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An exiled journalist’s ordeal with the abbys of immigration services

When I had to flee my home country Turkey in March 2016 after the increasingly oppressive government brutally took over our newspaper, I thought the problems I would encounter in the Western world would be much less frustrating and challenging. The year I spent in Belgium’s highly divided, bilingual and decentralized bureaucracy made me think the U.S. would be a better place to live for an exiled journalist like myself. After coming here for a journalism related project, I decided to stay. After all, the US is a country of immigrants as the famous expression goes. Given my graduate school experience in the US, I was able to safely argue that becoming an immigrant in the US would still be easier than anywhere in Europe. Little did I know about the dark abyss of the United States Center for Immmigration Services (USCIS)!  Let me try to simplify and oversummarize (I know there is no such word, but I had to coin it) my ordeal with the USCIS in the last three years. Through my lawye
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Erdogan is the wrong hero for Jamal Khashoggi

Relying on Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to bring justice to the killers of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi is, as the Turkish idiom goes, like “entrusting the liver to the cat.” We are relying on the wrong person on such a critical issue. Erdogan may be putting on a good show in his speeches and writings demanding that those responsible stand trial in Turkey, but remember that we are talking about the biggest jailer of journalists in the world. Turkey, which labels journalists terrorists and traitors and literally ruins their lives, is not concerned with human rights. I know, because they did that to me. I once was the editor in chief of Today’s Zaman , a newspaper that was shuttered in the aftermath of a failed coup attempt of July 15, 2016. Even before that tragic and still mysterious day when so many innocent people lost their lives, the Turkish government had taken over Zaman in March 2016, some four months before July 15, and sent many of us who worked
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Murder of Saudi journalist remains a mystery

Like the majority of the world, I heard the name Jamal Khashoggi (I always tend to say and type Cemal Kasikci due to his Turkish sounding name) on the day he did not get out of the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul per his fiancee's statement. Based on the global reaction, it became evident that this Washington Post columnist was much more prominent in the Western world than he was in Turkey. It seems he was an influential political dissident in his home country more than a journalist. As in similar cases of dissidents from anti-democratic countries, he had to force himself into exile in the US until he met and engaged a much younger Turkish woman named Hatice Cengiz. When I heard his disappearance on October 2, 2018 I found myself asking 'why did he even enter the Consulate building as a renown dissident?' As a Turkish journalist in exile, after the abductions of Turkish citizens by the government of Turkey in some third world countries, I do not even consider going to a con
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Has citizenship right at birth been abused by foreigners?

If you read my very first post today, you already know I fled my home country because of Erdogan's dictatorship. I lived in Belgium for over a year. Many people probably did not even know the name of the Prime Minister in that small and peaceful country.  The mood felt so apolitical. Yet, there was no future for me in a non-English speaking, bilingual country and I finally settled in the US, but at what a time? I had lived in the US during graduate school at Temple University and visited several states over the years. Not in my wildest dreams, I could have imagined a POTUS who calls the media the enemy of the people. I often joke that it must be my luck that at a time that the US has become my 'chosen home' , an eccentric personality, to say the least, is ruling the strongest economy and the country in the world. In Turkey, we were used to waking up to an at least one shocking news or remark coming from the President, but for Americans it was a new reality. Now, I guess e
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Once a journalist, always a journalist

Welcome to my blog! My name is Sevgi Akarcesme. I was a journalist until my newspaper, Today's Zaman, was brutally taken away from increasingly oppressive government of Turkey . I had switched to a career in journalism in 2012 after quitting my secure job in bureaucracy. It was a short yet extremely intense period under heavy pressure. Since then, I have tried my best to pursue reporting often with very limited resources. I was forced to leave 'home', Istanbul, in March 2016. After the initial shock, for about a year, with a tiny group of exiled colleagues in different parts of the world we worked hard to report tragedies going on in Turkey to the outside world in the absence of free media inside the country. After a while, I had to move on to start a new life. Online reporting from home was not a sustainable route. It was almost funny to listen pro-government media claiming that people like me had more than enough resources to report in English. All I had was a tiny M
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