The Guardian / UK: A Dutch journalist was blocked from leaving Turkey on Sunday following her arrest on Saturday night for tweets deemed critical of the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
“Police at the door. No joke,” wrote Ebru Umar on her Twitter account.
Umar, a well-known atheist and feminist journalist of Turkish origin, recently wrote a piece criticising Erdoğan for the Dutch daily Metro, extracts of which she then tweeted, leading to her arrest. After her arrest in the resort town of Kusadasi in western Turkey, where she was on holiday, Dutch officials said, she was brought before a judge.
She later said she was “free but forbidden to leave the country”.
Dutch blog Geenstijl said it received a message from Umar saying that she had been arrested after someone reported her tweets on a hotline set up by Turkish officials.
A political storm erupted this week over reports that the Turkish consulate asked Turkish organisations in the Netherlands to forward emails and social media posts that insult Erdoğan or Turkey.
The Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, said he would ask Ankara to clarify the call, saying it was not clear what the Turkish government aimed to achieve. The Turkish consulate said the note was sent by a consular official who used an “unfortunate choice of words” that was misinterpreted.
Umar had written about the row in her article. She compared the consulate’s call to “NSB practices”, a reference to the Dutch branch of the Nazi party before and during the second world war.
Umar’s Twitter feed showed she had recently engaged in spirited exchanges with her critics and reposted a tweet from someone claiming to have reported her to the police.
Insulting the president is a crime in Turkey punishable by up to four years in jail, but the law has rarely been invoked. Since Erdoğan became president in 2014, prosecutors have opened more than 1,800 cases against people for insulting him, the justice minister said last month.
Rutte said in a tweet that he “had had contact with @umarebru last night. Our embassy is in close contact with her for assistance.”
The Dutch education minister, Jet Bussemaker, told Dutch WNL television: “It is absurd that you can be arrested for a tweet.”
Born in The Hague to Turkish parents, Umar has been an outspoken critic of militant Islam, first in columns for the website of Theo van Gogh, who was murdered by a radical Islamist in 2004 after making films critical of the religion.
Her case follows outrage in Germany after the government there gave a green light for authorities to begin criminal proceedings against popular comic Jan Böhmermann for performing a satirical poem about Erdoğan.
Last year, Turkey deported another Dutch journalist after she was arrested on suspicion of aiding Kurdish militants. Frederike Geerdink was detained in September 2015 during clashes between PKK rebels and Turkish security forces.
It was the second time she had been taken into custody: in April, Geerdink had been put on trial on charges of spreading “terrorist propaganda” for the PKK but was then acquitted.
“Thinking of dutch columnist @umarebru, now locked up in a kusadasi police station. Utter disgrace,” she tweeted.
Earlier this week, a German reporter was detained at an Istanbul airport and sent back to Cairo where he is based. A day later, authorities denied entry into Turkey for Russian news agency Sputnik’s Istanbul-based general manager.
