Typically, journalists are interested in covering the news, not becoming the news. But when veteran CBC reporter Sasa Petricic was detained in Turkey this June along with his colleague Derek Stoffel, their arrest became their network’s lead story.
The scarcity of facts surrounding their detention made the headline all the more noteworthy: the lone word “arrested” appeared in Petricic’s twitter feed and his CBC colleagues back home were left to pick up his trail, which led to the basement holding cell of Istanbul’s main police station.
Luckily, this thriller-worthy beginning ended in more mundane, bureaucratic circumstances. Thanks in part to Petricic’s quick instincts, he and Stoffel were released after about 12 hours.
Speaking from Jerusalem about his brief foray into Turkey’s justice system, Petricic is pleasant and precise in his description of the sole arrest of his career (which is also the sole arrest of his life, he hastens to add). The Serbian-born, Toronto-bred journalist has done his fair share of challenging fieldwork in his two decades with the CBC: he has covered the Rwandan genocide, September 11th, the Southeast Asian tsunami and the war in Afghanistan. Clearly, Petricic has spent enough time in war and disaster zones to withstand a brief run-in with the Turkish police.
And yet, he discloses that the arrest is just a small part of a much larger challenge: his present role as Mideast correspondent is the toughest job of his career.
Back in late May on the day of the arrest, Petricic and Stoffel were at the centre of the action after anti-government protests erupted in Istanbul’s Taksim Square. The situation, says Petricic, was tense, both on the ground and at the level of political rhetoric.
“Police were sort of hanging out in riot gear on street corners, and had moved in with heavier equipment such as the water canon and armoured cars,” he describes. “And in politicians’ speeches and in statements there was more and more blame being put on foreign media.”
While Petricic and Stoffel stood at the edge of the square documenting the work of city crews removing barricades put up by protesters, they were accosted by a man in the street who, as far as Petricic could tell, was a civilian.
“He jumped out and started grabbing at my equipment and sort of pushing me away from this barricade, saying ‘Problem, problem! Trouble, trouble!’ and then saying something else in Turkish.”
Their scuffle soon snowballed into a larger discussion with police, which itself devolved into Petricic and Stoffel’s arrest for interfering with the city works crew and resisting arrest, which, quips Petricic “was kind of news to us.”
Packed in a bus headed for the police station with 10 or so other detainees (all young male protesters) as well as a bunch of police, the CBC reporters were instructed to turn off their phones. Petricic slyly disobeyed, and in a moment when most of the officers disembarked from the bus (kind of a shift change, he speculates), he pulled out his phone and sent out his modern-day SOS. “The easiest thing to do was send out a tweet,” he says. “It was the only way that I could figure to get in touch with the CBC, and I figured somebody needed to know what was happening.”
With no idea whether his tweet had even gone out, let alone knowledge of the waves it made back in Canada, Petricic arrived at the station where he and Stoffel were primed for their time in custody. They learned of a booking process that includes giving a statement, being interviewed by the prosecutor and then a possible sentencing by a judge who could choose to jail or deport them. The process would range from a day and a half to several days, time that the CBC reporters would spend in the station’s basement holding cells.
“We went through the booking process, and the Turks, who I guess have inherited this from the Ottomans and the Byzantines before them, were very thorough, and went through all our stuff.”
Despite the uncertainty — and potential long-term nature — of their predicament, Petricic kept his cool. There is no faster messenger than Twitter, and by the time a Canadian consular official came to visit the reporters, CBC’s Toronto office had contacted the federal government, the Turkish ambassador in Ottawa and the Canadian Consulate in Istanbul. At around 4 a.m. (after a mere three hours in the cell, just long enough to have some bread and water and converse with fellow prisoners), Petricic and Stoffel were told they were free to go.
“I suspect that, at the end of the day, the diplomatic hassle just wasn’t worth it for them,” speculates Petricic. “A number of things that happened that day in Ottawa showed that Canada’s political system was paying attention to this, wasn’t happy about it and wanted the Turkish government to be very clear if they wanted to pursue this.”
But if an on-the-job arrest in Turkey is such a benign affair, why does Petricic consider his work in the region as the biggest challenge he’s faced as a journalist? It’s because merely being a foreign reporter in the Middle East is provocative.
“Very often governments here use foreigners and foreign media as scapegoats to try to draw attention away from their own shortcomings,” explains Petricic. “You’re rarely viewed as simply a neutral observer,” he says. “The international media is perceived to have a huge impact on whether the United States decides to intervene in the Syrian conflict. It has a huge impact on whether Canada delivers more aid when you go into areas like the West Bank.”
The flip side of this constant speculation and scrutiny is the valuable role that the international media plays in countries where local media is restricted or limited in some way.
Petricic is proud of the attention he was able to bring to the protesters’ cause in Turkey, especially in light of a lack of local media coverage.
“You realize just how important it is to get information you trust and how, when you don’t have it locally, you count on all these new tools and on the international media, which seems, in many cases, to take its role of trying to give a more complete picture seriously.”
Petricic certainly takes his role seriously and will continue to tackle the complexities of the Middle East for a while longer before one day returning home to Toronto.
“I will likely end up moving back once my global adventures are over … whenever that might be,” he says. “I still consider it the most livable big city in the world. And I’ve seen most of the others!”