Forty nine so far, and counting. Forty nine (retired) personnel: 17 former generals, 4 navy admirals on active duty, 27 officers and one non-commissioned officer. All under arrest since Monday, because they are supposedly linked to Balyoz (Slegdehammer), an (alleged) coup plan dating from 2003 that has become part of the ongoing Ergenekon investigation.
When I read about Ergenekon stuff, I …
Indignation all around: alleged military coup plotters wanted to use journalists in their plans to overthrow the government. Daily newspaper Taraf recently revealed yet another coup plan, and it contains two lists: one of 137 names of journalists who would be asked to cooperate with the coup plotters to help create a chaotic atmosphere in the country, which would ‘justify’ …
I’m watching the Turkish news. Last weekend, four soldiers were killed by a PKK bomb in the southeast of the country, and yesterday and today they were buried. Some TV news bulletins start with pictures of the funerals: slow motion images of the coffin, wrapped in a Turkish flag, the now widowed wife falling on the coffin crying, the soldier’s …
When you live in Turkey for some time and follow the news, you could get used to the considerable power the military still has in this country. They interfere in politics all the time on all sorts of issues, from the Kurdish question and relations with Armenia to matters of freedom of expression and freedom of religion. It’s a Turkish …
And again newspaper Taraf (meaning ‘side’) made the Turkish army look foolish. They published a story about alledged plans from the army to make short work of governing party AKP and the Gulen Movement (a big group of followers of religious leader Fethullah Gulen, a controversial figure in Turkey). The AKP already announced that it will file a lawsuit against …
Mines and the Constitutional Court Card
Imagine, you have about 600,000 mines along a border hundreds of kilometres long with a neighbouring country, and you want to get rid of the mines before 2014, since you promised to do so by signing an international treaty. But you don’t have enough money, and your own army doesn’t have enough specialists and specialized equipment to do the job. …
The little boy on the orange bike
My man’s military service, which started about fifteen months ago, is over. And while he has some difficulty believing that he is really not expected back at the army base, there is something I can’t get out of my mind. That is: the little boy on the orange bike.
My man, H., worked the last few months in the army canteen …
I got both (soft) criticism and (warm) compliments after writing about the Kurdish question. Thanks for both. I feel a bit reluctant to write about it again, but what can I do? It’s an important issue and it keeps coming up in the news. Tonight, I deliberately went to see something about Kurds; I admit… I went to see …
‘Baby, I started counting down the number plates today.’ I know, this makes no sense to anybody who never had a Turkish lover in the army, but for any woman that ever did, it’s clear what this means: only 81 days left till army time is over.
Okay, I’ll explain. Number plates on cars in Turkey always start with the code …
A retired colonel, Abdülkarim Kirca, has committed suicide this week. He was found shot in the head in his apartment in Ankara. Soon after the suicide, the army started criticising the media. They had written about Col. Kirca extensively, because he was the highest-ranking colonel in the Kurdish southeast of Turkey during the nineties, when hundreds of murders were committed, …
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