KURDISH journalist Serdar Altan warned that international organisations are downplaying the number of media workers in Turkish jails as he laid out the objectives of a new solidarity platform today.

The Diyarbakir-based Dicle Firat Journalists’ Association has been launched to “increase solidarity among journalists and make visible the pressures and rights violations against media workers.”

It will also organise training programmes for journalists working in collaboration with other media organisations to build “a line of solidarity” against attacks on those working in the press.

The association will link in a solidarity network with international organisations, including the Journalists for Democracy in Turkey and Kurdistan, which was launched by the Morning Star NUJ chapel on World Press Freedom Day last year.

Turkey is currently the world’s biggest jailer of journalists, with a third of the world’s total. Reliable figures are hard to ascertain because the Turkish state insists that those behind bars are terrorists.

But Mr Altan warned that international organisations often downplay the figures, basing their numbers of the official statistics of the Turkish state, which he described as “sad.”

Many international press freedom organisations only focus on the so-called “high-profile” cases and limit their campaigning to meetings without concrete action and writing letters.

Some of the biggest groups, including Article 19, have caused concern over alleged links to intelligence services with large amounts of funding received from shady organisations, including the National Endowment for Democracy and the US State Department.

Mr Altan said that there was always a price to be paid for being a journalist, with Kurds working in the region often targeted as being opponents of the authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

“The pressure they face is double compared to those who work in the west [of Turkey],” he said adding: “We say ‘journalism is not a crime’ in the face of these circumstances.”

He said that while social media reaches a wider audience, it does not diminish the importance of journalism.

“On the contrary, the impact and the importance of journalism keeps increasing.”

In an example of the pressure faced by journalists, a court in Mersin jailed the editor of the now closed Kurdish daily newspaper Azadiya Welat (Free World). He was sentenced to 7.5 years in prison on Wednesday.

Ismail Coban was sentenced on charges of “membership of a terrorist organisation” based on the statements of three witnesses, two of them being secret.

Azadiya Welat was one of hundreds of opposition media outlets closed by government decree in October 2016.