Foreign Journalists Find Exile Not So Safe in EU Either

Abdullah Bozkurt was a well-known journalist in Turkey before he fled to Sweden to escape the repressive regime of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who tolerates no dissent, jailing reporters by the dozens.

As the Executive Director of the Nordic Monitor he set up to cover Turkish politics and intelligence and was attacked by three men outside his home in Stockholm and beaten, said the New York-based Committee to Project Journalists (CPJ.)

Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia Program Coordinator said, “Swedish authorities must maximize their efforts to prevent such attacks and ensure that Bozkurt and other exiled journalists can work without fearing that their lives are at risk.”

Bozkurt had worked as the bureau chief in New York and Washington for the newspaper Zaman, which withdrew support for Erdogan after he ended an anti-corruption probe.

He fled Turkey after a failed coup against Erdogan in July 2016 and has had an arrest warrant for alleged membership in the movement of Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish scholar living in Pennsylvania, whom Erdogan said was behind the attempt to overthrow the government.

While the attackers haven't been identified, in June this year a segment of the private TV station TGRT Haber called for Bozkurt to be "exterminated.”

His attack is not the first of its kind, neither in Sweden or in other countries of the European Union, where many foreign journalists have gone in an attempt to escape authoritarian governments.

In April, the body of Sajid Hussain Baloch, a Pakistani journalist who had gone missing a month earlier was found in the Fyris River, outside Uppsala. While police said it could have been an accident or suicide, doubt lingered.

Reporters without Borders (RSF), based in Paris, said Baloch may have been "abducted" on the behest of Pakistan's intelligence agency.

DANGEROUS PROFESSION

Baloch settled in Sweden in 2017 after receiving threats related to his reporting on the separatist conflict in Balochistan province while working for leading English-language daily newspapers, also covering human rights violations and drug smuggling, the German state broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported.

Can Dundar, former editor of the Cumhuriyet newspaper in Turkey, now living in Germany, had his properties back home seized on a court order which declared him a fugitive.

He was arrested in 2015 on a range of charges including supporting a terrorist group, following publication of an article on the use of Turkish weapons by Islamist rebels in Syria.

Dundar’s arrest came during Erdogan's post-coup attempt purge of civil society, the military, judiciary, education system which saw 47 journalists jailed in 2019. In this statistic, the country is only outmatched by China, which overtook Turkey in imprisoning reporters for the first time in four years.

The EU now has warned Turkey its chances of membership were vanishing fast, too late to help those such as Dundar who tweeted: "A person's real 'home' is his country. We, the 82 million citizens, are on the verge of losing this great home to darkness."

The European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF) offers support for exiled journalists and media professionals living in Germany, a program that will end on March 31, 2021.

In February, Pakistani blogger Ahmad Waqass Goraya, who fled the country after he was threatened, kidnapped and tortured by authorities and running afoul of the all-powerful military, was beaten outside his home in Rotterdam in The Netherlands.

WATCH YOUR BACK

"I always feel in danger of being attacked or becoming the victim of a sinister campaign," Goraya told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL.) "You always feel that someone is waiting for you on the corner of a street."

Steven Butler, Asia Program Coordinator for CPJ, said in April that attacks on Pakistani journalists and rights activists in Europe showed the exile community is "not safe," adding that the incidents are "worrisome."

Another Pakistani dissident targeted, Gul Bukhari, a Pakistani-British journalist and rights activist who lives in the United Kingdom - who was a critic of the military - said she was told by fellow journalists that Pakistani authorities were trying to hunt her down.

EU journalists are not safe even in their homelands. Marián Kočner, a powerful businessman accused of ordering the murders of Slovakian journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée, Martina Kušnírová, was recently acquitted, to public outrage.

Kočner had allegedly threatened Kuciak over the journalist’s investigations into his links with high-ranking politicians and public officials, The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) said.

In Malta, three men were charged with the car bomb murder of dogged investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia in October, 2017 and a prominent businessman with ties to the country's political hierarchy has been charged with ordering it. A public inquiry has not yet yielded results.