Journalist in Exile

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...

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...