LETTER FROM ISTANBUL
Timur Soykan practices his profession in the noblest way possible: disturbing. Freelance daily journalist BirGün, he has spent the last few years specializing in mafia networks and organized crime. In a country where the practice of the profession is increasingly corseted by an impressive legal arsenal, collecting and bringing to light the testimonies and practices of men in the shadows on the sensitive issue of trafficking is a challenge.
With his slender, elegant silhouette – and a face all in angles –, standing on the sets of television shows, there is in this investigative journalist Don Quixote. His investigations provoke and jostle, they are in his image, without artifice or twists of style. It was he who exposed the growing hold of foreign criminal groups in Turkey. He documented the violence of the Caucasian mafias established over the past ten years, put his finger on how the Balkans became the backyard of the Turkish mafia, how also the networks of the underworld were restructured.
Timur Soykan wrote about clashes between Azerbaijani clans, Serbo-Montenegrin gangs, Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta networks. Trafficking in cocaine, heroin too, and the possibilities of money laundering that Turkey holds.
He described networks of corruption up to the highest authorities in the country. He even made a book of it, a sort of investigative novel, entitled Baronlar Savasi (“La guerre des barons”, Kirmizikedi, 2020, untranslated), based on real events. Written from testimonies, legal documents and interviews, the book highlights the incestuous relations that the state maintains with mafia gangs, a recurring problem in Turkey, making this country “the Mexico of Europe”underlines the author.
political bomb
At the beginning of December 2022, he is at the origin of the affair which still shakes the country today. Two articles, published in quick succession, reveal a reported forced marriage of a 6-year-old child. Daughter of the head of the religious foundation Hiranur Vakfi, attached to the powerful Ismailaga brotherhood, she accuses her father of having married her religiously in her childhood to a 29-year-old disciple, in the early 2000s. To the journalist she explains that she suffered since then sexual abuse.
A few months before crucial elections, history has the effect of a political bomb. It sheds harsh light on the worrying impunity of the brotherhoods, and revives the debate on the protection enjoyed by religious circles close to power. Timur Soykan was accused of insulting Islam. He was the subject of lynching on social networks, some evoking a manipulation of the age of the girl. But facts are stubborn. The investigator even drove the point home with an equally disturbing third piece of paper.
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