ANKARA - In the previous days, police performed an operation against the video activist Oktay İnce's home at dawn. Oktay İnce had made a written press statement about the operation.
Police performed an opertion to the home of İnce at dawn and confiscated his hard drives where he kept his work of 15 years. İnce made a written statement demanding his hard drives containing his work to be given back to him. İnce wrote the statement as:
“On Tuesday, Oct 16, 2018, the house of video activist and Seyri Sokak video and documentary collective member Oktay İnce was raided by the police in İzmir and 18 hard drives were confiscated, following the accusation of members of Seyri Sokak on charges of “praising terror and terrorist organizations through social media posts.’
Seyri Sokak is a video activism collective that was established during the Gezi Park resistance in 2013 by a group of video and documentary activists in Ankara.
It is a voluntary human rights-based advocacy group supporting social struggles with social media news reports and video documentation. They have a large social media presence, with over 45,000 followers on Facebook and almost 20,000 on Twitter.
The activists of the collective have often faced police violence while documenting events on the street, and they have been taken into police custody several times and are facing various legal trials and related fees. With the raid of İnce’s house, Seyri Sokak is being accused of sympathising with a terrorist organization, with the aim of punishing them and halting their work.
Last February, 2018, the documentary filmmaker and international press card holder Sibel Tekin was also taken into custody during a raid of her house in Ankara because of her retweets associated with a hashtag opposing the Turkish military assault on Afrin. Ten hard drives full of footage and photos were confiscated during this raid. There is now an ongoing criminal investigation against her because of the two tweets she posted on the issue.
Eylül Deniz Yaşar, a video-activist, is also included in the investigation of Seyri Sokak; Eylül has been taken into custody numerous times in the past for filming demonstrations. The following is a statement by Seyri Sokak collective member Oktay İnce on the events of Oct 16, 2018
On the morning of Tuesday, October 16, the police, who claimed to be part of the anti-terror unit, knocked on the door of my house in the Kemalpaşa neighborhood of İzmir. They had a search warrant issued by the court regarding “terrorist organization propaganda”. The warrant ordered the seizure of all digital materials and my mobile phone on the premise that I might have shared twotweets on the twitter account of Seyri Sokak Video and Documentary Collective. I have spent the last twenty years of my life as a human rights defender and video activist, making news, documentaries and video art as part of the Karahaber Video Activism Collective and the Seyri Sokak Video and Documentary Collective. Over the last twenty years, our primary objective has been to create a visual archive of the social struggles of the oppressed in Turkey and to support their struggles. To this end, we have produced numerous news, documentary and campaign videos, organised video workshops, exhibitions and public screenings. The police seized the master copies of my news and documentary videos that were stored in 18 hard drives and 41 dvds at my place. Along with those fully edited works, they filled their bags with the raw footage of at least five other documentaries waiting to be edited and took them away under the pretense of forensic analysis. The eyewitness videos of the most important issues of Turkey’s social struggles, including LGBT and women’s rights movements, workers’ and public employees’ struggles, and students’ movements, were thrown into the same bags. Personal and private videos and photographs of our family, including the ones we have taken since the birth of our four-year-old daughter, were also taken away to rot on the shelves of police station, as part of their investigation related to the terrorism charges.
Even though according to Turkish law, digital material should be copied in situ and the originals should be left with the owner, we were subjected to the cruelty of forcible seizure in defiance of the country’s own laws. Erdoğan’s administration has either bought out the mass media or oppressively silenced it. Now, they want to silence the social media channels, the only outlet where the oppressed can voice their dissent, and to stop people from posting tweets criticising Erdoğan’s administration. Using two tweets to accuse Seyri Sokak of being a “terrorist organisation”, is merely an excuse to silence documentary filmmakers, video and news activists. We won’t be silenced, We cannot be silenced. I want my videos, footage and writings back immediately."