The free press has been revealing the truth with more than 50 newspapers, radios, news agencies, magazines in order to be the voice of the people in the face of of the sovereigns for 33 years. We would have liked to work in newspapers, broadcasting agencies and radios that meet with the public every day with the same name, but it didn't work. It didn't matter who was in power; they closed our agencies, bombed our offices, we established new ones with new names, we repoted the truth in the same spirit. We existed, we exist and we will exist to report the truth in the headlines of our newspapers, which they are trying to close down every day. The governments changed and the new government took their places. They pressured the free press in line with the conjuncture, but we did not hesitate to defend the truth.
Dicle News Agency (DİHA), which started its publishing life on April 4, 2002 with the slogan "No concessions from the truth" and has radically intervened in the perception of the press in Turkey in 14 years, has become a brand, was closed on October 30, 2016 with a Decree of Law (KHK) of the AKP government.
Not long after, on November 14, 2016 dihaber started its broadcasting life with the slogan "The truth will not stay in the dark" against the darkness of the State of Emergency (OHAL) and the Decree-Laws (KHK). Just like DİHA, dihaber was closed with the Decree No. 693, which was issued on August 25, 2017 in the darkest hour of the night. The government, which tried to survive with the state of emergency and decree laws, could only endure the efforts of dihaber to reveal the truth for 9 and a half months. However, the government did not get tired of shutting down news agencies, and journalists from the tradition of free press did not get tired of conveying the truth to the public.
We are journalists, who want to keep the public informed, soon came together and established the Mesopotamia Agency (MA) together with people on September 20, 2017. At a time when the society wanted to be completely plunged into darkness, the followers of the tradition of the free press became a new light in the darkness with its news stories.
We have completed our 4 years and today, when we started our 5th year, we see that the government that wants to surrender us to the darkness is not as strong and capable as the day we started broadcasting. We are even stronger by adding 33 years of experience to our 5 years because we are the comrades of journalists who do not hesitate to reveal the truth like Gurbetelli, Apê Musa, Hrant, Ferhat, Orhan, Safyettin, Cengiz, Metin, Nujiyan, Deniz, Agiri, Rizgar and Mazlum...
Since the day we started broadcasting, access to our website has been blocked 34 times. Due to the request of the government, our approved facebook pages were closed, restrictions were imposed on our social media accounts, the cameras of our reporters were confiscated, or broken by the police. Dozens of our reporters were detained, arrested, threatened, insulted, and new cases were added to the ongoing cases against them every day. But the Mesopotamia Agency did not take a single step back. We continued to write news stories that had an influence not only in Turkey, but worldwide.
The public learned about the bodies of Kurds were sent to their families by post, the bones of the sons and daughters of Kurdistan were removed from the cemeteries and buried under the pavements, the Kurdish children banned from speaking Kurdish among themselves in primary schools, the prostitution organisations in tent cities were established for Syrians, the AKP MP İbrahim Halil Yıldız family killed the Şenyaşar family, Suruç and Ankara massacres and the statements of ISIS describing the burning of 2 Turkish soldiers, the Kurdish families and workers who were attacked, lynched and killed in westerm provinces of Turkey where they went to work because they were Kurds, the expensive cell phones confiscated by the police and given to their wives as gifts, the bribery wheels and corruption of the trustees appointed to the HDP municipalities, villagers thrown from helicopters, deaths of prisoners disguised as suicides in prisons, refugees lost on migration routes and thrown into rivers, village raids by soldiers who tortured the villagers during raids, deforestation in Kurdistan, Turkish police using armored vehicle as weapons and crush people to death, the policy of impunity in cases where the perpetrator is a police officer or a soldier, the electricity persecution of Diyarbakır electricity company, the exploited workers, the massacres of women, the father who received the bones of his child in a box in the courthouse, and countless other news that set the agenda were learnt from the Mesopotamia Agency.
Mezopotamya Agency, which broadcasts in Kurdish, Turkish and English, continues to write its free press story. Thank you, our dear followers, for making us feel that we are not alone.
Mesopotamia Agency (MA)