A Turkish photographer and model have been detained by police in the capital, Ankara, for ‘insulting religious values’ after a photo-shoot in the city’s Kocatepe Mosque, prosecutors said on Tuesday.
Photographer Bilal Kisa and model Ezgi Cebeci faced a backlash from nationalist and Islamist accounts on social media after Kisa shared photos taken inside and in front of the mosque, in which Cebeci wore Islamic prayer beads as a necklace, a loose headscarf and a traditional male Muslim cap.
Kisa apologised on Monday, but he and Cebeci were arrested nevertheless and his photos confiscated.
Photographer Bilal Kisa’s photo of model Ezgi Cebeci in Ankara Kocatepe Mosque. Photo: Bilal Kisa/Instagram account
“An investigation was initiated ex officio for the crime of publicly insulting the religious values adopted by a section of the public… due to the photographs taken by a director named Bilal Kisa with a female person in Ankara Kocatepe Mosque and published on social media,” the Prosecutor’s Office in Ankara said in a statement.
In his apology, Kisa saying his work had “deviated from its purpose”.
He insisted he had no intention of insulting Islam or Muslims but that he wished to challenge “the prejudices of a certain group of people who are offended by the mosque and show that the place where they will find peace is the mosque”.
“I apologise to everyone I hurt and misunderstood,” he wrote.
Over 300 people have been arrested in a continuing crackdown by Turkish police and prosecutor’s offices on “provocative” social media posts and construction wrongdoings after the devastating earthquakes of February 6 killed over 48,000 people in the country.
Turkish police said on Twitter on Monday that 1,165 social media account holders had been “evaluated for making provocative posts about earthquakes on social media platforms in order to create fear and panic”.
Legal proceedings were initiated against 730 of them, 179 were brought to police stations and 43 were arrested, police said.
Prosecutors are investigating more than 1,000 individuals on suspicion that they ignored building laws and regulations to devastating effect when the earthquakes struck and buildings collapsed.
Demiroren News Agency, DHA reported on Monday that so far, 279 people including 99 builders, 149 site managers, 13 construction site owners and 18 people who made alterations to constructions have been arrested.
Millions were left without homes in Turkey’s 11 southern and south-eastern provinces when they were devastated by twin earthquakes registering 7.9 and 7.7 on the Richter scale.
Search and rescue missions have been halted, but the removal of debris continues and dead bodies are still being brought from the rubble. It is believed that there are still thousands of bodies still missing.
In the earthquake zone, which was home to nearly 15 million people, more than two million people migrated to western towns and cities and millions continue to live outside in tent camps and prefabricated houses.
Many town and cities still have difficulties with clean water, electricity, food and heating.
Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu urged the public to continue donating and supporting humanitarian aid campaigns for the survivors.
“We are asking for support from our citizens, benefactors and donors,” Soylu told reporters on Sunday during his visit to the affected area, stressing the continuing need for food and clothing supplies.
The Press Council of Kosovo, PCK, and the Association of Journalists of Kosovo, AJK, on Wednesday voiced concern over the proposed regulation of online media content under the Law on the Independent Media Commission, IMC, deeming it a violation of “international rules of journalism”.
The IMC is an independent state body that regulates, manages, and oversees TV broadcasting in Kosovo but now it has said it wants video production on local websites added to its jurisdiction. Print media are already monitored by the PCK.
The PCK is a self-regulatory body formed by the print media in Kosovo, which is recognized by the Assembly of Kosovo through the Law on Defamation and Insult. Rulings that the PCK issues for parties and the media are “respected and valued by local courts in cases where they decide for defamation and insult”.
“Each of the media should be held accountable for their actions before state bodies, based on relevant laws, but initially no one can better assess their ethics than the media themselves, or professionals of the field,” the PCK and AJK said in a joint press release.
The reaction comes after the IMC head, Xhevat Latifi, said a new law on the IMC should include audio-visual content of websites within its auspices.
Latifi said this at a presentation of the IMC’s Annual Report for 2020 to parliament’s Committee on Local Government, Regional Development and Media on Tuesday. “We are witnessing a toxic state of media vocabulary in Kosovo,” Latifi said, justifying the initiative.
Later he told BIRN that the initiative was not his own and explained it as “concern of society”.
“I have stated that portals which deal with audio-visual production would best be included in the new law; not all portals, only these which deal with audio-visual parts. It is only a request. We are only measuring the public, their concerns. I have presented it as a concern of society, we cannot say this is my opinion or IMC position,” he said.
