Turkey’s far-right ruling party, which is known for its frequent homophobic remarks, sent its police to attack a peaceful LGBT pride parade in Istanbul on Saturday.
Turkey’s government has become increasingly authoritarian and hostile to gay rights, bashing activists over the years.
Government officials have accused gay-rights activists of being “deviants,” and the ruling AKP Party, which has roots in the Muslim Brotherhood, has frequently pushed hate speech against gay people. The future of Turkey belonged to right-leaning Islamist youth, not “LGBT youth,” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a speech in February.
AKP has cracked down and suppressed gay rights and Pride Month for a decade under an increasingly authoritarian agenda. Headlines in 2006 said gay rights were moving in a positive direction toward equality, but gay-rights activists are now beaten by police.
Journalists have been rounded up and imprisoned to a level that makes Turkey the largest jailor of journalists in the world, according to Amnesty International, PEN and other groups.
In photos that activists said conjured up the murder of George Floyd in the US, police in Istanbul appeared to put their knee on the neck of photojournalist Bulent Kilic as they detained him. Police harassed people at restaurants and anyone filming their attacks on the pride protesters on Saturday. Nevertheless, many thousands of Turkish activists took to the streets and braved the police attacks.
Turkish police feel impunity to attack journalists from organizations such as the AFP because Ankara has for years cultivated close ties with NATO, Western governments and human-rights groups, as well as think tanks in Washington, to prevent criticism of its policies.
Kenneth Roth, the head of the NGO Human Rights Watch, tweeted criticism of Hungary’s anti-LGBT laws but did not mention Ankara’s attacks on journalists and the pride events. This is just one example of the stunning lack of criticism for Turkey’s actions by leading human-rights groups.
There also appears to be a lack of coverage of the crackdown among major Western media outlets, some of which often appear to whitewash Ankara’s crimes or take junkets funded by the regime to cover areas of Syria illegally occupied by Turkey.
Turkey’s crackdown, attacks on photojournalists from major news networks and the assault on Pride Month appear to lack coverage worldwide. It is unclear how Ankara is able to achieve this silencing of media and human-rights groups.
When the media is silenced in Hong Kong, it is major news. When Hungary has anti-LGBT laws, it makes headlines. But when it happens in Istanbul or Ankara, it does not get covered.
Turkey is a member of NATO and is ostensibly supposed to be held to high standards as an alliance member and as a government that was seeking increased ties with the EU, even perhaps membership.
Yet headlines of the attack on gay-rights protesters were tame at best, claiming police “break up pride parade with tear gas” – not exactly a full description of what actually happened.