Mark Lin BBC for his deportation from Türkiye

I just sent my family a message saying how happy I was to return to Türkiye, where I used to live, and how I felt to return home. Then the phone rang in my hotel room.

“We have an urgent issue to discuss personally,” the receptionist said. “Can you go down?”

I arrived to find three clear policemen waiting for me. They asked me about my passport and led me away, trying to prevent my colleagues from photographing.

I was in Istanbul for three days by that time, and I covered the anti -government protests raised by the arrest of the city’s mayor, Ikram Imamoglu.

I was first transferred to the police headquarters and detained for seven hours. Collers were allowed to be present and lawyers can talk to talk. The weather was generally friendly. Some police officers told me that they did not agree on what they said was the state’s decision. Someone embraced me and said he hoped for my freedom.

At 9:30 pm, I moved to the Istanbul Foreign Nursery Unit. There, the atmosphere was crucified from a series of smoking officers in the chain, who had to negotiate with them in the broken Turkish Turkish. The fingerprints have been depleted and were deprived of accessing lawyers or any contact with the outside world.

In the early hours of Thursday, she was presented to me to say that I was deported for being a “threat to public order.” When I asked for an explanation, they said it was a government decision.

A police officer suggested that he be photographed by saying that I will leave Türkiye for my agreement, which can help me return in the future and that could offer his heads. She politely refused, and doubted that it would be granted to the government -controlled media to pay its copy of the events.

By 2.30 am, I was transferred to a final site – the administration of foreigners at the airport. I put in a room with some rows of solid chairs and told me that I can sleep there. Among the police officers who enter their teeth, take off the planes and the morning call for prayer, no sleep came.

Seventeen hours after my first detention, I was taken to a waiting plane on one direction to London. That night, after the case was announced, which sparked great media coverage around the world, the Turkish government’s press office issued a statement saying that I lack the correct dependence. At any time, they did not mention this during my detention, and it seemed that it was a thinker on their part an attempt to justify my condition.

I never offended my treatment at any time during the ordeal. I knew all the time that the BBC and the British Consulate in Istanbul was working hard to secure the version.

Many others who fell on a mistake by the Turkish authorities have no safety net. When I lived there as the BBC correspondent Istanbul between 2014 and 2019, Türkiye was the largest prison prison in the world. Correspondents of the International Energy Energy Agency in Türkiye occupy 158 out of 180 countries in the Freedom of Press Index. Since these recent protests began, eleven journalists are among two thousand or so are their detention.

The recent disorders arrested Ekrem Imamoglu, and raised his main political rival Tayyip Erdogan, which opinion polls indicate that the president can in the elections.

But they grew into something much broader: the bustle of democracy in a country that slips into tyranny. Installing the media is essential in this path, as the government has gradually crushed or discussed. I look at that directly. It has ended with me with sadness and insomnia. For others, it was much worse.

Meanwhile, President Erdogan is digging and rejecting the protests as “street terrorism”. The current international climate of the presence of an ally in the White House encouraged him and Türkiye’s importance for everything from Ukraine to Syria.

The question now is whether the largest demonstrations in the country in more than one decade can maintain momentum or whether the leader of Türkiye has long been able to clean this. They may repeat the street “enough” – but they also know that Ragab Erdogan is not removed.