Ahmet Altan

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A page from Ahmet Altan's Kristal Denizaltı
Geschwister-Scholl-Preis 2019 to Ahmet Altan in absentia

Ahmet Altan (* 1950 in Ankara ) is a Turkish journalist and writer . He wrote for many years as a columnist for the newspapers Hürriyet , Güneş , Milliyet and Yeni Yüzyıl . In 2007 he founded his own newspaper Taraf , which he edited together with Alev Er and for which he wrote two columns. Taraf avowedly wanted to address the biggest taboos in Turkey such as the genocide of the Armenians and the discrimination against the Kurds. After the attempted coup on July 15, 2016his newspaper was banned by government decree. Ahmet Altan and his brother Mehmet Altan were arrested shortly after the attempted coup in July 2016, for which the government blames the movement of preacher Fethullah Gülen, who is in exile in the United States . They were accused of collaborating with Gülen and attempting to overthrow.

On February 16, 2018, he and five fellow journalists were sentenced to life imprisonment. He was detained in the Silivri correctional facility , where his brother was also detained until his release in June 2018. On April 14, 2021, a Turkish court of appeal overturned the judgment passed against Altan for supporting terrorism and ordered his release; The day before, Turkey had been convicted by the European Court of Human Rights for detaining Altan in the wake of the attempted coup in July 2016.

Life

His father Çetin Altan (1927-2015) was a writer and publicist and from 1965 to 1969 he was the representative of the Workers' Party of Turkey in the Turkish parliament . Altan's younger brother, Mehmet Altan, is a professor of economics at Istanbul University and the author of several political non-fiction books.

Atakurt

In April 1995, during his time at Milliyet , he used a mind game to design a country in which Turks are oppressed and assimilated by the Kurds. So was Mustafa Kemal not a Turk in Salonika , but as a Kurd in Mosul born and received after the War of Independence the honorary title Atakürt (father of the Kurds, rather than Ataturk, father of the Turks), the country was Kürdiye called (instead Türkiye). The existence of a Turkish people in this country was negated and the Turkish people were subjected to a policy of forced assimilation. With this mind game he wanted to draw attention to the Kurdish problem in Turkey. Ahmet Altan was released for this article and sentenced to 18 months in prison by the State Security Court. Following a lawsuit before the European Court of Human Rights , the prison sentence was converted into a fine.

Altan's Taraf newspaper played an inglorious role in 2010 in the publication of forged documents in the Balyoz affair used by Gülenists in the judiciary to attack the military leadership. Critics also accused Altan of campaigning with Taraf against left-wing Gülen critics such as Ahmet Sik . In his newspaper he defended the brief arrest of the terminally ill doctor Türkan Saylan († 2009); Saylan was a secular figure in Turkish civil society who had set up a scholarship foundation to support young girls.

Detained in 2016

Ahmet Altan and his brother Mehmet Altan were arrested on charges of spreading "subliminal messages" about the impending coup in a live television broadcast on a channel affiliated with the Gülen movement on July 14, 2016, on the eve of the coup. The investigations against them were connected with the attempted coup on July 15 , for which the government blamed the Islamist preacher Fethullah Gülen . Ahmet Altan was initially released from police custody, but the public prosecutor successfully appealed.

Authors, musicians, artists and academics - including three Nobel Prize winners - called after the arrest of the Altan brothers in an open letter to protest “against the government's smear campaign”. The nearly 300 signatories include Orhan Pamuk , Elena Ferrante , Roberto Saviano , JM Coetzee , Nick Hornby , Herta Müller and Günter Wallraff . They turned to the government of Turkey and the public to end what they called the " vendetta against the country's brightest thinkers and authors".

The Turkish Nobel Prize laureate Orhan Pamuk wrote in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica on September 10, 2016 , referring to the renewed determination of Altans:

“Freedom of thought no longer exists. We are moving at great speed from a rule of law to a terror regime [...] I am full of anger and express my sharpest criticism of the arrest of the writer [ sic ] Ahmet Altan, one of the most important pens of Turkish journalism, and his brother Mehmet Altan, a renowned academics and economists. "

- Orhan Pamuk

In January 2018, the Turkish Constitutional Court ordered his release, which was rejected by the criminal court. On February 16, 2018, the same day on which the German-Turkish journalist Deniz Yücel was released from custody, Altan, like five other Turkish journalists, was sentenced to life imprisonment. The other convicts are his brother Mehmet Altan , the journalist Nazlı Ilıcak and the Taraf journalists Şükrü Tuğrul Özşengül , Yakup Şimşek and Fevzi Yazıcı . The Secretary General of the Council of Europe, Thorbjørn Jagland , called on Turkey to respect its own constitutional court.

