Turkey is sending its journalists to prison

CAN DUNDAR saw the shooter approach and take aim at his legs. “He drew his gun, called me a traitor, and began firing,” he says, recalling the scene on May 6th outside an Istanbul courthouse, where he and a colleague have been standing trial. His wife grabbed the gunman, and Mr Dundar (pictured, right), one of Turkey’s best-known journalists, survived unscathed. Just hours later, he was sentenced to nearly six years in jail for publishing details of covert Turkish arms shipments to Syrian insurgents in Cumhuriyet, the newspaper where he served as editor-in-chief. The paper’s Ankara bureau chief, Erdem Gul (pictured, left), was sentenced to five years. Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who had called on the pair to “pay a heavy price” for revealing state secrets, has kept mum about the attack. Pro-government newspapers suggested it had been staged to attract sympathy for its target.

These are dark days for journalism in Turkey. The latest press freedom index by Reporters Without Borders puts the country in 151st place, between Tajikistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Censorship is the industry standard. News reports from the Kurdish southeast, where clashes between armed separatists and Turkish security forces have claimed more than a thousand lives since last summer, increasingly resemble army propaganda. The dead are referred to either as “martyrs” or “terrorists”; civilians, at least 250 of whom have been killed in the fighting, are seldom mentioned.

Journalists are routinely sacked or dragged through the courts. In late April two columnists, also from Cumhuriyet, were given prison terms for republishing a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad. Mr Dundar blames Mr Erdogan and his government. “Most of our media [have] already surrendered,” he says. “Now they are trying to silence the rest.”

The departure of prime minister Ahmet Davutoglu, hounded into resigning last week, and the pending appointment of a more pliant successor, will make that task easier. For over a year, Mr Erdogan has been pushing for constitutional changes that will give him sweeping new powers. He is now ratcheting up his campaign to transform Turkey’s system of government from a parliamentary to presidential one. “At this point,” he said in a speech on May 6th, “there is no turning back.”

To get those changes, he will need an early election, a referendum, or both. But it may no longer matter. With Mr Davutoglu out of the way, one of the last checks on Mr Erdogan’s power is gone. “This effectively marks the end of parliamentary democracy in Turkey,” says one political strategist. “Davutoglu may not have been a huge reformist, but the fact that he was in the system gave people some reassurance that things would not lead in the direction of one-man rule,” says Asli Aydintasbas of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank. That reassurance is now gone.

A deal that promised visa-free travel to the EU for Turkish citizens, in exchange for a range of reforms and a commitment to stem illegal migration to Europe, offered some hope of emboldening the reformists in the Turkish government. That deal is now hanging on by a thread.

Mr Erdogan seems more than happy to snap it. In his speech, the Turkish leader slammed Europe for asking Turkey to amend its laws against terrorism, which are increasingly used to prosecute Kurdish activists and other critics, including Mr Dundar. “The EU says: you will change the anti-terror law for visas,” he said. “Pardon me, but we are going our way and you can go yours.”