Articles-Interviews

Articles-Interviews 1 June 2022

The musicians are speaking (I): “Thousands of people were left to their own fate”

Solidarity helps to survive this difficult period of pandemics when the authorities do not produce radical solutions, musicians cannot come together and efforts of professional organizations were appeared to be insufficient. Musician Mavi along with her colleagues can’t stand this course and tries to bring musicians who are having a hard time and establish a network of solidarity. Ahmet Mustafa Sözmen is a musician who plays in rock bands in Mersin and draws attention to the problems in the music scene. We start our series by building a bridge from Bodrum to Mersin…

Articles-Interviews 31 May 2022

What does İlhan Sami Çomak want? (1)

Poet, writer and translator Erkut Tokman wrote a review for the Speak Up Platform on the autobiographical book of poet İlhan Sami Çomak, who has been deprived of his freedom for 27 years, “Not to Destroy the Ant’s Nest”

Articles-Interviews 31 May 2022

What does İlhan Sami Çomak want? (2)

Poet, writer and translator Erkut Tokman wrote a review for the Speak Up Platform on the autobiographical book of poet İlhan Sami Çomak, who has been deprived of his freedom for 27 years, “Not to Destroy the Ant’s Nest”

Articles-Interviews 19 June 2020

İlhan Çomak: When in prison, poetry, too, is confined

“I have never self-censored my poetry, neither has my poetry ever been censored; to the contrary, I actually hear that many of the officials here, who are obligated to read my poetry, quite like it.” Ayşen Güven from Speak Up Platform spoke to the poet İlhan Çomak, who has been in prison for 26 years, about the prison conditions during the pandemic, the injustice he experienced, and his poems

Articles-Interviews, Cases 27 April 2020

Journalism in times of calamity: So, what exactly did Fatih Portakal do?

Crackdown on journalists is on the rise during the corona pandemic. In Turkey, President Erdoğan filed a criminal complaint against Fox News anchor-man and journalist Fatih Portakal for spreading lies and manipulating the public through his social media posts. The story is always the same wherever you go: Fatih Portakal in Turkey, journalist Ana Lalic in Serbia, the law recently enacted in Vietnam, and the measures taken by the media supervision authority Roskomnadzor in Russia. Reporters continue to be accused with such vague language as “spreading fake news”, “sowing fear”, and “causing panic”