Şener Levent is on a mission. He has survived being set on by mob and two gun attacks and has had a dead dog left at his door, but none has stopped the editor taking Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to task.
With evident pride, he says his Turkish Cypriot newspaper, Afrika, is the only Turkish-language daily to denounce Ankara’s military offensive against Kurdish fighters in northern Syria.
“I’ll continue writing the truth,” insisted Levent, who narrowly escaped being lynched in January when a mob of ultranationalists, incited by Erdoğan, attacked the publication’s premises in the Turkish-run north of Cyprus. “The Turkish army went into Syria and the Kurdish enclave of Afrin to commit a massacre and occupy the country, just as they did here.”
Such defiance has not gone unnoticed. Media repression is at the root of growing international concern over Erdoğan’s increasingly authoritarian style. More than 150 journalists have been jailed, many on tenuous terror charges, following the failed July 2016 coup. Criticism of Turkey’s cross-border operation is high on the list of perceived infractions, which is why Levent’s newspaper is in Erdoğan’s sights.
“It is a crime now to be a good person in Turkey because if you are good you are imprisoned,” he lamented, sitting behind a chaotic, paper-stacked desk. “It is even a crime to say ‘no’ to war in Turkey. No country is my enemy, but I am absolutely against Erdoğan’s and his Islamofascist regime. Why did he start this war? Because he needs this war to consolidate his power.”
Afrika is one of 20 dailies produced in northern Cyprus, the breakaway republic where Ankara has stationed 35,000 troops since invading in response to a coup aimed at union with Greece in 1974.
Run on a shoestring budget, its circulation is about 2,000. Its web presence is similarly limited. Even among Turkish Cypriots, Levent’s contrarian views – he refuses to submit to Ankara’s line that 1974 was a “peace operation” – are prone to eliciting derision. His own office, down a long, bare, dark corridor, is decorated with tapestries of Che Guevara and other leftwing heroes who like him, the 70-year-old bohemian laughs, were once dismissed as “marginals” and “provocateurs”.
Afrika had originally been called Avrupa [Europe] but was renamed after the north’s then-hardline regime forced it to close in 2001. “I wanted to call it New Avrupa, but they wouldn’t let me so I called it Afrika to convey we have jungle rules here,” he said mischievously.
But while the editor clearly delights in his role as a gadfly, Turkish Cypriots have rallied around him.
As Erdoğan seeks to crush dissent in the run-up to snap legislative and presidential elections in June, many are alarmed that Afrika should be singled out. Within hours of ordering the assault on Afrin, the Turkish president spoke at a rally and denounced the newspaper as “cheap and nasty”. He criticised the publication for comparing the Syrian offensive to Turkey’s actions in 1974 and exhorted his “brothers in northern Cyprus to give the necessary response”.
The next day, Afrika’s first-floor premises were viciously attacked as flag-waving protesters, hurling bottles and stones, took up his call. Turkey’s prime minister, Binali Yıldırım, again raised the issue of Afrika in March, appealing to his Turkish Cypriot counterpart, Tufan Erhürman, to bring “the unpleasant voices” under control.
All of which leaves Levent, who was born and raised on the island when it was a British colony, a little stunned. “It is crazy that such a powerful man should be afraid of such a small newspaper,” he said, his voice gravelly from Dunhill cigarettes. “I am very proud that we are the only Turkish-language newspaper writing about what is really happening in Afrin.”
The building housing Afrika still bears scars from the attack. For more than a month after, Levent had the office’s smashed windows encased in thick chipboard, forcing staff to work in the semi-darkness. The balcony, which protesters tried to scale, was barricaded, enhancing the sense of siege. There is still blood on the wall and a gash in the office’s front door, a stark reminder of the bullet that pierced it when a would-be assassin turned up in 2011.
Levent now has a CCTV monitor on his desk so he can keep an eye on the main entrance. Since the attack in January, he comes to work with a gun. “I thought there’ll be a battle here if they come again,” he said.
He said he is still shocked that it had taken so long for the police to stop the assault given the building’s location between the parliament, presidential office and Turkish embassy. Police only responded when the enclave’s president, Mustafa Akıncı, intervened. While distancing himself from Levent’s views, Akıncı deplored the attack as an assault on freedom of expression.
Soon after, thousands of Turkish Cypriots took to the streets to protest Turkey’s role in agitating “fascist” segments to silence Afrika and other voices of dissent.
Six of the attack’s protagonists were rounded up and sentenced to jail terms of between two and six months. Another nine remain at large.
His case has been raised with the EU by the government in the internationally-recognised Greek south. Although EU laws are suspended in the north, because of the island’s divided status, Turkish Cypriots are EU citizens.
Levent acknowledges that the 40-mile channel that separates Cyprus from Turkey offers a measure of protection that mainland critics do not have, but he worries that the light sentences will invite further violence at a time when even a wrongly worded tweet in Turkey is considered a crime.
“Every day I ask, where is justice? Why haven’t the others been arrested?” he said. “An attack can come tonight, tomorrow, any time.“I have a particular philosophy. I am not afraid,” he said, adding that Hamlet’s “readiness is all” speech guides him when the going gets tough. “A person lives once and dies once. If you are to die, at least die with honour.”
