More Turkish journalists in jail, and not just that…

Journalists in Turkey started the week with the early bird news on Oct. 31 that yet another colleague had been taken into police custody after a raid on his house.

Murat Sabuncu has been the editor-in-chief of the influential center-left daily Cumhuriyet since Sept. 1, after the resignation of Can Dündar following an armed attack outside the Istanbul courthouse where he had been summoned for yet another investigation. 

Dündar, who is now in Germany, was prosecuted over a report Cumhuriyet had run in 2015 about documents claiming Turkey's National Intelligence Agency (MİT) was transporting arms to rebels fighting against the Bashar al-Assad regime back in 2014. The government believes the entire story was a plot by prosecutors and gendarmerie officers loyal to Fethullah Gülen, the Islamist preacher living in the U.S. who is now seen as the mastermind of the bloody military coup attempt of July 15, 2016. Prosecutors accuse Dündar and Cumhuriyet's Ankara bureau chief Erdem Gül of revealing state secrets under the manipulation of Gülen's network. They were released from prison pending appeal in February 2016 after spending 92 days in jail.

Now, according to the Istanbul Prosecutor's Office, Sabuncu and 10 colleagues are accused of helping - "without being a member" - the propaganda of two organizations: The Gülen network (or as the government and prosecutors call it, the Fethullahist Terror Organization), and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

There is no use trying to understand the logic behind accusing Turkey's oldest newspaper - a flagship of secularist and Kemalist traditions - of assisting a coup-plotting Islamist network and a secessionist Kurdish network. The first book unveiling and criticizing the Gülen network,...