Amid reactions to the recent arrest of a number of Cumhuriyet daily journalists, police on Sunday came to the home of critical columnist and academic Baskın Oran.
Oran informed the public about the police who checked his house in the early hours of Sunday in a column published on the T24 news website that same day.
According to the column, three policemen arrived at Oran’s home at 1:50 a.m. and asked him whether he was Baskın Oran. The officers told Oran that they came because there was a query from one of his relatives who was worried about his safety. But police declined to mention the name of Oran’s relative.
After saying that all his relatives have his mobile number and that his mobile is always switched on, Oran said: “I must have been wrong. They did not come to get me. They came to confirm that I live here after my ‘relative’ became concerned about me.”
Recalling President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s recent statement that “Turkey has never been a country with as much freedom, peace and comfort as it has now,” Oran ended his column with the message: “There isn’t this much concern about the peace of citizens in any other country in the world. What else can we ask. Well done!”
According to Turkish media organizations, a total of 156 media outlets in Turkey were closed down, 184 journalists were detained, 56 journalists arrested, 866 journalists fired from their jobs and 620 journalists had their press cards canceled over the past months, over alleged links to a failed coup on July 15 in Turkey that claimed the lives of more than 240 people. About 150 journalists are behind bars in Turkey.