Welcome to the dictator’s playground

On 2 October 2018 a team of agents dispatched by the Saudi government strangled dissident Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi after he entered the consulate building in Istanbul. The respected journalist’s body was dismembered and, according to Turkish intelligence, dissolved in acid. The CIA said Khashoggi’s state-employed assassins acted at the behest of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Since that dark day, Turkey’s reputation as a hub of transnational repression has grown.

Uyghur dissidents in the country are one group feeling the effects of China’s transnational power. Turkey was once seen as a haven for the persecuted people from China’s northwest given the linguistic, cultural and religious overlaps, and was therefore home to the largest numbers of Uyghurs outside of China. Now the incidents of attacks of Uyghur dissidents are going up and up. According to a 2023 report from Safeguard Defenders, more than one-third of Uyghurs interviewed in Turkey said they had been harassed by Chinese police or state agents while in the country. Leading activists have been deported. It’s unclear about Turkey’s stance here and they have yet to ratify an extradition treaty which Beijing signed in December 2020. Still, it’s far from safe and if Turkey do ratify the treaty Uyghurs will be even more exposed.

Another group to feel the effects are Iranian dissidents. Over the past half-decade, Iranian intelligence agents have carried out multiple operations on Turkish soil, at times even aided by members of Turkey’s judiciary and police force. In September 2023, a former Turkish prosecutor was sentenced to 11 years and eight months in jail for collaborating with Iranian intelligence. Among the 15 others tried in court were two police officers. In 2019, the prosecutor allegedly took $50,000 in return for providing the location of Mohammed Rezaei, a former Iranian navy officer, to Iranian intelligence.

The operation to kidnap Rezaei – conducted using the car of the Turkish state prosecutor – failed. The attempt to capture Shahnam Golshani, the manager of the Iranian website Mesghal, also failed. An authority on the value of hard currency, Golshani’s website was blocked in Iran in 2013 after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lost control of the currency market and asked Golshani to publish lower rates for hard currency to calm people, which he refused to do.  There were reports that the Courts of First Instance issued the death penalty against Golshani. He fled the country illegally over the border into Turkey in 2013.

Iranian intelligence failed to capture Golshani and Rezaei but managed to abduct a former Iranian colonel, Mashali Firouze. Another ‘success’ came in 2022, when the Iranian dissident Mohammad Bagher Moradi, nine years after taking refuge in Turkey, left home to buy bread. He never returned. The police found his abandoned car, and his family pointed to the Iranian intelligence as culprits. Moradi, a member of Saraye Ahl-e Ghalam (Writers’ Association), had received a five-year prison sentence on the charge of ‘illegal gathering and collusion against national security’ while living in Iran.

Trapped between Turkey and Iran

Esmaeil Fattahi, a dissident on the watchlist of Iranian intelligence, said he can’t ignore these developments and just continue with his life. Born in 1988, Fattahi has been living in Turkey since 2015. His crime was to blog about the political situation in Iran. He was part of a group that worked clandestinely, distributing pamphlets, conducting secret meetings, and putting up graffiti to highlight human rights and women’s rights struggles inside Iranian factories.

First arrested aged 15 in Tabriz, where he lived, Fattahi spent six months in prison. Four years later, he was again sentenced to six months. His arrest in 2010 led to a five-year prison term. By the time of his release, Fattahi became convinced he’d leave Iran. ‘When I left prison in 2015, I was 27, and I had spent around a fourth of [my life], six years, in prison,’ he told Index.

After his release, Fattahi learned another case had been opened against him – for reporting on the torturous conditions in Iran’s prisons to international human rights organisations. Also, he couldn’t get employment. ‘The Iranian media called me “the dog of Israel and America” and claimed I was an agent, a communist,’ he recalled. The owner of a cafe where he worked offered his apologies before firing Fattahi. ‘Once they learned who I was, it was over. Nobody wanted to take the risk.’

Fattahi made headlines in Turkey when, in 2021, he was arrested with three other Iranian dissidents in the Anatolian city of Denizli for attending a protest event against Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention. This Council of Europe treaty, which Turkey had been the first to sign in 2011, opposes violence against women and domestic violence. But as Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his far-right allies launched a war against the idea of a culturally determined gender, they turned the treaty into a hate object which they claim is defended by woke race traitors, and nefarious powers in the pay of George Soros.

Fattahi joined Leili Faraji and Zeinab Sahafi for the protest, took a banner and delivered a speech. He was joined by members of the Iranian LGBTQI+ community in Turkey. A month later, he received a call from the mother of Sahafi, who said her daughter was detained. Two other phone calls followed. An ally, Mohammad Pourakbari Kermani, who hadn’t even participated in the protest, was also detained.

Fattahi didn’t return home and headed to the police headquarters in Denizli, where he was swiftly put behind bars. The four dissidents refused to sign a voluntary return document and spent a month in a deportation centre in Aydın. Public furore and a viral social media campaign followed. Amnesty and Freedom House pressured Turkey’s Interior Ministry. There was even a parliamentary question about the arrests. ‘We got out thanks to those,’ said Fattahi.

Nowadays he lives in a different Anatolian town. ‘Iran is a totalitarian state with not a shred of democracy, press freedom or freedom of expression,’ he said. ‘Here in Turkey, police can detain you for your political views and a judge can, at most, sentence you to prison. In Iran, they hang you or subject you to whipping.’

Miniatürk, Istanbul. Cropped image by Boris Dzhingarov via Wikimedia Commons

He is worried about being kidnapped. ‘For years, Iranian agents entered Turkey easily. Last year, a friend of ours was assassinated in Istanbul,’ he said. The situation is particularly perilous in cities such as Van, close to the Iranian border. ‘Iranian agents tried to kidnap a friend of mine to Iran last month.’

