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Rape, kidnapping, fear: ZDF documentary shows Erdogan's brutal revenge - also on Germans

2022-01-14T12:34:51.710Z


Rape, kidnapping, fear: ZDF documentary shows Erdogan's brutal revenge - also on Germans Created: 01/14/2022 13:24 By: Clara Marie Tietze After the attempted coup on July 15, 2016, the Turkish President vowed revenge: Recep Tayyip Erdogan. © -/Kremlin/dpa After the attempted coup on July 15, 2016, the Turkish president vowed revenge. A ZDF documentary with three impressive stories now shows wh


Rape, kidnapping, fear: ZDF documentary shows Erdogan's brutal revenge - also on Germans

Created: 01/14/2022 13:24

By: Clara Marie Tietze

After the attempted coup on July 15, 2016, the Turkish President vowed revenge: Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

© -/Kremlin/dpa

After the attempted coup on July 15, 2016, the Turkish president vowed revenge.

A ZDF documentary with three impressive stories now shows what it looks like.

Ankara/Berlin - Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a controversial president who is using harsh means to silence his critics - so far nothing new.

But the extent to which his government pursues, kidnaps and arrests German journalists with connections in Turkey is like a Hollywood film.

Many people are familiar with cases that have become prominent in Germany, such as that of the German

world

journalist Deniz Yücel or the human rights activist Peter Steudtner.

Erdogan's political prisoners: This is how Germans are broken in Turkey

But there are numerous cases that cannot count on such clear public support. People who have demonstrably done nothing wrong and are still being held - often without charges, as in the case of Mesale Tolu, a German journalist. She was held in prison with and without her two-year-old son for nearly 8 months. When she was acquitted, she was taken from prison to a small police station in Istanbul - "kidnapped", as she says today in the

ZDF

documentary for the

Auslandsjournal

.

Mesale Tolu has meanwhile ranked right behind Deniz Yücel and Peter Steudtner both in Turkey and in Germany.

Most are accused of membership or support of a terrorist organization via windy connections.

The procedures often come to nothing or are dropped due to contradictory court decisions.

German journalists and citizens imprisoned in Turkey: “The problem you created yourself”

Hozan Canê, a German-Kurdish singer, and her daughter Gönül Dilan Örs, a social scientist from Cologne, are among the lesser-known faces of Erdogan's coup revenge. Despite this, they too were held in prison for months. The mother tells of a rape and the constant fear of starving or dying of thirst. The daughter wanted to kill herself during months of house arrest, but was only stopped by her cousin, who locked her in the toilet. Turkey "wanted to clear up a problem that it had created itself," explains the then German ambassador in Ankara, Martin Erdmann.  

All of these were political imprisonments, according to the three women in the documentary. The three women are now back in Germany - by fleeing or having an official exit permit - and are trying to come to terms with what they have experienced. "How can you do that to a person? That you simply erase two years from this person's life?” 38-year-old Gönül Dilan Örs is still wondering. For the three women, the odyssey is over for now. But there are numerous people who are still in prison in Turkey for political reasons.

Even in Germany, the three women cannot really feel safe, because "there are many Turkish fascists here, something can happen again at any time," said Hozan Canê.

She's right: just last summer, a Turkish journalist was attacked in Berlin.

Source: merkur

All news articles on 2022-01-14

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