Aliza Marcus: Reporter Fights Turki

[kurd-l at burn.ucsd.edu]

From: akin at kurdish.org (AKIN)
Subject: Aliza Marcus: Reporter Fights Turkish Spies, US Indifference

Reporter Fights Turkish Spies, US Indifference

By Charles M. Sennott, The Boston Globe

        ISTANBUL - The foreign correspondent walked into a smoky bar in a
hotel here, lighted a cigarette and ordered a scotch. Glenfiddich. No
rocks. Make it a double.
        Meet Aliza Marcus, an American reporter for Reuters News Service,
assigned to cover a decade-long war in the mountains of Turkish Kurdistan.
As wars go, this one is uncelebrated. No live coverage from CNN. You won't
find Dan Rather here. But that doesn't mean it isn't as cruel as any other
war.
        In an effort to crush a Kurdish insurgency in the southeast, Turkey
has bombed 2,200 villages, according to Human Rights Watch. Some 19,000
people have been killed, including civilians, Kurdish militants, and
Turkish soldiers.
        And here's Marcus, the only full-time Western reporter covering a
war that goes unnoticed by the rest of the world.
        "You're risking your life, traveling along roads that are mined,
and you realize that you're writing a story that will be a paragraph
somewhere buried in the newspapers back home," she says. "You realize
there's probably two people who are going to read this. It can be
depressing."
        Through a cloud of smoke in the bar, she notices two men with dark
hair sitting at the next table. They have been there 20 minutes and have
ordered nothing. One is leaning awkwardly, with one ear cocked, apparently
to hear our conversation.
        She turns, asking, "Who the hell are these guys?"
        They both stand up. One is carrying a walkie-talkie. Abruptly, they
leave. It is obvious to her that they are Turkish military intelligence. If
so, it is the second time that day Marcus has challenged the government
spies assigned to monitor the media. At a morning news conference, she
spotted two others and asked why they were posing as reporters.
        "We are just interested in what's going on here," one of them said,
staring sullenly and refusing to give his name.
        If the look was meant to intimidate, it didn't. Marcus stoop in
front of him - clad in Levi's and black combat boots - jotting down notes
in a reporter's pad.
        "The truth is, I've gotten pretty drained by the harassment. I used
to get mad," says Marcus, 33, who grew up in Westfield, N.J., but lived for
several years in Cambridge, Mass., free-lancing for the Christian Science
Monitor. "Now, to be honest, I'm getting more concerned. I feel like I just
don't know what they are capable of."
        So far "they" have proven themselves capable of making her life
difficult. In July, the Turkish government charged Marcus with "provoking
enmity by showing regional or racial differences." Their key evidence was
an article she wrote for Reuters on the Kurdish nationalist movement that
was published in a now-closed Kurdish newspaper.
        "There was nothing wrong in the story. No factual inaccuracies. No
misspellings," says Marcus."So how do you prove that you are not inciting
racial differences?...It was a clash between what Western journalism is and
what the Turkish government believes journalism should be."
        Marcus points out that the harassment she has received is only an
annoyance compared with the censorship that the Turkish government has
imposed on Kurdish newspapers and pro-Kurdish writers and intellectuals.
Scores of writers have been convicted and jailed under the state's tough
antisperatism laws - not for acts of violence but for expressing political
ideas at odds with the official ideology of an indivisible nation. Marcus'
charge carried a maximum of three years, but the state Security Court, a
semi-military tribunal, acquitted her, citing "lack of evidence and
intent."
        She is now waiting to hear if Turkey will renew her press
credentials for the new year. Something, she says, pushes her to stay on
and write about a war that so few seem to care about.



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