Nathan Shachar: Joakim Medin brought to Turkey’s Lubja

The following year, when the Silivrifangelset was renamed the Marmaraian, it was an attempt to raise its unlucky reputation. The giant facility where journalist Joakim Medin has now been taken is considered Europe’s largest.

Silivri, by Turkish human rights activists sometimes called Lubjanka, after KGB’s notorious headquarters in Moscow, is the flagship of the Turkish prison system’s huge expansion under the leadership of the AKP Party. When the prison was built in 2008, it had eight closed institutions and one open, and was able to accommodate 11,000 prisoners. In 2014, the prison was expanded and currently covers over 100 hectares just west of the city of Silivri on the European’s European page, seven miles west of Istanbul. In connection with the prison there is also a hospital as well as courtrooms where a number of the most disputed legal processes of the last decade have taken place. In Silivri, since 2017, the country’s most well -known political prisoner, the philanthropist Osman Kavala.

At the end of 2013, Prime Minister (currently president) recovered Recep Tayyip Erdogan in open conflict with the Gülen movement, which has so far been his allies. The Gülenists, who checked the police and the judiciary, had arranged rail trials against Erdogan’s opponents. After the break, the need for prison places rose as Erdogan cleared Gülenists from the state apparatus. After the military coup attempt in 2016, where Gülenists played an important role, the need became acute. Turkey today has close to 400,000 detainees, many thousands of political prisoners.

The legal authorities know that Medin has had nothing to do with terrorism. But it is almost a routine thing to stamp citizens and journalists who are arrested during unrest.

Medin is not the first Swedish writer held in Silivri. One of the victims for the purges after the coup attempt in 2016 was the Swedish -Turkish academic and journalist Sahin Alpay. He was a social democrat, not a gülenist, but had written a column in Gülenists’ newspaper Zaman. Alpay was accused of trying to overthrow the elected government with weapons power. After almost two years in Silivri, he was put in house arrest 2018.

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