HRW slams Turkey for rise in human rights violations

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has warned about the deteriorating human rights situation in Turkey, slamming authorities in Ankara for creating a “climate of fear” by cracking down on their critics.

The New York-based rights body said Thursday that Turkey’s future looks bleak as its democracy has been in a state of decline. 

Officials in Ankara “have shown an unprecedented willingness over the last year to create a climate of fear for their critics and demonize their opponents,” said Emma Sinclair-Webb, a senior Turkey researcher at the HRW. 

Pointing to the crackdown carried out on Turkish media, the rights group noted that Erdogan’s intolerance of criticism has taken a toll on media outlets in the country.

HRW also criticized the Turkish government for the imprisonment of journalists and the literal takeover of several news outlets.

“The scenes that come before our eyes when we think of this are the brutal attack where the police burst into the offices of the Koza Ipek Media group with Bugun TV and other channels, and literally pulling the plug on a live broadcast, and the imprisonment of Can Dundar and the Cumhuriyet Ankara representative Erdem Gul, who were sentenced to jail, where they joined many other colleagues,” Sinclair-Webb said. 

Turkish forces have stormed several opposition-linked Turkish television stations in recent months.

In the most stunning case, another journalist working for Today’s Zaman daily has been given 14-month suspended jail sentence. Bulent Genesh is accused of insulting Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu by posting comments on social media websites.

Human Rights Watch also touched on the military crackdown on predominantly-Kurdish regions of Turkey’s southeast, saying the operations have led to a rise in the number of civilian deaths as well as internally-displaced people in the volatile areas.

“The sheer spread of the descent into violence has been so shocking. We see that the state security forces are willing to take the conflict to city centers and that we are seeing that the PKK are a willing partner in taking the conflict to city centers,” the HRW researcher noted.

Turkey’s southeast has been volatile since a shaky ceasefire between Ankara and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) that had stood since 2013 collapsed following the Turkish military operation against the militant group.

Ankara has been engaged in a large-scale campaign against the PKK in its southern border region in the past few months. The Turkish military has also been conducting offensives against the positions of the group in northern Iraq.

Since mid-December 2015, curfews have been imposed in the towns of Silopi and Cizre in Sirnak Province as part of the army operations against PKK militants, prompting angry reactions from the residents of the Kurdish-majority areas.

Authorities, however, claim the curfews are aimed at protecting civilians amid near-daily clashes.

Last week, Amnesty International urged Turkey to end the excessive use of force and the “draconian restrictions” on the movement of people in the country’s Kurdish-populated regions.

The report added that Ankara’s military operations that are being conducted “under round-the-clock curfews are putting the lives of tens of thousands of people at risk.”

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