Early in the morning on May 17, the German police raided the homes of two Turkish journalists and took them into custody. Ismail Erel and Cemil Albay — who work for Sabah, a pro-government Turkish daily headquartered in Istanbul — were released after a few hours, but their arrests provoked strong condemnation in Turkey. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in the midst of a tight presidential race, told an interviewer that “what was done in Germany was a violation of the freedom of the press.”
The Big Idea: Shifting Borders
Borders are liminal, notional spaces made more unstable by unparalleled migration, geopolitical ambition and the use of technology to transcend and, conversely, reinforce borders. Perhaps the most urgent contemporary question is how we now imagine and conceptualize boundaries. And, as a result, how we think about community.
In this special issue are stories of postcolonial maps, of dissidents tracked in places of refuge, of migrants whose bodies become the borderline, and of frontier management outsourced by rich countries to much poorer ones.
The European Centre for Media Freedom also came out in support of the Sabah journalists, condemning the detention and demanding that press freedom be upheld. But Turkey itself is a leading jailer of journalists, ranked 165th out of 180 countries in the 2023 World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders. And, according to German prosecutors, Erel and Albay were under investigation for the “dangerous” dissemination of other journalists’ personal data.
German authorities have legitimate concerns about the safety of Turkish journalists living in exile. In July 2021, Erk Acarer, a Turkish columnist, was beaten up outside his home in Berlin. Later that month, German authorities began investigating Turkish nationalist organized crime groups operating in Europe after the police found a hit list of 55 journalists and activists who had fled Turkey.
In September 2022, Sabah published information that revealed the location of Cevheri Guven’s home. It appears likely — though it has not been confirmed by German officials — that this was the reason for the arrests of Erel and Albay. Guven himself had been arrested in Turkey in 2015 and sentenced to over 22 years in prison. He was the editor of a news magazine that had published a cover criticizing Erdogan. Out on bail before his trial, Guven wrote that he gave his “life savings” to a smuggler to get him and his family out of Turkey. He now lives in Germany.