The Press Council and journalists’ associations deem the idea dangerous.
“Initiatives to control and evaluate ethics for print and online media by a state organisation are harmful and do not help the media and journalists,” their press release said.
BIRN is advertising three positions, offering exciting opportunities to get involved in this unique new initiative.
Under the working name ‘Reporters’ House’, the museum and community space will be the first regional museum in the Balkans that tells the comprehensive story of the break-up of the former Yugoslavia and the wars that erupted as the unified state collapsed.
The museum space will offer a compelling, fact-based narrative but will not simply serve as a heritage venue of wartime history. We aim to create a contemporary, inviting, creative, inspiring and memorable place providing space for discussion, learning and growth.
We want to celebrate the journalists, photographers and media workers who courageously reported the war and its aftermath, exposing atrocities and serious human rights abuses while maintaining the highest professional standards despite the deadly risks they faced.
We want to highlight the untold or forgotten stories of solidarity, bravery and humanity in times of war, and to preserve the memory of the journalists who lost their lives in the Yugoslav wars. We also want to remember the darker moments for our profession, looking at how media were used for propaganda purposes, instigating hatred and division.
Many of the challenges that journalists faced during the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia have enduring lessons for media coverage of wars. At the same time, contemporary journalism faces issues of propaganda and disinformation that have been amplified by the online environment and social media.
This is why we also want Reporters’ House to serve as a community space for journalists to gather and discuss the critical issues facing the societies of South-East and Central Europe, exchanging ideas with experts from outside the region about the development of quality journalism and investigative reporting and the role of media in conflict and conflict prevention.
The space is located in Sarajevo, and will be renovated ahead of the planned opening in Spring 2022.
The opening date is symbolic as it will mark 30 years since the beginning of the siege of Sarajevo and the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which saw the largest number of media workers killed in Europe since World War II.
Sarajevo is also home to the regional office of BIRN, the first structured network of journalists from the former Yugoslavia who got together to report about the key issues that countries in the region were facing in the wake of the wars that accompanied the break-up of the country in which they were born.
The opening of the ‘Reporters’ House’ will also serve to celebrate the tenth anniversary of our regional Balkan Transitional Justice programme, a platform that ensures a regular, up-to-date flow of information about transitional justice issues in the region through our dedicated network of correspondents in all the countries of the former Yugoslavia and our contributors from other media outlets, civil society organisations, governmental institutions, academia, the cultural sphere and elsewhere.
Over the past ten years, we have reported from all the war crime trials that have been held domestically and internationally, we have revealed human rights abuses and help to locate war crimes suspects, and we have inspired and supported other journalists to report and collaborate on reporting projects about conflict-related topics.
We have also brought together various different interest groups to exchange views on transitional justice policies, and most importantly we have given a voice to thousands of war victims to tell their stories and demand justice. With the Reporters’ House in Sarajevo, we intend to take this work to another level and ensure that the issues and debates raised by the Yugoslav wars have a positive impact on the region’s future development.
Greek police are intensifying efforts to locate the perpetrators of last Friday’s execution-style” killing of the veteran crime reporter Giorgos Karaivaz, shooting him dead outside his house in the southern Athens suburb of Alimos.
Investigators are leaning to the possibility that two different teams were involved in the street slaying. The first team likely monitored the reporter’s movements after he left STAR TV channel, where he had taken part in a daytime show, and then informed the second team, who waited in the area on a motorcycle and executed the crime.
A CCTV video camera appears to show two riders some seven minutes before the attack. The driver can be seen wearing a helmet while the second driver, who according to witnesses hopped off the bike and shot the reporter as he got out of his car, is wearing a khaki hoodie, sunglasses and a mask.
Karaivaz took a total of ten bullets, six in his chest. According to reports, he was also shot twice in his head, verifying a passersby’s testimony that, once he fell to the ground, he received the final hit from the assassins before they got away.
According to media outlet Kathimerini, police believe the Beverly scooter used in the attack had been stolen, and have created a log of motorbikes of the same type reported stolen from their owners lately.
Police have been also trying to locate the safe house of the perpetrators. Investigations are focused on hotels and Airbnb apartments in the southern suburbs of Athens, but also on recent arrivals at Greece’s airports and across the land borders. For the moment, the lead scenario appears to be that the two perpetrators were brought from abroad for the hit, and left afterwards.
