarding the detention of journalists in today’s political genocide operations.
Emphasising that the government wants to standardise the press, the DFG statement said: “The mind that tries to normalise censorship with legal regulations such as ‘censorship law’ and ‘influence agency’ aims to make it permanent with detention and arrest operations. The free press is targeted because it struggles for the truth to be made known. The understanding that aims to obscure the truth with detentions will fail to achieve results today as it did yesterday. The free press will continue to pursue the truth and convey it to the whole public. We do not accept the detentions against journalists and demand their immediate release. We call on democratic public opinion and the whole society to protect the right to information. We call on all professional organisations to stand in solidarity against the detentions and once again we say loudly: journalism is not a crime”.
The Forum of Women Journalists of the Mediterranean (FMWJ), together with the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), the world’s largest organisation of journalists founded in 1926, and Giulia Giornaliste (the national association of Free Women Journalists United, founded in 2011), join their DFG colleagues in expressing solidarity and calling for their immediate release and an end to the ‘political genocide’ carried out by the Erdoğan regime.