BBC’s Mark Lowen on being deported from Turkey- QHN

I had just sent my family a message saying how happy I was to be back in Turkey, where I used to live, and how it felt like coming home. Then, the phone in my hotel room rang.

“We have an urgent matter to discuss in person,” the receptionist said. “Could you come down?”

I arrived to find three plain-clothes policemen waiting for me. They asked me for my passport and led me away, trying to prevent my colleagues from filming.

I had been in Istanbul for three days by then, covering the anti-government protests sparked by the arrest of the city’s mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu.

I was taken first to the police headquarters and held for seven hours. Two colleagues were allowed to be present and lawyers could come in to talk. The atmosphere was generally cordial. Some of the police officers told me they didn’t agree with what they said was a state decision. One hugged me and said he hoped for my freedom.

At 9.30pm, I was moved to the foreigners’ custody unit of the Istanbul police. There, the atmosphere hardened from a succession of chain-smoking officers, with whom I had to negotiate in my broken Turkish. I was fingerprinted and denied access to lawyers or any contact with the outside world.

In the early hours of Thursday, I was presented with papers to say I was being deported for being “a threat to public order”. When I asked for an explanation, they said it was a government decision.

One police officer suggested he film me saying that I was leaving Turkey of my own accord, which could help me to return in the future and which he could show his bosses. I politely refused, suspecting it would be given to the government-controlled media to push their version of events.

By 2.30am, I was being moved to a final location – the foreigners’ custody department at the airport. I was put in a room with a few rows of hard chairs and told I could sleep there. Between police officers entering to brush their teeth, planes taking off and the morning call to prayer, no sleep came.

Seventeen hours after my initial detention, I was driven to a waiting plane to board a one-way flight to London. That night, after the case was made public, sparking significant media coverage around the world, the Turkish government press office released a statement saying I had lacked the correct accreditation. At no point had they mentioned this during my detention and it seemed clear that it was an afterthought on their part to attempt to justify my case.

I was never mistreated at any point during the ordeal. And I knew throughout that BBC management and the British Consulate in Istanbul were working hard to secure my release.

So many others who have fallen foul of the Turkish authorities do not have such a safety net. When I lived there as the BBC Istanbul correspondent between 2014 and 2019, Turkey was the world’s biggest jailer of journalists. The watchdog Reporters Without Borders ranks Turkey 158th of 180 countries in the Press Freedom Index. Since these latest protests began, eleven journalists are among the two thousand or so people who have been detained.

The latest unrest was sparked by the arrest of Ekrem Imamoglu, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s main political rival, whom opinion polls suggest could unseat the President in an election.

But they have grown into something much wider: a clamour for democracy in a country sliding further into authoritarianism. The clampdown on the media is central to that trajectory, as the government has progressively crushed criticism or debate. I caught a glimpse of that first hand. It ended for me with sadness and sleeplessness. For others, it’s been so much worse.

Meanwhile, President Erdogan is digging in, dismissing the protests as “street terrorism”. He’s emboldened by the current international climate of having an ally in the White House and of Turkey’s importance to everything from Ukraine to Syria.

The question now is whether the country’s biggest demonstrations in over a decade can sustain momentum or whether Turkey’s long-time leader can simply brush this off. Those out on the street may be chanting “enough” – but they also know never to write off Recep Tayyip Erdogan.