Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, commonly referred by to his initials RTE, is a Turkish politician who is the 12th and current president of Turkey since 2014. He previously served as the prime minister of Turkey from 2003 to 2014 and as mayor of Istanbul from 1994 to 1998. He also co-founded the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2001.
Zaman, sometimes stylized as ZAMAN, was a daily newspaper in Turkey. Zaman was a major, high-circulation daily before government seizure on 4 March 2016. It was founded in 1986 and was the first Turkish daily to go online in 1995. It contained national (Turkish), international, business, and other news. It also had many regular columnists covering current affairs, interviews, and a culture section. The newspaper is known for its closeness to Fethullah Gülen, the leader of the Gülen movement. The newspaper originally supported the Justice and Development Party (AKP), but became increasingly critical of that party and its leader, Turkish president and former prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, particularly after the AKP closed the 2013 December investigation into corruption. On 4 March 2016, in what activists and international media groups criticized as another blow to press freedom in Turkey, control of the newspaper was seized by the government. The takeover was motivated by the newspaper's ties to the Hizmet movement of Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen, which the government accuses of attempting to establish a parallel state in Turkey.
The Hürriyet Daily News, formerly Hürriyet Daily News and Economic Review and Turkish Daily News, is the oldest current English-language daily in Turkey, founded in 1961. The paper was bought by the Doğan Media Group in 2001 and has been under the media group's flagship Hürriyet from 2006; both papers were sold to Demirören Holding in 2018.
Yeni Şafak is a conservative, Islamist Turkish daily newspaper. The newspaper is known for its hardline support of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the AK Party and has a very close relationship with the Turkish government. Together with other media organizations in Turkey, it has been accused of using hate speech to target minorities and opposition groups.
Mehmet İlker Başbuğ is a Turkish former general who served as the 26th Chief of the General Staff of Turkey. He was charged with contravention of Articles 309, 310, and 311 of the Turkish Penal Code. In August 2013, he was convicted on charges of "establishing and leading a terrorist organization" and "attempting to destroy the Turkish government or attempting to partially or completely prevent its functioning" and sentenced to life imprisonment as part of the Ergenekon trials. However, the Constitutional Court of Turkey determined that Başbuğ's legal rights were violated and overturned his conviction; he was released on 7 March 2014.
Muhammed Fethullah Gülen is a Turkish Muslim scholar, preacher, and a one-time opinion leader, as de facto leader of the Gülen movement. Gülen is designated an influential neo-Ottomanist, Anatolian panethnicist, Islamic poet, writer, social critic, and activist–dissident developing a Nursian theological perspective that embraces democratic modernity. Gülen was a local state imam from 1959 to 1981, and he was a citizen of Turkey until his denaturalization by the Turkish government in 2017. Over the years, Gülen became a centrist political figure in Turkey prior to his being there as a fugitive. Since 1999, Gülen has lived in self-exile in the United States near Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania.
Censorship in Turkey is regulated by domestic and international legislation, the latter taking precedence over domestic law, according to Article 90 of the Constitution of Turkey.
Mehmet Zafer Çağlayan is a Turkish politician and former Minister. He is a member of parliament from the ruling Justice and Development Party and the former Minister of Economic Affairs under Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Nokta was a leading Turkish weekly political news magazine. Founded in 1983, it was closed down by its owner in 2007 under military pressure after revealing several coup plots. Revived in 2015, it was closed again in the course of the 2016–17 Turkish purges.
The Gülen movement, or Hizmet movement, or Fethullah Gülen movement, referred to by its participants as Hizmet ("service") or Cemaat ("community") and since 2016 by the Government of Turkey as FETÖ, is an Islamist fraternal movement led by Fethullah Gülen, a Muslim scholar and preacher who has been living in the United States since 1999. The movement is designated as a terrorist organization by Turkey, Pakistan, Northern Cyprus, and the Gulf Cooperation Council. Owing to the outlawed status of the Gülen movement in Turkey, some observers refer to the movement's Turkish Muslim volunteers as effectively a sub-sect of Sunni Islam; these volunteers generally hold their religious tenets as generically Turkish Sunni Islam.
Operation Sledgehammer is the name of an alleged Turkish secularist military coup plan dating back to 2003, in response to the Justice and Development Party (AKP) gaining office.
