"In Turkey, we are progressively putting behind bars all people who take the liberty of voicing even the slightest criticism of the government," wrote author Orhan Pamuk, Turkey's first Nobel Prize winner. "Freedom of thought no longer exists. We are distancing ourselves at high speed from a state of law and heading towards a regime of terror" that is driven by "the most ferocious hatred."
Pamuk wrote those words in Istanbul, but they were not published in Turkey. He sent them to Italy's leading liberal daily, "Repubblica", because no Turkish paper would dare to publish them. Indeed, almost the entire senior editorial staff of Turkey's oldest mainstream daily, "Cumhuriyet", was arrested recently, allegedly for supporting both Kurdish rebels and the Islamic secret society controlled by exiled Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen.
This is rather like accusing the Wall Street Journal of supporting al-Qaida and the Maduro regime in Venezuela. Cumhuriyet always defended Turkey's secular constitution from those who dreamed of creating an Islamic state (like the "Gulenists"), and it always condemned Kurdish separatists who resorted to violence.