Turkish police have censored the latest edition of LeMan, Istanbul’s radical comic weekly.
Will this incident — and the ongoing crackdown on media, academia, and officialdom following the botched coup of July 15 — deter Turkey’s clique of opposition cartoonists?
“We stir things up,” LeMan editor Tuncay Akgün told me in late June.
Since he co-founded the magazine in 1991, LeMan has produced bold and politically savvy comic art. But being a cartoonist in Turkey in 2016 — irrespective of current events — is more difficult than ever. For instance, LeMan is fighting a lawsuit in response to a cover of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It is just one of the myriad legal attacks that the president’s supporters have brought against humorists in the recent period.
Tuncay Akgün at LeMan’s headquarters / 30 June 2016
LeMan posted its new cover online last night, but since then authorities halted its printing.
Perhaps that is because the cover in question points to conspiracy. LeMan not so subtly suggests that the hidden hands of President Erdogan’s regime are responsible for the bloody events of last week.
“I bet on the soldiers,” says the man who pushes the timid military men toward confrontation. Another man in a suit edges a handful of angry citizens toward the uniformed pawns, saying, “Good, then I’ll put my 50 percent on the people.” That’s a reference to Erdogan’s remark during the 2013 Gezi protests, in which he cited the AK Party’s electoral mandate (50 percent in the 2011 balloting) amid street demonstrations against his authoritarian policies.
Detail of the censored cover.
We might look to how Turkey’s comic artists operated three decades ago, in the aftermath of the military’s successful yet bloody overthrow of the government, as we consider how Erdogan’s government will react to radical satire.
After the 1980 coup, authorities shut down the notorious comic magazine GirGir, which at the time had a circulation of about 500,000. The reason for the closure: “allegedly mocking Turkish national identity with a cartoon of the Turkish flag on the naked body of a popular singer,” according to scholar Asli Tunç.
A month later, however, GirGir, was up and running, lampooning the military government and its overreach. No doubt GirGir’s perseverance in the face of a clampdown on dissent galvanized a generation of Turkish comic artists, like Akgün, who today are the top artists and editors of the country’s vibrant illustrated, satirical press.
“We have continued the tradition,” Akgün told me.
LeMan has attributed the censorship of its coup issue to its history of publishing caricatures and covers of Fethullah Gülen, the U.S.-based cleric whom Erdogan has blamed the coup on. But we may never know what else was inside the special issue.
That has not stopped LeMan from releasing this week’s regularly scheduled issue. The July 20th edition, like almost every comic published across the world this week, features a gag about Pokémon Go—except this one is rather dark.
On the left, youths are hunting for Pokémon. On the right, thugs are hunting for so-called opponents of the regime. (Since Friday, mobs celebrating Erdogan’s victory over the putschists have attacked Alevi and Kurdish neighborhoods in Istanbul, and burned down a Syrian-owned shop in Ankara.)
“Good luck youngsters!” say the thugs. “There seem to be many Pokémons in the park over there. Any Alevis or Syrians in that direction?“
"We haven’t seen any, bro,” say the youths. “Good luck to you guys too!”
And, we might add, good luck to Tuncay Akgün and his colleagues at LeMan.
Many thanks to Yasemin Ergin for translation help.
Previous posts on Turkey here here here and here.
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