Abdülhamit Bilici*
Throughout my journalism career, I have covered NATO summits in several capitals.
As foreign news editor of the Zaman daily, I covered the 2004 summit in İstanbul, when Turkey was still presented as a democratic model for the Muslim world. In 2012 I followed the NATO summit in Chicago with the journalists accompanying then-president Abdullah Gül.
What a difference two decades have made. Zaman has been shut down, and Turkish democracy is now on life support.
I would have liked to cover the latest NATO summit in Ankara in person. That was not possible. Since I was forced to leave Turkey 10 years ago, I have lived in exile. Were I to return, I would almost certainly be detained at the airport and “hosted” at Marmara Prison in Silivri.
As a journalist familiar with NATO summits, I believe the greatest scandal in Ankara was not what happened inside the meeting rooms. It was what failed to happen in the press briefing rooms.
When a NATO summit is hosted by a leader who has imprisoned his most important political rival, journalists should seize every opportunity to raise the issue.
Imagine for a moment that the summit had been held in Germany and Chancellor Friedrich Merz had jailed Cem Özdemir, one of the Green Party’s most prominent politicians, on fabricated charges. Could journalists simply ignore it? Could someone who failed to raise the matter still claim to be doing journalism?
That was the reality in Turkey, the host of the latest NATO summit.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s most important political rival, Ekrem İmamoğlu — the main opposition Republican People’s Party’s presidential candidate and the elected mayor of İstanbul, a city of 16 million people — has been imprisoned for more than a year.
As the summit was being held, İmamoğlu was trying to defend himself in proceedings widely denounced as politically motivated and marked by repeated humiliation.
His lawyer had also been jailed. Despite facing charges carrying a possible sentence of 2,430 years, İmamoğlu was expected to complete his defense within only a few hours in this week’s hearing. When he objected, he was removed from the courtroom.
News from the summit and the İmamoğlu trial appeared on my screen at the same time.
For a country hosting the leaders of the world’s leading democracies, the scene should have been a source of deep embarrassment. The silence of those leaders should have been, too.
The Turkish media, which should be questioning and challenging this assault on democracy and the rule of law, is under relentless pressure. Journalists are regularly jailed, and the Erdoğan government denied accreditation to representatives of some of the few remaining independent Turkish media outlets seeking to cover the summit.
Pro-government journalists showed no interest in İmamoğlu’s treatment. Independent Turkish journalists, meanwhile, were denied the opportunity to point to the elephant in the room.
In such an environment, the hundreds of journalists who came from Europe and the United States had an additional responsibility: to ask the questions their silenced Turkish colleagues were unable to ask.
Yet not one of them asked Erdoğan or US President Donald Trump about İmamoğlu, let alone the thousands of other human rights abuses in Turkey.
In my view, that was the summit’s greatest journalistic failure.
Why did they remain silent?
Was it because they failed to understand the significance of the case? Because they did not want to offend the Erdoğan government after being welcomed with such grandeur? Or because they have accepted Turkey as a dictatorship and no longer regard the imprisonment of political opponents as newsworthy?
Whatever the reason, every journalist who attended the summit should reflect on the failure to confront its most important issue.
The duty of journalism, after all, is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
I hope Turkish society and the opposition find a way to revive a democracy now in intensive care.
Otherwise, this summit may be remembered not as a celebration of the NATO alliance but as a funeral ceremony for Turkish democracy, attended with great pomp by the leaders of democratic nations.
*Abdülhamit Bilici is the former editor-in-chief of the now-defunct Zaman daily who currently lives in exile in Washington, D.C.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Turkish Minute.