On Saturday, the Prime Minister, Kiriakos Mitsotakis, tweeted: “The assassination in cold blood of Giorgos Karaivaz has shocked the entire society,” adding that he met with the Minister of Citizen’s Protection, Michalis Chrisochoidis, to urge him to help solve the case.
But Mitsotakis has received criticism for only responding to the news of the assassination some 24 hours after the attack. His tweet came hours after various media freedom watchdogs, such as the Committee to Protect Journalists, and foreign officials, including the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, had already condemned the attack.
Former prime minister and opposition SYRIZA party leader Alexis Tsipras also criticized the government, saying that “those who were campaigning for law and order have let the country be converted to a colony of organised crime and uncontrolled action of gang mafias”.
Speaking on TV, the deputy Minister of Citizen’s Protection, Lefteris Oikonomou, said a series of similar-style assassinations in the last three years suggested that some form of “open war” has been going on.
On the website bloko.gr that he founded and managed, which focused on crime and police authorities, Karaivaz had reported on more than ten assassinations that have taken place since 2018 and are attributed to conflicts between different gangs for supremacy. The authorities have been studying his laptop, his car and his mobile phone, reportedly also hit by a bullet.
Karaivaz’s funeral meanwhile took place on Sunday in Kallifytos, a village just outside Drama, where his only son, Dimitris, 19, said: “My father believed a lot in people and he loved them. He believed in a second chance”.
“Of course, we want the people that killed him to be caught, so that they will not kill someone else in future,” he added.
“But my father would forgive them for killing him, and would look for the reason behind this and wouldn’t want this event to terrorize society – a society that fights for freedom and equality,” he concluded.
Two Moldovan journalists working for the TV8 television station, Viorica Tataru and Andrei Captarenco, were stopped on Tuesday by Russian and Transnistrian separatist peacekeeping troops at the Gura Bacului checkpoint and ordered to erase all the footage they had filmed and surrender their technical equipment.
“We are here at the peacekeepers’ post. We have been detained, the car has been seized, and we cannot get out of the vehicle. They told us we have to hand them the material we filmed, otherwise we can’t get out of here,” Tataru told BIRN by telephone.
She added that four armed men with a Russian flag emblem on their uniforms were guarding their car.
She said they had contacted the police and representatives of the Joint Control Commission, a combined military command structure involving Moldova, Transnistria and Russia that has operated in the separatist-controlled territory since the war in the country in 1992.
“We’ve been waiting for the police for an hour. I also called the Joint Control Commission. They said they would come, but so far no one has come,” Tataru said.
The two journalists have been filming a weekly TV show for more than a year in villages that are controlled by Moldova but are located on the eastern bank of the Dniester river – in an area that is mostly controlled by the breakaway Transnistrian authorities.
To reach the villages, the journalists have to pass through the Gura Bacului checkpoint.
Transnistria does not allow its checkpoints to be filmed or photographed.
In July 2020, peacekeeping troops chased them into Moldovan controlled-territory and asked them to surrender footage they shot on Moldovan soil.
The Transnistrian ‘frozen conflict’ has seen no armed violence between government forces and Russian-backed separatists since 1992. The de facto border has remained open, and populations on both sides of the river have come to depend on each other economically.
The Turkish Interior Ministry announced on Tuesday that security forces detained 39 social media users in the first week of February for allegedly posting propaganda for terrorist organisations online.
It said that a total of 575 offenders have been detected and that detentions continue.
“Debates and developments on social media platforms as well as the social media accounts of illegal groups and structures are being followed closely,” the ministry said in a written statement.
The detainees are accused of propaganda for organisations which Turkey accepted as terrorist organisations, including the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, PKK, the so-called Islamic State, extremist leftist groups and the so-called Fethullahist Terrorist Organisation – a name Turkey uses to brand followers of exiled Turkish preacher Fethullah Gulen, who Ankara accuses of orchestrating a failed coup attempt in 2016.
The 39 detainees include several students who allegedly run social media accounts to organise the recent series of high-profile protests against the political appointment of a new rector at the prestigious Bogazici University in Istanbul.
Riot police staged a major operation to disperse the student protesters last week, with hundreds detained and dozens charged.
Aysen Sahin, an independent Turkish journalist, was also detained by police at her home on Monday evening for posting a message on Twitter during last week’s student protests.
Sahin was detained after some pro-government newspapers criticised her. She was released on Tuesday morning.
The Turkish government’s crackdown on social media users intensified after it introduced a new law on digital media last year.
