Canadian Arrested For Calling Turkish President A ‘Biyatch’

It’s never a good idea to insult thin-skinned Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan on social media, as yet another person learned after being arrested in Turkey just before the new year.

Ece Heper, a 50-year-old Canadian-Turkish woman who was on a prolonged visit to Turkey, was arrested on December 30 and is accused of insulting Erdogan on her Facebook page, according to the Globe and Mail. A Facebook account that appears to be Heper’s does criticize Erdogan, calling him “America’s biyatch,” a “jack ass,” and an “idiot” in a post dated two days before Heper’s arrest.

Friends of Heper’s told the Globe and Mail that they were working to free her and are concerned that she will not have access to medication she needs for her health conditions.

Shortly after Erdogan became president in 2014, Turkey began arresting his haters and critics for breaking what had been a little-used law against insulting the president of Turkey. Those convicted face up to four years in prison, though some of the high profile convictions resulted in suspended sentences rather than jail time. Last May, a former Miss Turkey was given a suspended sentence of 14 months after sharing a mean poem about Erdogan on her Instagram account. A month later, a man who shared a meme of Erdogan next to pictures of Gollum from “The Lord of the Rings” on his Facebook page was given a suspended sentence of a year and stripped of his parental custody rights, according to the BBC. He had argued that being compared to Gollum was not an insult and also that when he shared that meme, Erdogan wasn’t even the president of Turkey.

Last July, Erdogan offered to drop all lawsuits against people accused of insulting him, but that hasn’t stopped new cases from coming up. A few days before arresting Heper, Turkish police arrested a cafeteria manager for insulting the president after a police officer claimed he heard him say he would never serve Erdogan tea.