the weekend, there could be quite a bit of cloud around, some drizzly showers, fog and frost, but not a lot of rain is in the forecast. welcome to hardtalk, i'm stephen sackur. the earthquakes that rocked southern turkey in early february not only caused a humanitarian disaster, they exposed cracks in president erdogan�*s carefully crafted image as turkey's indispensable leader. amid the ruined cities, and the anguish of millions of displaced people, basic government competence is being tested.

my guest is long standing erdogan critic, the exiled turkish writer ece temelkuran. a presidential election is looming. does the opposition have what it takes to end the erdogan era? ece temelkuran, welcome to hardtalk. thank you, stephen. your country is grappling with a humanitarian crisis of unimaginable scale. the death toll has now passed well past 40,000, millions are displaced, and the government is saying that this is a time for

national unity and solidarity. for you as a very prominent critic of president erdogan, can you at least share that sentiment? well, there is a national unity. unfortunately, the government is out of this unity. they have to connect with people right now, because most of the people, well, i can say millions of people, are feeling like they are trying to help the victims of the earthquake despite the government. despite the regime's strong hand, who is trying to do everything on their own? how can you say that, when we all see the turkish emergency services on the scene across the south of the country, which has been devastated? we, indeed, see president erdogan himself making a point of going there, embracing those who have suffered, victims of the quake, the homeless. his signal to the nation is clear. i am in control.

for the first 48 hours there was no proper help in that area. nobody could really reach that area from the government. and the most important thing i heard on tv, and this is on the mainstream channel mind you, and we all know that turkey's mainstream media, 95% of it, at least, has been controlled by government. and on the mainstream media, there were journalists... there was a journalist who said that, "i entered the city," hatay, one of the cities, hit hardest, and he said that, "there was no one." "it was all dark." "and i walked on my tiptoes because there were so many people shouting, asking for help from under the rubble."

"and i had to be so silent so they don't ask for help from me." "i was ashamed," he said. that's important, because there needs to be a full accounting of those early days, but here we sit, more than two weeks after those terrible quakes, and things are moving. for example, the turkish government has an emergency plan, hang on, let me finish, an emergency plan to shift millions of displaced people away from the quake zone. and indeed, they've told all university students to leave campus because all of the nation's university campuses are going to be opened up to those homeless people. there is, indeed, a state of emergency across the country. i mean, this is action. this isn'tjust words. government was so meticulously doing everything wrong. i mean, it was as if they decided to do everything wrong. you know, they decided to evacuate all the city students overnight and they didn't even tell them. so, overnight, thousands of students who had nowhere else to go were emptied from their dormitories, from their places, so that the earthquake victims could come, whereas there

were many other places that were listed by the civilians that the earthquake victims could go. and those... the situation in towns and cities across the south is still terrible, but, nonetheless, if i may, tone is important in the debate within turkey about how to best respond. you have used extraordinarily powerful, passionate, some would say, perhaps, dangerous words. you've talked about the jackals in government working tirelessly with the full power of their propaganda in the wake of the quake. you've called the government response notjust shameful, but you've actually used the word evil. is that helpful to turkey? it is, because it is the truth. and somebody has to tell the truth. and there are many people, right at this second, despite the fear caused by the government, despite the oppression,

they are telling the truth. and this is not only me telling this. thousands of people, normal people, apolitical people, even akp supporters sometimes, they go on mainstream media, which is unprecedented in turkey, and they say the truth. and this is a time when, you know, truth sort of cracks, you know, breaks the wall of fear in turkey. this is a time when human dignity prevails over the fear because the fear is real. you can be imprisoned, you can be exiled, you can be whatever. you can be jobless, you can lose everything. and despite that fear, since people lost their everything during this earthquake and in the aftermath, they are now telling the truth. and this is important because mainstream media has been controlled strictly by erdogan. and on the night of the earthquake, you know, after one day when people were calling help, for help, under the rubble,

why are twitter, why are social media? there was a direct order from the palace, from erdogan, to shut down twitter. 0h, excuse me. it wasn't shut down. it was the bandwidth was decreased to i%. i want to begin, though, if we're going to talk politics, and we have to talk politics because, despite the fact that the first priority is the humanitarian catastrophe still unfolding, we have to talk about the political fallout as well. turkey was due to elect a new president in just a few months. 0riginally, it was going to bejune. erdogan, injanuary, declared that he wanted to move the election forward to may. as a prominent voice in the opposition, albeit in exile right now, do you believe that that election could, should, take place on may 14? leaving aside the debate about exile, i don't like that word, but... and it's also embarrassing to talk about real politic at this point when thousands are dying, but i will because, yes, this is the time to speak about, to talk politics, because these people,

