Former Miss Turkey Merve
Buyuksarac speaks to The Associated Press in Istanbul, Turkey.
A court on
Tuesday, May 31, 2016 convicted a former Miss Turkey of insulting President
Recep Tayyip Erdogan through social media postings and gave her a 14-month
suspended sentence, amid deepening concerns that the country is swaying toward
an increasingly authoritarian form of rule.
Welcome to the New Turkey,
where people can get locked up for saying something critical of President Recep
Tayyip Erdoğan.
When the AKP came to power in
the early 2000s, Western liberals claimed the party's leader, Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan, was pro-democracy. He was supposed to be enlightened; an innocent
Islamic version of a Christian Democrat.
An Istanbul court convicts a
former Miss Turkey of insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan through social
media postings and gives her a 14-month suspended sentence.
The court finds 27-year-old
model Merve Buyuksarac guilty of insulting a public official but immediately
suspends the sentence on condition that she does not re-offend within the next
five years.
Back in 2014, Buyuksarac (who
now goes by her married name of Ciner) shared a satirical poem on her Instagram
page that prosecutors deemed "insulting" to Erdoğan. The young
lady denied it was meant as an insult to the man, who was then still prime
minister, but the prosecutors couldn't care less. She had written something
that could, with some creativity, be constructed as criticism of Turkey's
glorious leader.
The good news is that the
former beauty queen won't have to go to prison yet. The
bad news: she has lost the freedom to speak her mind.
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