When Turkish courts arrested some pro-PKK politicians of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), a group of PKK supporters took to the streets in Brussels and gathered in front of the European Parliament. I took my camera and went to the area to witness it myself, for the first time, how banners and flags of a listed terrorist organization were being waved before an institution that claims to advocate for democracy and fight against terrorism. When I arrived to the scene, I observed that some of the protesters were cautiously watching those passing near them. Thus, I decided to do live broadcasting via my mobile phone from a distance of some 10 meters. There were only two police officers in the area and they were sitting in their car quietly until I reached their door to ask if the crowd had permission to hold a demonstration. The officers opted to remain silent and took the advice of a PKK supporter who wanted me to stay at a far distance. Probably, my press card was not as worthy as the PKK flag the terror supporter had in his hands. It is worth noting that according to regulations, an online application is needed at least 10 days prior to a planned demonstration. However, this rule does not seem to apply for PKK supporters.

Several weeks passed and I started to better understand how things with the PKK work in Europe and this was pretty disturbing. The double standards on responding to terrorist organizations pushes the people of Turkey further away from Europe, and this is borne out in recent studies showing that up to 65 percent of the population does not think positively of the EU.

I realized that hundreds of questions and doubts raised by Turkish society and politicians do not get asked directly to European officials. When commenting on the PKK or Turkey, EU officials repeat the same words each time: “PKK is a terrorist organization for us.” However, their actions portray a different picture.

Two days after the PKK’s twin car-bomb attack in Istanbul killed 44 people and injured 155 on December 10, I went to a press conference at the European Commission (EC) and asked the deputy spokesperson a question that we are still unable to get an answer for. “We have recently witnessed France arresting people for browsing terrorism-linked content online. Following Saturday’s terrorist attack in Istanbul, there were dozens, or probably hundreds, of PKK supporters in Europe celebrating and glorifying the attack. Are we finally going to see Europe taking action against these people who celebrate a terrorist attack in an [EU] candidate country?” The spokesperson said these are questions the EU’s foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini would be happy to answer. However, I have still not been given the chance to raise the question.

I went on to remind the EC spokesperson that the EC’s Enlargement Commissioner Johannes Hahn had met with some pro-PKK figures. These included Faysal Sarıyıldız, an HDP deputy who is accused of supplying weapons to the PKK and entrapping security forces in a curfew held district, Tuba Hezer, who once shouldered the coffin of a PKK terrorist, and Eyüp Doru, a name with an Interpol red notice, who has been on active duty at the PKK’s Qandil headquarters for five years. “Is this the new approach towards enlargement of the EU or we are going to see steps against these terror-linked people?” I asked and questioned whether the EU is planning to enlarge with close relations with terror suspects or sit at a table with representatives from Ankara. Again, there was no answer.

The EU is not only allowing PKK propaganda at its institutions or staying silent over the PKK’s terror activities, it also demands Turkey soften its counter-terrorism laws to grant the country visa-free travel to the Schengen zone. In a sensitive time when the country fights against many branches of the PKK at home, in Syria and Iraq, European demands only further frustrate the people of Turkey. Since all the European countries have their own counter-terror laws, what exactly is it that the EU wants from Ankara? Turks are also curious whether if these European standards would allow the state to confiscate assets of terror suspects without a court verdict like here in Belgium, or if social media users will end up in jail for their supportive messages to terror groups, like we witness across many EU member states. If the answer is yes, there is not much to fuss about.

EU Council President Donald Tusk recently said that it was still difficult for Ankara to change its anti-terror laws. “I know that this is not a sign of a bad intention, but objectively they [Turkey] are in a very difficult situation,” he confessed.

The ordinary people in the street that I talk to have either very little knowledge about how the PKK ended the recent ceasefire, with an announcement on July 11, 2015 and the killing of two police officers while they were asleep in their beds on July 22, 2015. They are also unaware that so-called politicians use the terrorist organization for propaganda, even attending the commemoration ceremony of a suicide bomber. Thanks to the mainstream Western media, the biased portrayal of incidents has led PKK members sought with Interpol red-notices to carry on their propaganda at the EP.

On the other hand, the majority of the Turks in Belgium – including those of Kurdish origin who oppose the Marxist ideology of the PKK – are aware of the realities on the ground and they also seem to be losing trust in Belgium and Europe. A Turkish-Belgian man in his 60’s told me that he grew up here and some of his friends were “martyred” while digging metro tunnels in Brussels. “We have served and help to build this country for many years and we cannot understand why Belgium tolerates and supports this terrorist group.” Another question that flies into space.

Europeans need to come to their senses and think again. Just because the PKK or the DHKP-C are secularists, does not mean they can be tolerated. They kidnap children, they train and send suicide bombers to cities, they do not want to lay down arms and get into politics, they continue making money over drug trafficking. The list can continue and we may witness a time when Europeans regret their direct or indirect support to this poisonous group.

Ali Ulvi Ersoy’s caricature published on May 30, 1960 in Cumhuriyet newspaper, following the military coup of May 27, 1960 and dedicated to the Grand Turkish Army (Büyük Türk Ordusu).

