Dogan Güzel was a cartoonist for the pro-Kurdish dailies Özgür Gündem and Özgür Ülke. In 1998, he had been sentenced to forty months imprisonment for "insulting the State" for having written the phrase "Khape TC" ("the lax/weak Republic of Turkey") in four drawings. Each caricature resulted in a ten-month prison sentence for Güzel. He is also a contributor to the comic magazine Meme.