The new law allows security forces to detain anyone responsible for suspicious posts which are linked to terrorist organisations or any kind of disinformation.
As part of the new law, social media platforms are forced to appoint legal representatives in the country to answer the government’s demands to delete social media posts and close accounts.
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Russia’s VK social media platform decided to appoint representatives after Turkish government fined them twice. Twitter, however, is still resisting the Turkish government’s new regulations.
According to the Turkish Interior Ministry, 14,186 social media accounts were investigated and 6,743 people were tried because of their posts on social media in first eight months of 2020.
Romania’s High Court of Cassation and Justice ruled on Tuesday that pretending to be someone else on Facebook is an offence punishable under the country’s criminal law.
The ruling arose from the case of a man sentenced to three years and eight months in prison for blackmail, digital fraud and breach of privacy for posting intimate images of his ex-girlfriend on a social network and opening pornography site accounts in her name.
According to the indictment, the man created the false social network account after threatening his former girlfriend in December 2018 that he would publish several videos of them having sex, as well as pictures in which she appeared naked, if she did not resume the relationship with him.
The case reached the High Court after the Court of Appeal in the Transylvanian city of Brasov in central Romania asked for its opinion about whether “opening and using an account on a social network opened to the public” to publish real “information, photographs, video images, etc.” could be considered digital fraud as defined by article 325 of the criminal code.
The High Court concluded that “opening and using an account on a social network open to the public, using as a username the name of another person and introducing real personal data that allows for that person’s identification” meets the requirements to be considered as digital fraud.
The Brasov court referred the case to the High Court because other Romanian courts had previously reached different and contradictory conclusions in similar cases.
Serbia’s Market Inspectorate on Friday banned the Belgrade-based 011 Shop from selling and advertising sweatshirts and T-shirts with a slogan praising the 1995 Srebrenica massacres, which its website had been promoting online.
The Trade Ministry said that a criminal complaint had also been filed to the Serbian prosecution accusing the company of “the advertising of products that incite national, religious and racial hatred”.
The garments featured the slogan “Noz, Zica” (“Knife, Wire”) – a reference to a popular Serbian football hooligan chant at matches, “Knife, Wire, Srebrenica”, which celebrates the mass killings of Bosniaks by Bosnian Serb forces in July 1995.
“The advertising and sale of such products not only violates the law on advertising and the criminal code, but is in direct conflict with the constitution of Serbia, because it encourages the incitement of national, religious and racial hatred, which is explicitly prohibited,” said the secretary of state at the Trade Ministry, Uros Kandic.
Kandic said that a criminal complaint against the online retailer had been filed to the Prosecutor’s Office for High-Tech Crime.
Shop 011 apologised for the incident on its Facebook page, claiming that the message on the garments had been “misinterpreted” and “taken out of context”, and that they had been withdrawn from sale.
“It was not our intention to spread any kind of hatred or bigotry towards anyone,” the shop’s statement said.
Its website, registered to the Belgrade-based company Souvenir Shop, went offline on Friday morning.
Shop 011 advertises its garments as “Serbian street wear” for men, women and children. Some items also celebrate the Serbian nationalist Chetnik Movement and its World War II-era leader Dragoljub Mihajlovic, as well as notorious 1990s paramilitary leader Zeljko Raznatovic, alias Arkan.
The company also has retail shops at locations in Belgrade.
Bosnian Serb forces killed some 8,000 Bosniak men and boys after seizing the town of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia in July 1995, in a series of massacres that international courts have classified as genocide.
The report presents an overview of the main violations of digital rights in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Hungary, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania and Serbia between January 31 and September 30, 2020, and makes a series of recommendations for authorities in order to curb such infringements during future social crises.
The global public health crisis triggered by the coronavirus exposed a new the failure of states around the world to provide a framework that would better balance the interests of safety and privacy. Instead, the report documents incidents of censorship, fake news, security breaches and concentration of information.
More than 200 pandemic-related violations tracked
At the onset of the pandemic, numerous violations of digital rights were observed – from violations of the privacy of persons in isolation to manipulation, dissemination of false information and Internet fraud.
BIRN and Share Foundation documented 221 violations in the context of COVID-19 during the eight-month monitoring period, the largest number coming during the initial peak of the pandemic in March and April – 67 and 79 respectively – before slowly declining.
The countries with the highest number of violations to date are Serbia, with 46, and Croatia, with 44.