As a result of the rigid perspective, all these magazines provided an intellectual basis for the execution of Menderes, the legitimate president. Humor magazines, as a representation of cultural hegemony, have moved in concert with the junta in modern Turkish history that is full of military coups and conspiracies, so much so that they produced fun and erotism-oriented publications in spite of socio-political conflicts between 1960s and 1990s. Although many scholars and politicians were murdered by unknown assailants especially in 1993, the magazines generally ignored the essential question. What is more, the 1997 military memorandum was approved by caricaturists. The hegemony war between conservatives and seculars, between nationalists and socialists, between traditionalists and reformists turned into a tense cultural segregation after AK Party was founded and Erdogan became prime minister.

Before and After 2002

Humor can understandably be an ideological and subjective providing that it makes opposition in a principle sense. The basis of the principle should be conscience, justice and courage. However, humor publications in Turkey are biased, unfair and tutelary; so much so that they have supported the military coups experienced since the late Ottoman era, also that they felt free to describe the ousted leaders as animals on account of supporting the official authority based on nationalist Kemalism. Not only Abdulhamid II, also Adnan Menderes, the elected president, who was executed by hanging was harshly criticized by humorists. They did not utter a word about militarism. Further, same attitude was continued in March 12 (1971), September 12 (1980), February 28 (1997), April 27 (2007) and even in July 15 (2016). In fact, the figure of Erdogan in the periodicals accompanies previous ousted or, at least, ‘chastened’ leaders. He was drawn as monkey, camel, cow, frog and snake and depicted as bigoted and vulgar character. He was ‘orientalistically’ associated with Hitler. Also, the AK Party supporters were stereotyped as ignorant and amorphous mass. Electoral system and even democracy was questioned whenever AK Party won the elections.

Penguen Magazine cover dated August 7, 2008. The magazine summarized a top court’s decision not to close the AK Party as “AKP was not closed, but warned” with a smiling picture of then prime-minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan with a scar on his face. The court decision did not please Penguen magazine, which always represents itself as democratic.

As for the political opposition in Turkey, they were instead sympathized. Terrorist groups such as PKK, DHKP-C and TAK were never criticized by leftist humorists dominating this field. The term “terror” was linked only to Erdogan, the State and the government. The unprincipled view can be conceptualized as “Tayyip-phobic humor”. Today, humor without Erdogan is almost impossible. The opposition made by humorists concentrated merely on his “evil” existence. He is known as the crux of every problem in Turkey, in Middle East and even in the world. The humorists, who define humor as cliché-breaker, produce rude and rigid clichés ironically themselves. What is more, some of these are indisputably Islamophobic. The magazine covers that are intolerant about religion, tradition and pedagogy are full of ‘ugly’, ‘repellent’ and ‘terrorist-like’ Muslim types. The language of the publications is mainly slang, swearing and humiliation rather than irony and lambency.

One of the deadlocks of humor publishing, not only in Turkey also in all over the world, is the ambivalence between censorship and freedom of expression. Humorists generally tend to reduce the freedom into unlimited liberty and to define the censorship as restriction of freedom. However, just as freedom does not refer to a free hand, censor is not antithesis of freedom. The concept freedom that becomes vague and gets more complicated each passing day in the contemporary culture is paradoxically is positioned in an absolute positiveness, therefore its destructive mission in the context of consumption-based worldview is ignored in some way. According to the overall impression gaining from the statements made by humorists, AK Party has dominated humor magazines and sued for damages, so much so that Turgut Çeviker, a humor historian, describes AK Party era as the most radical period in which caricaturists are suppressed and humorists are marginalized. However, considering the cases, it is easily seen that almost all of them were dismissed in favor of caricaturists. Moreover, these cases were somehow seen as a resistance mark against the political power.

Leman Magazine cover dated March 16, 2016. The cover portrays the Ankara bombings of March 13, 2016, which were claimed by the TAK terror organization, a branch of the PKK, yet the magazine redirected the blame on Erdoğan and connected the issue with the debate on presidentialism.

Humor magazines that have taken a stand against the AK Party government in every crisis and that have seen Erdogan as responsible in all local or global trouble categorize and discriminate the society. On the one hand they underline the importance of peace and solidarity in interviews, but on the other hand, with their works, they provoke the differentiations and cultural tectonic faults of contemporary Turkey as Turks and Kurds, Alevis and Sunnis and, seculars and conservatives. In this respect, we can conceptualize this non-principle approach as a “humor dictatorship”. As an indication of this approach, although they highlighted Berkin Elvin and Ali Ismail Korkmaz who lost their life during the Gezi Park protests, they said nothing about Yasin Börü and Serap Eser who killed by the PKK and its extensions. Similarly, they frequently dealt with Kobane, but never Aleppo.

Without doubt, most humorists in Turkey are not elite but elitist and they are away from the real problems of the society in which they live. Throughout the history of the republic, they have satirized civilians rather than elites, so much so that they have taken active roles in legitimizing the military tutelage against democratic regime. They have been more rigid and bigoted than even religious dogmatism despite the fact that they define themselves as creative, cliché-breaker and reformist. Hence, in the magazines, while facts give their places emotion-based ideologies, opposition turn into vulgar aggression. Since Tanzimat era, political power and cultural power are separate and even vis-a-vis. Therefore even if governments are determined by elections, the Power is mostly at the settled elitists’ hands, and more interestingly, although humor magazines that describe themselves as ‘unofficial weekly’ reproduce the discourse of those who see themselves more equal than others. In other words, just as humor magazines in Turkey stand in the heart of official history and ideology, they are not dependent upon, for and together with the society.