Journalist in Exile

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...

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...

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...