The most common violation – accounting for roughly half of all cases – was manipulation in the digital environment caused by news sites that published unverified and inaccurate information, and by the circulating of incomplete and false data on social media.
This can be explained in large measure by the low level of media literacy in the countries of the region, where few people actually check the news and information provided to them, while the media themselves often publish unverified information.
The most common targets of digital rights violations were citizens and journalists. However, both of these groups were frequently also among the perpetrators.
Contact tracing apps: Useful or not?
The debate about the use of contact-tracing apps as a method of combating the spread of COVID-19 was one of the most important discussions in Croatia and North Macedonia.
At the very beginning of the pandemic, the Croatian government led by the conservative Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ, proposed a change to the Electronic Communications Act under which, in extraordinary situations, the health minister would request from telecommunications companies the location data of users.
Similarly, Macedonian health authorities announced they were looking to use “all tools and means” to combat the virus, with North Macedonia among the first countries in the Western Balkans to launch a contact-tracing app on April 13.
Developed and donated to the Macedonian authorities by Skopje-based software company Nextsense, the StopKorona! app is based on Bluetooth distance measuring technology and stores data locally on users’ devices, while exchanging encrypted, anonymised data relevant to the infection spread for a limited period of 14 days. According to data privacy experts, the decentralised design guaranteed that data would be stored only on devices that run the app, unless they voluntarily submit that data to health authorities.
Croatia launched its own at the end of July, but by late August media reports said the Stop COVID-19 app had been downloaded by less than two per cent of mobile phone users in the country. The threshold for it to be effective is 60 per cent, the reports said.
Key worrying trends mapped
Illustration: Olivia Solis
Bosnia and Herzegovina saw a number of problems with personal data protection, free access to information and disinformation. In terms of disinformation, people were exposed to a variety of false and sometimes outlandish claims, including conspiracy theories about the origin of the coronavirus, its spread by plane and various miracle cures.
Conspiracy theories, like those blaming the spread of the virus on 5G mobile networks, flourished online in Croatia too. One person in Croatia destroyed their Wifi equipment, believing it was 5G.
In Hungary, fake news about COVID-19 arrived even before the virus itself, said journalist Akos Keller Alant, who monitored the digital environment in Hungary.
Several clickbait fake news sites published articles about COVID-19 victims a month before Hungary’s first confirmed case. The Anti-Cybercrime Unit of the Hungarian police arrested several people for spreading fake news, starting in early February when police raided the operators of a network of fake news sites.
In Kosovo, online media emerged as the biggest violators of digital rights by publishing unverified and false information as well as personal health information. Personal data rights were also violated by state institutions and public figures.
In Montenegro, the most worrying digital rights violations concerned privacy and personal data protection of those infected with the coronavirus or those forced to self-isolate.
The early days of the pandemic, when Montenegro was among the few countries that could claim to have kept a lid on the virus, was a rare moment of social and political consensus in the country about how to respond, said Tamara Milas of the Centre for Civic Education in Montenegro, an NGO.
The situation changed, however, when the government was accused of the gross violation of the right to privacy and the right to the protection of personal data.
Like its Western Balkan peers, North Macedonia was flooded with unverified information and claims shared online with regards the pandemic. Some of the most concerning cases included false claims about infected persons, causing a stir on social media.
In Romania, the government used state-of-emergency powers to shut down websites – including news and opinion sites – accused of spreading what authorities deemed fake news about the pandemic, according to BIRN correspondent Marcel Gascon, who monitors digital rights violations in Romania.
In Serbia, a prominent case concerned a breach of security in the country’s central COVID-19 database. For eight days, the login credentials for the database, Information System COVID-19, were publicly available on the website of a public health body.
In another incident, the initials, age, place-of-work and personal address of a person infected with the virus were posted on the official webpage of the municipality of Sid in western Serbia as well as on the town’s social media accounts.
In the report, BIRN and Share Foundation conclude that technology, especially in a time of crisis, should not be seen as the solution to complex issues, be that protection of health or upholding public order and safety. Rather, technology should be used to the benefit of citizens and in the interest of their rights and freedoms.
When intrusive technologies and regulations are put in place, it is hard to take a step back, particularly in societies with weak democratic institutions, the report states. Under such circumstances, the measures applied in one crisis for the protection of public health may one day be repurposed and used against other “social plagues”, ultimately leading to reduced human rights standards.
To read the full report click here. For individual cases, check our regional database, developed together with the SHARE Foundation.
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