President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan‘s notorious intolerance for dissent was brazenly exported to the streets of the American capital, as his personal security detail physically and verbally assaulted journalists and protesters outside a prestigious Washington think tank. The incident provided a shocking, firsthand look at the brutal tactics used to silence critics in Turkey, now deployed on US soil.
The confrontations erupted as Erdoğan prepared to speak at the Brookings Institution. His bodyguards, exhibiting the same aggression seen on the streets of Istanbul and Ankara, moved to suppress any form of protest.
Amberin Zaman, a respected Turkish journalist with the Woodrow Wilson Center, was targeted by one of Erdoğan’s guards, who screamed that she was a “PKK whore” simply for standing in a public space. This crude and defamatory language, often used by pro-government circles to delegitimize any critic, was suddenly echoing through the heart of Washington D.C.
This Erdogan security detail called me “a pkk whore”
For standing in the driveway of @BrookingsInst pic.twitter.com/jMxwcG1ftd— Amberin Zaman (@amberinzaman) March 31, 2016
The presidential guards’ actions quickly escalated, leading to physical altercations as they manhandled and shoved journalists and protesters. The scene became so chaotic that local police were forced to intervene, not against the protesters, but against Erdoğan’s security team.
In a stark display of the clash between democratic norms and authoritarian impulses, one US police officer was reported by Foreign Policy magazine to have admonished the Turkish guards directly: “You’re part of the problem, you guys need to control yourselves and let these people protest.”
This brazen assault in a foreign capital is not an isolated incident but a direct extension of Erdoğan’s ever-tightening grip on power at home. His government is infamous for its war on critical media, a campaign that has seen the hostile takeover and shuttering of major newspapers and the imprisonment of countless journalists.
The events in Washington send a chilling message: the Turkish government’s campaign to silence the press is no longer confined by its own borders. For critics of Erdoğan, it seems there is no safe haven, not even in the capital of the United States.