most of them, died not only because of a natural disaster, but because of the corruption, because of the wrongdoings of this government. so, the election. you know that the government will accuse you of blatant and, to use your word, shameful opportunism in playing politics with a death toll that is now well beyond 40,000. all this time, especially 2000, since 2016, i tried to do the criticism on the level of system. i mean, like, i try to do it as a political thinker, as a political theory in terms of political theory. but now, after what happened, especially that night when the twitter was shut down, when all of us were trying to reach the people under the rubble, yeah, i'm kind of crossing my red lines as well. so, let's get back to the basic question. for you, should the election still take place on may 14th? of course.

do you think it will? huh. that's a good question. and, you know, since the country is run by only one man, and since the destiny of the country is unfortunately between the lips of that man... well, we are hoping and we are working for it. many people are working for it. the quake does present challenges for the opposition to the erdogan government as well as to the president himself. 0ne challenge is, does this make any difference to the calculation that the opposition appeared to be making that they were going to present one united candidate from at least the six main opposition parties? there was going to be one person to represent them to fight erdogan in the presidential election. do you think that sort of opposition unity can be maintained? should be maintained? that is the will of the majority at this point. how do you know? well, i come from that country. that's why i know, because many people, especially

after the earthquake, are now aware that this might be the last election that turkey is seeing. last so—called semi—democratic election. so ,that is why many people, without raising their voice, sometimes, but many people know that this is our last chance. there are, it seems to me, two key political figures in the opposition who could represent the opposition in a fight against erdogan. one is the main opposition party leader, mr kilicdaroglu. the other is, of course, the mayor of istanbul, mr imamoglu, who actually has been convicted of a crime. thich means he is facing a almost three year prison sentence, albeit he is appealing... stephen, i'm like, who isn't convicted in turkey? so, yeah, he's one of them. he's out on appeal, but he does face that sentence, and he also

faces the possibility he'll be barred from politics for the duration of that sentence. so, is he a credible candidate? i think right now what they are trying to do, this coalition, is to come together to form a programme rather than push the leader. and the leader, i'm not sure the leader, who is the leader, will be so important in this case. yes, it is important, of course... really? in a country which has been dominated by one man... absolutely. for the past two decades, you're telling me that the identity of his key challenger doesn't really matter? stephen, you told me that the death toll is 40,000. the death toll is expected to be 200,000. so, right now, we do not have the luxury of discussing which leader would be better. we just need to get rid of this regime. that's the point. what happened in terms of the process of construction and development of turkey over the last 20 years?

is it possible thatjournalists are going to be able to dig deep enough to tell the truth about what happened, and why so many new buildings utterly failed to withstand this twin quake? when media is under attack, when it is oppressed, truth takes another form. it becomes something that everybody knows but nobody speaks about. so, yes, investigative journalism is pretty strong in turkey. and, i'm proud of my friends, actually, my colleagues. they're doing amazing thing, and they are able to do it, but then they are marginalized. they are silenced, they are prosecuted. and, so, even during the earthquake, when they couldn't send the tents, they were prosecuting the journalists, just because they held the mic to the victims of the earthquake. journalists have been arrested while covering this quake. accused, of spreading

disinformation, of undermining the government effort. exactly. and not only the journalists, normal people who only ask, where is the tent? where is the state? why is nobody helping us? only those questions got you into a police interrogation. and these people are the ones who lost their, all their loved ones, all their relatives and so on. so this is the limitlessness of... and you say is it too... that you think that it's too strong that i call it evil, but times but sometimes you have to call the spade a spade, so, yeah. you are intimately involved with this question of what journalists are and are not able to do. back in 2012, you were fired from yourjob because it was deemed that you, in the way you reported, for example, on the abuses, human rights abuses, in kurdish areas of turkey, you'd overstepped a mark. do you believe, today in 2023, the restrictions

on reporting are tighter than they were then? of course, it got tighter and tighter. and then, at the end, there were only a few people who are telling the truth, which is the case at the moment. but then, this is why i told that the human dignity is prevailing over the fear. right now, all those people who had been in fear, all the journalists, who were kind of keeping their voices down after seeing what happened, after seeing the reality on the ground, they cannot make themselves stop. it's the truth, as if, pouring from leaking, pouring, i don't know how to put it, but this is a very important moment. this is a massive moment of the king is naked. but there is now legislation, i think it loosely can be translated into english as the crime of publicly spreading misleading