Fattahi receives death threats on social media all the time and reads emails whose senders describe what they’ll ‘do’ to him ‘soon’. ‘I’ve been getting those for the past seven years. I can’t just ignore them,’ he said.

Still, he feels lucky. Many refugees live in abject poverty in Turkey, with no financial support and no work permits, which leads them to work illegally. Undocumented refugees do the most challenging work for the longest hours and receive the lowest wages. As a freelancer working from home, Fattahi can at least organize his life. ‘I order all my food and groceries from my phone. I try not to go out at all. I only go out to walk my dog, which I do very carefully. Most refugees work 12 hours outside, and many have committed suicide because of the conditions.’

Last year, a friend of Fattahi, who had been in Turkey for seven years, called him to say he was going back. ‘I encountered so much racism here, and my wife left me because of our financial situation. I prefer going to prison in Iran than being here,’ Fattahi remembered him saying.

In 2019, the police broke down the door of Fattahi’s house, and he woke up with a gun next to his head. Four men in black balaclavas took him to the police headquarters. ‘There were cameras in the station, so they beat me up in the toilet,’ Fattahi said. The following day, they set him free. When he sued the police who intimidated him, a court handed him a seven-month prison sentence and a fine for ‘resisting security forces’.

Pondering the future, he is particularly worried about kidnapping attempts conducted by Iranian spies who can then return to Iran without any hurdles. ‘I have to be constantly careful about my relationships here,’ he said.

The dispersing Russian Ark

Dissidents from other countries, such as Eva Rapoport, who is Russian, encounter different challenges. The cultural anthropologist and photographer left Russia in 2013 before the annexation of Crimea. ‘I thought that the situation would keep deteriorating and one day all would go down in flames,’ she recalled. Rapoport moved from Moscow to Southeast Asia and lived in Indonesia for a while before ending up in Turkey in 2020.

She rented an apartment in Istanbul, hoping things would return to normal. But they went in the opposite direction. The new anti-war wave of Russian immigration began, with thousands of liberal Russians and those opposed to the war moving to Turkey. Rapoport noticed she had advantages compared with people who had left Russia without any preparation. ‘I had local knowledge about how to live in Istanbul,’ she said. She decided to put that to good use.

Rapoport is part of the Ark Project, founded in March 2022 as a response to the criminalization of Russians who disagree with the war in Ukraine. ‘The Ark is the first initiative that centrally helps people from Russia who left because of an anti-war stance,’ its website announces. ‘Now, the audience of the Ark is about half a million people.’

It had been straightforward for Russians to go to Turkey, a popular tourist destination since the 1990s. For years, scores of Russians came to the Mediterranean haven of Antalya and stayed in all-inclusive hotels. ‘For dissidents who take refuge in Turkey, they don’t feel threatened, and here they don’t feel like aliens,’ Rapoport said.

She had spent months organizing lectures on topics pertaining to the situation in Russia but also addressing Turkish and Middle Eastern history, culture and politics. The programme – for which she selected speakers from September 2022 until March 2023 – did very well. ‘Our most popular events were gathering over 100 people. We had one poetry reading in November which attracted 60 people.’ But in December 2022, things took a turn for the worse.

‘Turkish authorities stopped issuing residency permits. People began getting rejections. Nobody knew what was happening. By spring, lots of people who were going to stay left,’ Rapoport said. Their departure was not voluntarily. Instead, they were pushed out, their visas not renewed. There are various theories about why: some link it to pressure from Putin, a strong ally of Erdoğan, not to provide refuge to dissidents, but it’s equally possible to explain Erdoğan’s change of heart as the result of the rise of anti-refugee sentiment among the electorate.

Like Fattahi, Rapoport is concerned about the future of dissidents. ‘I don’t see my future even for the next 10 months in Turkey,’ she said. ‘I was quite enthusiastic here when the immigration began, right after the war and the first wave, and the second one in September, following mobilization. There was this feeling that Istanbul could become a new hub for Russian opposition culture, a good version of what Russian cultural and intellectual life could be. Then it became clear that people were not staying; people who were eager to start some projects here or had started businesses also didn’t have their residencies renewed. People left, and they will keep leaving.’

The Ark Project, which conducts its communications via Telegram, has thousands of members in Turkey. Is Rapoport aware of the fate they share with Iranian dissidents? ‘There were jokes here about Russians and Iranians coming together and having an argument about whose passport is worse,’ she said. Even as Russia falls under more international sanctions, Iranian passports are still worse in terms of the number of countries its holders can travel to, she added.

Suspended lives

Both Fattahi and Rapoport say their main problem is not knowing what the future holds. ‘I have no idea whether I’ll leave Turkey next year or in a decade. I can neither study, open a new business or set up a life,’ Fattahi said. ‘I’m 35, and I have spent almost a decade here, not going to college and amassing nothing to secure my life. If I left Turkey today, I’d begin from scratch.’

Like Rapoport, Fattahi had tried to initiate cultural events for like-minded Iranian dissidents. He rented a cafe where they could read books together and have weekly screenings of films about social issues, including LGBTQI+ rights. ‘But we can’t do those now,’ he said. ‘People in Iran think Turkey is a free country with freedom for women and the freedom to consume alcohol. They don’t realise Turkey is not a free and democratic country until they start living here.’

This article was originally published in the 2024 spring issue of Index on Censorship. Kaya Genç is Index’s Turkey contributing editor.