Anyone who advocates for justice in Turkey is faced with the state’s relentless crackdown on freedom. In the past few months alone, several pro-Kurdish elected mayors have been removed from their posts, and a four-day film festival in Istanbul was cancelled in protest at a ban on showing Queer, a drama starring British actor Daniel Craig.
Around the same time, on October 16, an independent Istanbul-based radio station called Açık Radyo was shut down. The station’s daily news programme hosted a guest on April 24 who referred to the atrocities committed against the Armenian population in 1915 as “genocide”, which Turkey still denies having ever carried out. The guest spoke about the ban on commemorating the victims in Turkey, which Armenians do annually also on April 24.