information, a law that was passed in the autumn of 2022, which surely makes all of those journalists who, for example, are now looking at the so called construction amnesties that were offered by the akp government at local and national level to developers who hadn't followed the rules for earthquake proofing their buildings, but could then pay money to get a certificate anyway. journalists who want to dig deep into that surely face the very real possibility that they will end up in prison. exactly. that is why i'm telling this is our last chance, this election. because after this, there won't there will be no limits, either legal or illegal, to the power of this regime of erdogan. so if we want to have a home to go back to, in my case, going back to or if we need a home to live in. yes, this is our last chance. and also to the international community, they have been supporting erdogan

and his regime until to 2013, until the gezi uprising. and now we want to see the same enthusiastic support for the progressive forces, for the democratic forces of turkey. and this is the time that you should... international communities should not leave turkey alone, not only in terms of earthquake victims, and that support is very much needed, but in terms of democratic struggle. but surely one basic fact you cannot ignore is that you should never, ever underestimate president erdogan. he never has for 20 years dominated turkish electoral politics. if you look at the polls before the quake, he still had a steady lead over any possible potential presidential run down. please tell the percentage, though, it's not more than 35, not even 35 now. it was still a significant lead in most polls. he can say to the turkish

people, look, we have a crisis right now. but over the last 20 years, me and my akp party have delivered an average gdp growth rate per year of something over 4%. we have delivered for turkey. that's still his message. the gdp thing is not true to start with. it's going down. and all these people... i'm saying an average over 20 years. turks look at where they are today compare it with... it was like that... ...where they were at the beginning of the century. and they see a more modern society. they see a nationalist president who projects power across the world, who is socially. religiously conservative, which still seems to suit many turks. and you tell me that it doesn't matter who runs against him, the opposition this time has an historic opportunity. i say to you, maybe not. sometimes, sometimes i feel like you take this being the devil's advocate too... you sound like akp

spokesperson. you can all say these things. but then these people have been suffering from an economic crisis already since few years now, and they are now suffering from the earthquake. so, nobody could convince them that he has a strong leader. he's a strong leader. what is that strong leader? i mean, ukrainian rescue team was there before the turkish state body who is responsible taking care of such crises. as you have lived outside of turkey for some years now, you've been studying populist nationalist movements in different countries. and you famously wrote a book in which you outlined the seven steps from democracy to dictatorship. i'm just wondering whether you've also managed to come up with steps that can lead back from dictatorship to democracy, because according to your own perception of where turkey is, that is exactly what turkey needs today. do you have a plan?

well, i've written a book about it called together a manifesto against the heartless world. it's not only for turkey, but for all the other countries, including this one, who has been victimized by right wing populism or neo fascism, rather. well, hang on. let's not bandy around words like fascism to lump together a whole host of different countries. i thought i could get away with it. no, i'm actually, i think it's really important to know whether, on reflection, having lived outside of turkey, you can now see a viable route back to genuine democracy. yes, ican. and i choose to believe in this, and we have to believe in this. otherwise, this legacy, this, you know, this inertia, will take over the entire political space, and we won't have a say at the end. and, you know, earthquake is a great example about how right wing populism can ruin a country, not only politically but also morally. how that moral corruption can

trickle down from the higher echelons of politics, and how it can take over the entire country. because right now, thousands of people on the second day of the earthquake they were talking about a city was not helped by the governmentjust because they didn't vote for the government. and right now, many people, i'm talking about millions, they do not want to support the state agency responsible for the relief work because they do not trust that that work, that money will go there. so, this is a horrible thing. i mean, you have a state, an organization to take care of you in your darkest hour, and you don't trust that your donation will go to the earthquake victims. you have told me that you think the restrictions on media freedom are worse in turkey today than they were when you were fired from yourjob in 2012.

we spoke in 2016. you assured me then that you had no intention and no desire to leave your home country of turkey. and yet within months after that, you did leave and you haven't lived there permanently ever since. why? why have you not felt able to live in this country that you care so passionately about? i was promoting my book then and then the book overlapped with the coup attempt 2016, and the book was turkey: the insane and the melancholy. and i talked about that book, the coup attempt with you, and then i went back to turkey. i was in the passport line and that was the time when they were confiscating the passports of the dissidents and so on. you thought you might be arrested. or at least...