Süleyman Soylu is a Turkish politician. He is a deputy chairman of the Justice and Development Party. He previously served as the Minister of Labour and Social Security from November 2015 to August 2016 and the Minister of the Interior from August 2016 to June 2023. He is a former leader of the Democrat Party (DP).
Aydınlık is the newspaper of the Patriotic Party. Originally launched as a weekly newspaper in 1921, it has been repeatedly closed and relaunched, most recently in 2011.
Mehmet Baransu is a Kurdish journalist and author from Turkey. He is a correspondent for Taraf, and previously worked for Aksiyon (1997–2000). He is the winner of a 2009 Sedat Simavi Journalism Award. Known for investigating the Turkish military, he reported on the "Cage Action Plan" which became part of the Ergenekon trials, and published documents in January 2010 revealing "Balyoz" ("Sledgehammer"), a plan for a coup that was supposedly hatched by Turkish military officers in 2003. In January 2010, in connection with Sledgehammer, Baransu delivered a suitcase to the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor's Office a suitcase containing evidence of the coup plot such as CDs, tapes, printed documents, and handwritten notes. The Sledgehammer plot involved plans to bomb two mosques in Istanbul, attack a military museum and blame it on religious extremists, and attack a Turkish plane and blame it on Greece. Three hundred and thirty-one of the 365 suspects were sentenced to prison on 21 September 2012, while the remaining 34 were acquitted. Three retired generals were sentenced to life in prison on charges of "attempting to overthrow the government by force," but their terms were later reduced to 20 years. Turkey's Constitutional Court ruled in June 2014 that the rights of most of the convicted suspects had been violated, and ordered the immediate release of 236 of them. The rest were released later. A new trial began on 3 November 2014. Reports released in December 2014 and February 2015 claimed that some of the evidence in the case was fabricated.
The Batı Çalışma Grubu was an alleged clandestine grouping within the Turkish military said to be linked to the Ergenekon organization. It was allegedly set up in 1997 by General Çevik Bir as part of the process relating to the 1997 military memorandum, and active until at least May 2009. The primary activity of the group appears to have been classifying politicians, military personnel, journalists and others according to ethnic background, religious affiliation and political leanings, and to monitor the activity of those considered a potential danger to secularism in Turkey. This included monitoring some religious communities outside Turkey. It has been claimed that in 1997 BÇG had records on 6 million people, and offices in the Higher Education Board (YÖK) as well as in each branch of the military.
The Daily Sabah is a Turkish pro-government daily newspaper, published in Turkey. Available in English, Arabic, and owned by Turkuvaz Media Group, Daily Sabah published its first issue on 24 February 2014. The editor-in-chief is Ibrahim Altay.
Turkey's media purge after the failed coup d'état on July 15, 2016 resulted in the shutdown of at least 131 media outlets and the arrest of 117 journalists – at least 35 of whom have been indicted for "membership in a terror group".
The presidency of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan began when Recep Tayyip Erdoğan took the oath of office on 28 August 2014 and became the 12th president of Turkey. He administered the new Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu's oath on 29 August. When asked about his lower-than-expected 51.79% share of the vote, he allegedly responded, "there were even those who did not like the Prophet. I, however, won 52%." Assuming the role of President, Erdoğan was criticized for openly stating that he would not maintain the tradition of presidential neutrality. Erdoğan has also stated his intention to pursue a more active role as President, such as utilising the President's rarely used cabinet-calling powers. The political opposition has argued that Erdoğan will continue to pursue his own political agenda, controlling the government, while his new Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu would be docile and submissive. Furthermore, the domination of loyal Erdoğan supporters in Davutoğlu's cabinet fuelled speculation that Erdoğan intended to exercise substantial control over the government.
Ufuk Şanlı is a Turkish journalist and author. He worked as a finance and economy reporter for various mainstream newspapers until 2016, when he was jailed following the coup attempt in Turkey as part of Turkish government's media purge. He received the Best Print News award in 2012 from the Turkish Association of Economy Reporters. In 2016, he wrote for Al-Monitor, where his latest column focused on Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's increasing influence on Turkish media. Şanlı worked as an economy correspondent for various dailies such as Milliyet, Vatan and Sabah. He also hosted a program for the former financial news channel CNBC-E. His reporting mainly focused on economy and energy. He was the founding editor of Turkish daily Milliyet's financial news website Uzmanpara.
Bülent Keneş is a Turkish journalist, currently living in exile in Sweden and working with the Stockholm Center for Freedom. He previously served as editor-in-chief of Today's Zaman.
