BBC Lowen brand to deport from Turkey

I just sent a message to my family, saying how happy I was to go back to Turkey where I lived and how I felt like going home. Then the phone in my hotel room rang.

“We have an emergency matter to discuss in person,” the receptionist said. “Could you go down?”

I arrived to find three police officers with ordinary branches that await me. They asked me about my passport and took me, trying to stop my colleagues from shooting.

Until then, I was in Istanbul for three days, covering the anti -government protests caused by the arrest of the mayor of the city Ekrem Imamoglu.

I was first taken to the police staff and detained for seven hours. Two colleagues were allowed to attend and lawyers could go in to talk. The atmosphere was generally heartfelt. Some police officers told me that they did not agree with what they said it was a state decision. One hugged me and said he was hoping for my freedom.

At 9.30 pm, I was moved to the Istanbul Police Department. There, the atmosphere has hardened by a series of chain smoking officers, with which I had to negotiate my broken Turkish. I was printed and denied access to lawyers or any contact with the outside world.

In the early hours of Thursday, I was presented with documents to say that I was deported as a “threat to public order”. When I asked for an explanation, they said it was a government’s decision.

A police officer suggested that I be filmed, saying that I was leaving Turkey in my agreement, which could help me return in the future and which he could show his bosses. I politely refused, suspecting that the media will be given to the media to push their version of the events.

At 2.30 pm I was moved to a final place – the custody department of foreigners at the airport. I was placed in a room with a few rows of hard chairs and said I could sleep there. There is no dream between police officers who come in to brush their teeth, the planes that take off and the morning call for prayer.

Seventeen hours after my initial detention, I was taken to a waiting plane to get on a one -way flight to London. That evening, after the case became public, igniting significant media coverage around the world, the Turkish government press center released a statement stating that I lacked the right accreditation. At no time had they mentioned this during my detention, and it seemed clear that this was a consequence of them to try to justify my case.

I have never been abused during the test. And all the time I knew that the BBC and the British Consulate in Istanbul was working hard to ensure my release.

So many others who have broken up by the Turkish authorities do not have such a safety net. When I lived there as a BBC Istanbul correspondent between 2014 and 2019, Turkey was the largest prisoner in the world of journalists. Borders without borders rank Turkey 158 from 180 countries in the Freedom Index. Ever since these latest protests began, eleven journalists have been among the two thousand or more people who have been detained.

The latest riots were triggered by the arrest of Ekrem Imamoglu, the main political rival of Tayyip Erdogan, for whom public opinion studies suggest that they can remove the president of election.

But they have grown into something much wider: attachment to democracy in a country that slides further into authoritarianism. Media preservation is central to this trajectory as the government progressively criticizes criticism or debate. I looked that first hand. Ended for me with sadness and insomnia. It was so much for others.

Meanwhile, President Erdogan is digging, rejecting protests as “street terrorism.” He is fascinated by the current international climate to have an ally in the White House and by the importance of Turkey for everything from Ukraine to Syria.

The question now is whether the largest demonstrations in the country in more than a decade can withstand inertia or whether the longtime leader of Turkey can simply delete it. Those on the street can chant “enough” – but they also know that they never write down Recep Tayyip Erdogan.