Altan was released conditionally on November 4, 2019, but arrested again on November 12, following an objection by the Attorney General.

The awarding of the Geschwister-Scholl-Preis to Ahmet Altan for his book I will never see the world again. Texts from the prison on November 25, 2019 in Munich had to take place in the absence of the writer. The journalist and writer Yasemin Çongar accepted the award on behalf of the company .

The PEN Center Germany appointed Ahmet Altan an honorary member in November 2019 - “as a sign of solidarity”. Previously there were similar honorary memberships for Václav Havel and Liu Xiaobo , Anabel Hernández and Selahattin Demirtaş , Raif Badawi and Li Bifeng .

Awards

Works

  • Dört Mevsim Sonbahar. (1982) ("Four Seasons Autumn")
  • Sudaki İz. (1985) ("The trace in the water")
  • Yanlızlığın Özel Tarihi. (1991) ("The special story of loneliness")
  • Tehlikeli Masallar. (1996) ("Dangerous Fairy Tales")
  • Kılıç Yarası Gibi. (1998) ("Like a sword wound")
    • German edition: The scent of paradise. Translated from Turkish by Ute Birgi-Knellessen. Krüger, Frankfurt am Main 2002, ISBN 3-8105-0131-X ; New edition and the like T. Like a sword stroke. Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 2018, ISBN 978-3-596-70382-1 .
  • İsyan Günlerinde Aşk. (2001) ("Love during the days of the uprising")
  • Aldatmak. (2002) ("Cheating")
  • En Uzun Gece. (2005) ("The Longest Night")
  • Son Oyun. (2013) ("Endgame")
  • I will never see the world again. Texts from prison. Translated from Turkish by Ute Birgi-Knellessen. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2018, ISBN 978-3-10-397425-6 .

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ahmed Altan: "I will never see the world again" . In: sueddeutsche.de . March 9, 2018, accessed March 26, 2019.
  2. ↑ Ahmet Altan: "I am ready to die in prison" . In: sueddeutsche.de . February 23, 2018, accessed March 26, 2019.
  3. ↑ Ahmet Altan will be released in Turkey , deutschlandfunkkultur.de, published and accessed on April 14, 2021.
  4. ↑ Ahmet Altan tazminat kazandı. In: Milliyet . July 24, 2001, Retrieved March 26, 2019 (Turkish).
  5. ^ A b c Frank Nordhausen : Turkey: "McCarthy-style witch hunt" . In: fr.de . September 13, 2016, accessed March 26, 2019.
  6. ↑ Dani Rodrik : Erdoğan and the Gülen Movement - Shadows of Power . In: Qantara.de . September 30, 2013, accessed March 26, 2019.
  7. ↑ Turkish journalist Ahmet Altan back in custody . In: dw.com . September 23, 2016, accessed March 26, 2019.
  8. ↑ Quoted from: Orhan Pamuk warns of a terror regime . In: Zeit Online . September 11, 2016, accessed March 26, 2019.
  9. ↑ Turkey ignores its own constitutional court - journalists remain in custody . In: welt.de . January 11, 2018, accessed March 26, 2019.
  10. ↑ Six journalists in Turkey sentenced to life imprisonment . In: welt.de . February 16, 2018, accessed March 26, 2019.
  11. ↑ hba / dpa: Turkey: Ahmet Altan arrested again eight days after his release. In: Spiegel Online . November 12, 2019, accessed May 15, 2020 .
  12. ↑ Guest contribution by Ahmet Altan: Ahmet Altan - More valuable than life itself. In: sueddeutsche.de . November 25, 2019, accessed May 15, 2020 .
  13. ↑ dpa-infocom GmbH: Imprisoned journalist receives Geschwister-Scholl-Prize. In: welt.de . November 25, 2019, accessed May 15, 2020 .
  14. ↑ Altan becomes PEN honorary member: “One of whom Turkey doesn't want to hear anything” , deutschlandfunkkultur.de from November 19, 2019, accessed on November 26, 2019
  15. ↑ Leipzig Media Prize 2009 to Roberto Saviano, Dušan Miljuš and Ahmet Altan. In: leipziger-medienstiftung.de. Media Foundation of Sparkasse Leipzig, September 4, 2009, archived from the original on March 3, 2010 ; accessed on March 26, 2019 .
  16. ↑ Ahmet Altan receives the Scholl Sibling Prize. In: Spiegel Online . October 2, 2019, accessed October 4, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Altan, Ahmet
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Turkish journalist and writer
DATE OF BIRTH 1950
PLACE OF BIRTH Ankara