H. E. Necmettin Erbakan
Prime Minister of the Republic of Turkey
Prime Minister’s Office
Ankara
Turkey

Vienna, 13 May 1997

Your Excellency,

The International Press Institute (IPI), the global network of editors and media executives from newspapers, magazines, broadcasting organisations and news agencies in 98 countries, is most concerned over the circumstances surrounding the armed attack on the headquarters of one of Turkey’s major newspapers.

On Monday, 12 May 1997, the 22-year-old Huseyin Vuran overpowered a guard at the headquarters of the daily Hurriyet, grabbed the guard’s gun and shot a maintenance worker in the leg. We understand that Vuran, apparently opposed to Hurriyet’s editorial line, was looking for owner Aydin Dogan, head of the media group Dogan Holding, for delivering “a blow to Islam.” The attack follows closely that by armed assailants on the Istanbul offices of Flash TV on 2 May 1997, staged in an apparent reaction to a programme on organised crime which implicated several leading figures in corruption.

IPI is convinced that the increasingly hostile statements by members of Your Excellency’s government have created an atmosphere in which such incidents can take place. We urge you to ensure that government statements which might incite hatred or violence toward members of the media are no longer issued.

Unfortunately, instead of seeing efforts which could improve the uneasy relationship between the government and the media, we now learn that the Ministry of Justice has initiated inquiries against eight journalists for articles and speeches, published in April which allegedly call for a military coup d’etat. We view such a move as an inappropriate reaction to signs of sympathy shown by the mainstream secularist media for the political initiatives of the Turkish army and urge that the decision to charge the eight journalists is revoked.

We thank you for your attention.

Yours sincerely,

Johann P. Fritz
Director