There’s a Turkish joke about a political prisoner who goes into
the prison library with a list of books he would like to check out for the
week. “I’m sorry, we don’t have any of those books,” the librarian says. “We
only have the authors.”

It’s not far off.

Last week, Turkey’s Supreme Court affirmed a nearly five-year prison term for Canan Kaftancioglu, the head of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) in Istanbul. Her crime? “Insulting” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other officials in the ruling party in a series of tweets between 2012 and 2017.

She is not the first opposition politician to land in prison for
the crime of opposition. Selahattin Demirtas,
co-leader of the Peoples’ Democratic Party, remains in prison for a 2013
speech in which he praised Erdogan for pursuing peace talks with imprisoned
Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan. That was good at the
time, but once Erdogan’s peace process fell apart, he sought to airbrush the
fact that it was his initiative from memory, so Demirtas had to pay the price.

In this, Erdogan’s behavior has not been much different from his crackdown on followers of exiled theologian Fethullah Gulen, a man whose extradition Erdogan demands in exchange for lifting his hold on Swedish and Finnish NATO accession. What Erdogan forgets, however, is he was once Gulen’s chief ally; the two worked as partners in crime until their falling out a decade ago.

Back to Kaftancıoglu: Against outrage at the sentence, Turkey’s Justice Minister Bakanı Bozdag sought to defend against the criticism that the Turkish government was prosecuting for posting tweets. “It is unfair to accuse us of investigating or prosecuting people for tweeting,” he explained. “Tweeting is free. It’s only the contents of the tweet that we are after.”

For Turkey’s regime, then, all speech is free. It’s just the content that’s not.

The post Turkey Explains: Speech Is Free, Just Not Its Content appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.