i'm in the passport line. and there's this passport lady, young woman, and she took my passport and it started taking too long. and i thought, ok, now it's happening. either they arrest me or they confiscate the passport. and then she screamed, oh, my crown, can we take a selfie? and i remember half of my face crying, half of my face laughing, and i thought, this is too much. one cannot live like this. i'm like, yes, i can live like this. but then i cannot think. i cannot write. and of course, you know, i'm not talking about the death threats, rape threats, which is their favorite. so, yeah. there's another writer in turkey that i've interviewed several times, 0rhan pamuk, winner of the nobel prize, no less. now he is no friend of the akp government. his books have a lot of sort of allusions to tyranny and dictatorship, but he's chosen to stay. he lives in turkey with bodyguards. and he joked to the guardian newspaper last year, he said, i used to have three bodyguards, now i have one. surely that means turkey must be improving. maybe you, given that you care so much about this country,

could consider going back? many people like me, and when i say like me, i don't only mean politically critical people, and so on. i, i also talk about the very well—educated people who had to leave turkey after 2016. there was a massive brain drain from turkey. they do not have the privilege of having a bodyguard. and for all of us right now, the focus is this election and what we can do for this election. this is the last time we can pull ourselves together and make turkey a democratic country again. it was never a great democracy, but it was a functioning, crazy democracy before this regime change the system to a weird presidential system. you, in a sense, represent what erdogan and the akp would call a unrepresentative liberal elite. do you think the people of turkey are going to listen to you? will they listen to me or him?

that's the question. it's a binary choice in a sense. yeah, it is a binary choice because now the country is... yes, split into two and it is obedience and the ones who are telling the truth. so i choose to believe that human dignity can prevail over fear. and i choose to believe that truth can prevail over the lies. so i am doing what i can and i am super committed, especially after the earthquake, especially when that twitter was shut down, because i was trying to connect a pregnant woman under the rubble asking for help with the doctors in the region. and right that second the twitter was shut. now i'm dangerous.

we have to end with that thought. thank you very much indeed for being on. stephen, thank you. hello there. wednesday brought our first appreciable rain for some time. in fact, for eastern england, more rain than we've seen all february so far. but the other element was, of course, a cooler day. temperatures dipped from the 13 in harden on tuesday to just eight on wednesday, which is about average for the time of year. and the change was due to a change in wind direction behind this rather raggedy looking weather front on our satellite picture, the north westerly wind developed and that north westerly wind is blowing our cloud away further south, although we've had a smattering of snow across the moors in the southwest. so, it is cold air. we could see something a little bit wintry on the hills as that continues southwards through the rest of the night. behind it, temperatures are dropping to freezing and of course, where we're seeing any wintriness. so with the surfaces damp, it could well be quite icy. so that's something we haven't

seen for a while, either. so, a cold and frosty start for many of us in the morning. 0ur weather front and it's cloud still in the south. the next one starting to approach the north. but the high pressure in between does promise more sunshine for many across scotland, northern ireland, northern england, wales. this cloudier zone, cool. some bits and pieces of rain drizzle takes a while to clear, and later on something more significant comes back into the north and west and the northern isles, along with a strengthening and quite gusty wind. so, that will make it feel chillier. but some sunshine elsewhere, and temperatures similar to those of wednesday, which as i say, is about average for this time of year. then through the evening, that weather front will weaken. the rain amounts almost peter out as it pushes its way southwards. and so behind it, the cloud breaks. and ahead of it we could see some frost as well. so colder to start friday morning. again, a cold start across central and southern areas, but the high pressure isjust relinquishing its grip for a while. now, these weather fronts will introduce more cloud and also that northerly winds. so i do think it'll feel quite

chilly on friday even when the cloud starts to break with some sunshine for the north east of scotland, eastern england, there's a bracing wind and we will still have some rain on this weather front. again, it doesn't look like anything significant, but it will introduce more cloud across the skies and give us some patchy nuisance rain. but as i say, a little bit chillier than the nine or ten would suggest. and then the high pressure�*s back for the weekend. a strong high pressure building, keeping those weather fronts at bay once again. so as we look towards the end of february and through the weekend, there could be quite a bit of cloud around, some drizzly showers, fog and frost, but not a lot of rain is in the forecast.

welcome to newsday, reporting live from singapore, i'm karishma vaswani. the headlines: ahead of the first anniversary of the russian invasion of ukraine, president putin once again defends his special military operation. translation: there are nettles coin: translation: there are nettles auoin on translation: there are nettles going on right — translation: there are nettles going on right now— translation: there are nettles going on right now on _ translation: there are nettles going on right now on our- going on right now on our historical frontiers for our people courageous warriors are fighting. we'll have details of the putin rally, and we'll look at the latest military cooperation between russia and china. also in newsday this hour: 11 palestinians are killed and more than a hundred injured in an israeli—raid on the occupied west bank. an off—duty police officer is shot in northern ireland,

he's been taken to hospital but his condition�*s unknown.