Şener Leven has made his tiny Turkish Cypriot newspaper an enemy of Turkey’s president
By Helena Smith
Şener Levent is on a mission. He has survived being set on by mob and two gun attacks and has had a dead dog left at his door, but none has not stopped the editor taking Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to task.
With evident pride, he says his Turkish Cypriot newspaper, Afrika, is the only Turkish-language daily to denounce Ankara’s military offensive against Kurdish fighters in northern Syria.
“I’ll continue writing the truth,” insisted Levent, who narrowly escaped being lynched in January when a mob of ultranationalists, incited by Erdoğan, attacked the publication’s premises in the Turkish-run north of Cyprus. “The Turkish army went into Syria and the Kurdish enclave of Afrin to commit a massacre and occupy the country, just as they did here.”
