The video footage of Turkish journalist Cüneyt Ünal who went missing in Syria has been broadcast on a Syrian national television channel.
Anyone who speaks Turkish can easily understand that Ünal was forced to memorize the prepared testimony, probably under torture.
The Assad regime used another ruse to portray Ünal as a "terrorist" by broadcasting a photo of him holding a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.
Of course, these are blunt lies. Lies that we got used to hear from the Syrian government...
Ünal's wife says that his picture is photoshopped and he went to Syria as a freelance journalist with nothing but his camera equipment to earn some money for their newborn baby.
Although Ünal recently started to work as a freelancer, he had already earned reputation as a great cameraman who could find hundreds of colleagues to go bail for him.
Just last year, he was awarded with the most precious prize of videojournalism in Turkey, thanks to his work in Libyan civil war.
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All journalism organizations in Turkey, as well as the International Press Institute, have called for Ünal's release, emphasized that journalists are not terrorists and the Syrian regime will be hold to account about his well-being.
Unfortunately, Ünal's case is also related to the wrong policies of the Turkish government.
After all, this is the government that drove Turkey to the Middle East hellhole with its Neo-Ottoman dreams, turning its back to the European Union, which has been the policy goal since the foundation of the Republic.
And, maybe worse, this is the government that arrested almost two hundred journalists in the last two years, one of them being Nedim Sener, who spent more than a year behind prison bars as an alleged terrorist.
Like Ünal, Sener is also an awarded journalist. Ultimately, he is a World Press Freedom Hero of the International Press Institute.
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"This regime labels a cameraman as a terrorist. Such a regime could also label the opposition as terrorist. For this regime, anyone who raised his voice against its oppression is either a terrorist or an Israeli agent," Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said today.
Sadly, these words define the Turkish government, too, considering more than eighty journalists who are still in Turkish prisons, while many of them standing trial as alleged "terrorists."
To conclude, I wish that Ünal will be free and Syria will have democracy as soon as possible.
And I also wish that Turkey will have a much better democracy with no journalists in jails.
PS: If Davutoglu had not uttered the words I quoted, I wouldn't talk about this parallelism out of respect to Ünal. But after hearing these words, being silent about the jailed journalists in Turkey would be a bigger shame. I can't help but speak out when I see hypocrisy.
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