Can there be any winner?

The Gırgır magazine of the ’70s and ’80s, under the leadership of the late Oğuz Aral, was a masterpiece of political satire disguised as a comic weekly. Not only did it help the Turks, particularly in the aftermath of the 1980 coup, release their anger, it was at the same one of the basic educational tools to keep Turks in politics at a time when there was a massive depoliticization campaign during which the military regime banished hundreds of professors from universities, put thousands of young people behind bars and ended the lives of many young people at the gallows.

While almost the entire country hypocritically applauded the military regime, it was this magazine that dared to level criticism, disguised in the form of cartoons. Still, it faced oppression from time to time but lived to reach its golden era and became the country’s number one and one of the world’s most prominent cartoon magazines with a circulation of well over 1 million copies a week.

Gırgır, again, was perhaps the staunchest critic of the late Turgut Özal administration. For a long time the magazine had indexed its price to something like TL 10,000 = 1 Özal head, and when it became TL 50,000 its masthead showed the magazine price to be 5 Özals = TL 50,000. Özal, of course, was not happy with the criticism, like any of our past political leaders, but was cultured enough to accept humor and indeed was tolerant toward the cartoons, not only in Gırgır but throughout the Turkish media.

One way of overcoming cases against the press, on the other hand, was to exceed the statute of limitations, which was six months in the past but which has been shortened to 60 days with the latest reforms in the laws governing trial procedures.

Only yesterday Cumhuriyet cartoonist Musa Kart and Sakarya newspaper’s editor Hakkı Sağlam were acquitted by an Eskişehir court on grounds that the 60-day period had expired, and the case was automatically dropped. The two were facing court over reproduction of a cartoon created by Kart — sentenced earlier to a high fine of YTL 5,000 — in the local Sakarya newspaper.

The acquittal of the two, however, did not mean an end to the intolerance of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to criticism. The case against Penguen — which placed the head of Erdoğan on a variety of eight animals — is still ongoing.

Many other court cases against newspapers will follow after the new penal code enters into force within days. But for God’s sake, can there be any winner in the premier’s vendetta against the press? Does he think Turkey will become a better country if the press stops criticizing him?