Enis Berberoğlu, the jailed deputy of Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), has complained of isolation in his prison cell to Pınar Türenç, the head of Turkish Press Council, when the latter visited him in İstanbul’s Maltepe Prison.
According to a report by Hürriyet daily news on Sunday, Berberoğlu told Türenç that “I have been by myself for approximately a year in my cell. It is not possible to talk and have a brief chat with anyone. I could not even take a stroll with another inmate.”
Berberoğlu is a former journalist who was initially sentenced to 25 years in jail and put in prison on June 14, 2017 on charges of “helping a terrorist organization,” “espionage” and “leaking secret state documents.”
In February, an appeals court ruled there was no evidence supporting charges of “espionage” and “helping a terrorist organization.” It therefore reduced the 25-year sentence while still sentencing the CHP deputy to five years and 10 months in jail for making secret government documents public.
Berberoğlu, the first CHP deputy to be given prison time, is accused of providing daily Cumhuriyet with a video purporting to show Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MİT) trucks sending weapons to radical jihadist groups in Syria to fight against the regime of Bashar al-Assad.
“How can I be a spy? It is so clear the claims against me are unfounded … I hope for a positive decision to come from the Constitutional Court, to which I have applied for an appeal. A situation that does not suit any article of law is being experienced right now. I have hope,” Berberoğlu has told Türenç, adding that he spends his days writing a book named “By myself in the cell” while in prison.
Berberoğlu is a former journalist, who started his career at business daily Dünya in 1981. In his long journalism career, Berberoğlu also worked for Cumhuriyet, CNN Türk and Radikal. He also served as daily Hürriyet’s editor-in-chief from 2009 to 2014.
When the MİT truck story first broke in 2015, it produced a political firestorm in Turkey about the role of the Turkish spy agency in arming radical Islamist rebel factions in Syria and prompted an investigation into Cumhuriyet daily journalists Can Dündar and Erdem Gül, who published the report.
They were first jailed while facing trial on spy charges for publishing footage purporting to show MİT transporting weapons to Syria in 2014. Later, the two journalists were released pending trial.
When Dündar later published a book titled “We Are Arrested,” he mapped out the details of the news story on May 27, 2015, saying that “a leftist lawmaker brought the information to him.” Upon that revelation, the İstanbul Chief Prosecutor’s Office launched a new investigation and examined Can Dündar’s phone calls during the days leading up to the publication of the story.
The prosecutor’s office detected a phone conversation between CHP deputy Berberoğlu and Dündar on May 27. A new indictment was drafted naming Berberoğlu. In September 2016, an İstanbul court decided to merge the trial of journalists Dündar and Gül with that of Berberoğlu.
In order to protest the court decision, CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu launched “March for Justice” on June 14, 2017 in Ankara which ended at Maltepe Prison in İstanbul, where Berberoğlu is jailed.
