Turkish authorities have blocked KHK TV’s YouTube channel and X account for the second time, just three months after the Constitutional Court ordered the platform restored on grounds of the right to freedom of expression.
According to the TR724 news website, the channel, which has roughly 103,000 subscribers, had been unblocked following the court’s finding that the earlier ban violated constitutional free speech protections. Authorities have now reimposed the restriction without explanation while also shutting down the outlet’s second X account. The first, which had 80,000 followers, was blocked a year ago.
KHK TV was founded in 2019 by public sector workers dismissed through emergency decree powers, known as KHKs, following a 2016 coup attempt. Many were removed over alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement. Those dismissed largely denied the accusations, and the outlet documents their accounts.
Turkey experienced a controversial military coup attempt on the night of July 15, 2016, which, according to many, was a false flag operation aimed at entrenching the authoritarian rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan by rooting out dissidents and eliminating powerful actors such as the military in his desire for absolute power.
Erdoğan has targeted followers of the Gülen movement, inspired by the late Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, since corruption investigations in December 2013 implicated him as well as some members of his family and inner circle. He dismissed the probes as a Gülenist conspiracy and later designated the movement as a terrorist organization in May 2016, intensifying a sweeping crackdown after the failed coup in July of the same year that he accused Gülen of orchestrating. The movement denies involvement in the coup attempt or any terrorist activity
Journalist Ahmet Erkan, one of the channel’s managers, condemned the latest action. “There is not a single threat to the security of the state or the nation in KHK TV’s content,” Erkan said. “There is no terrorism, no violence, no insult, no slander. Only the stories of people who have been unlawfully accused and victimized. Is this how a state governed by rule of law operates?”
Erkan confirmed the channel’s YouTube presence had now been cut off twice. The first block came in February 2020 and was lifted only after the Constitutional Court issued its violation ruling. That ruling has now been effectively disregarded.
Following the coup attempt, the Turkish government declared a state of emergency (OHAL) that remained in effect until July 19, 2018. During this period, the government carried out a purge of state institutions under the pretext of an anti-coup fight by issuing a number of government decrees. Over 130,000 public servants, including 4,156 judges and prosecutors, as well as more than 24,000 members of the armed forces were summarily removed from their jobs for alleged membership in or relationships with “terrorist organizations” by emergency decree-laws subject to neither judicial nor parliamentary scrutiny.
Former public servants were not only fired from their jobs but also banned from working again in the public sector and getting a passport to seek employment abroad. The government also made it difficult for them to work formally in the private sector. Notes were put on the social security database about dismissed public servants to deter potential employers.
As a result, many purge victims have had to work in uninsured jobs with very little workplace safety. There have also been several cases where former public servants have died due to occupational accidents in physically demanding jobs.
In recent years, some of the people fired have been reinstated, yet this process has often come too late. Numerous cases have surfaced where dismissed individuals, facing severe emotional and financial strain, have died by suicide or otherwise passed away before their reinstatement.
