FRIDAY, March 29, 2024
nationthailand

Article inaccurate about Turkish coup attempt

Article inaccurate about Turkish coup attempt

First of all, I would like to congratulate you for your media policies and the quality work of your paper.

But I want to raise a point of which you may not be aware that may affect your credibility. On Saturday you published an article from the Wall Street Journal under the headline “How Europe lost Turkey”. I was devastated when I read it. 
The author of the article is quite a well-known journalist, but he has some kind of grudge against the Gulen movement, which he mentions with bad intention in his articles. In this article, he used language of hatred that you might not recognise as such, but I, as a Turk, can easily see it. He says Erdogan opened a court case against some generals with the help of Gulen followers. This doesn’t reflect the truth. In fact, Erdogan as mentioned took revenge on the generals, but because of his future political ambitions, he did not want to take full responsibility and be seen as misusing his authority, instead claiming that things were changing positively with Gulen’s followers’ help. This was not the reality. There is another famous case. Ahmet Sik was a journalist arrested and charged before the July coup attempt. Everyone said he was jailed because the Gulen movement wanted it. But after the coup attempt, he was arrested again. There were no “Gulen people” involved, as was claimed everywhere. 
There is concrete evidence that Ahmet Sik was arrested the first time because he opposed Erdogan. The president misused his authority by claiming he was arrested because his book manipulated people’s minds, but in fact he wanted the dissenter silenced. In another part of the same article, Gulen is intentionally named again in a mention of the failed coup. He again says some generals aligned with the Gulen movement wanted to overthrow Erdogan. The generals who attempted the coup were Kemalists, but there is no mention of it here. Why? Because the author is a Kemalist too, and wants to protect his ideology. It shows he is not objective, trustworthy and unbiased. If top generals are Kemalists, then what could the lower-ranking officials do when they received orders from above? Is it important to say lower-rank soldiers are Islamists, nationalists or this and that? 
There is a hierarchy in every army. So we only look the top generals’ status when a coup occurs. It was officially reported that they were Kemalist. So why did this author use Gulen’s name again and again? I criticise his immature understanding and writing, because he doesn’t write the truth and uses hatred language against the Gulen Movement.
I will not go into here the nature of the coup. He says it was a coup, but hundreds of articles have been published saying it was not a coup, but rather theatre staged by Erdogan to consolidate his power. 
I suggest you to find more objective, unbiased and impartial articles on any matter. I hope you will be selective about what appears in your paper the future and not publish such articles again.
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