“Of course my family are worried. Who in this country isn’t worried?” says Ramazan Ölçen, who was detained for owning the copyrights to Azadiya Welat (Freedom of the country), what was Turkey’s only Kurdish-language daily newspaper. It was shut down by a cabinet decree issued under Turkey’s state of emergency, which has been in place since 20 July 2016.
“On 4 March 2017, at around 6am, special operations officers and counterterrorism police raided my house [in Diyarbakır], which was completely unnecessary,” he says. “I would have voluntarily gone and testified if the prosecutor’s office had sent me a notice.”
Ölçen’s wife was terrified by the “special operations officers wearing masks on their faces and sporting automatic rifles” he says. “Honestly, I too was afraid.”
