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Turkey blocks access to YouTube

27 March 2014 18:24 (UTC +04:00)

The move to ban YouTube, a government decision rather than the result of a court order, comes as political tensions heighten in the country ahead of local elections that prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan depicts as a virtual referendum on his rule.

Mr Erdogan last week personally took the decision to ban Twitter in Turkey after the microblogging platform was used to distribute corruption allegations against his government – a decision that the US has described as the 21st century equivalent of book-burning and which has been widely condemned internationally.

But Thursday’s leak on YouTube appeared to be even more incendiary than previous releases of seemingly incriminating conversations between Mr Erdogan and his circle, some of which the prime minister says were faked.

“Circulating national security conversations is dishonest,” the prime minister said in a speech on Thursday afternoon.

In the latest tape, which appears to have been recorded this month, Hakan Fidan, Turkey’s spy chief, and Ahmet Davutoglu, foreign minister, appear to discuss how to establish grounds for a military intervention in Syria.

The Turkish foreign ministry said some parts of the recording – which it labelled “a treacherous attack” – had been tampered with.

It added: “Monitoring a top secret place such as the office of the foreign minister, where the most sensitive issues are considered, and releasing it to the public is a cowardly attack against Turkey’s national security, an espionage activity and an extremely serious crime.”

Turkey, which on Sunday shot down a Syrian fighter jet the armed forces said had crossed over Turkish airspace, is just three days away from nationwide local elections. Opposition leaders have accused Mr Erdogan of seeking a conflict with Syria as a diversionary tactic from the corruption allegations.

Mr Erdogan has denied all such allegations.

His supporters add that the latest recording shows that the prime minister’s enemies in the movement of Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic ally with followers throughout the Turkish state, have acquired almost unlimited ability to record personal conversations in the country and are acting as a hostile spy network.

Mr Gulen has denied any connection to the leaks or to the wider corruption inquiry Mr Erdogan depicts as a coup by the Gulenist movement.

Meanwhile, Mr Erdogan has been accused by leading Turkish lawyers of violating the rule of law – not least because of the Twitter ban, which remains in place even though an Ankara court ruled on Wednesday that it was illegal. An Istanbul court rejected a separate appeal by Twitter on Thursday.

The prime minister has also moved thousands of police officers to derail the corruption inquiry and to rid the service of Gulenists, while hundreds of prosecutors and judges have also been shifted.

But the fact that the latest recording appears to refer to recent events indicates that Mr Erdogan’s foes still have access to some of the most intimate secrets of the state. Another leaked recording this week appeared to have been made from a computer belonging one of Mr Erdogan’s staff and was even accompanied by a shot of the prime minister apparently made by the computer’s camera.