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, …
Usually when a number of soldiers die in the fight against the PKK, you see more flags on the street over the following days. Not this time. Seventeen soldiers died last weekend in the southeast of the country, but even though the national grief is no less than any other time, now there’s a lot of criticism of the army. …
Yesterday, there was a trial in Ankara concerning article 301, the infamous Penal Code Article on ‘insulting Turkishness’. Thursday there’s one in Istanbul, Friday in Iskenderun. I get an update on trials that concern ‘freedom of expression’ every week. The trials are not only about 301, but also about other articles that are misused to limit the freedom of expression. …
Today I could write about the withdrawal of the Turkish troops from northern Iraq. About how here in the newspapers it’s stated that everybody already knew about the withdrawal, except prime minister Erdogan – at an occcasion where he would speak to a group of journalists, Erdogan’s speech had already been distributed and the speech still spoke of ‘the continuing …
Last night the Turkish army started a military operation in the north of Iraq. I was just reading about it on the internet, when BNR Newsradio – a big Dutch radio station – called me: would I like to contribute some comments about the invasion in their broadcast right after the 12 o’clock news? Of course I would, …
For me, the arrest of Kemal Kerincsiz appeals to my imagination. He’s an ultra-nationalist lawyer, who is notorious for the lawsuits he started against writers and journalists like Orhan Pamuk, Elif Safak and Hrant Dink because they insulted ‘Turkishness’. Harmful cases in my opinion, because they provoked emotions that even led to murder.
And now Kerincsiz himself is behind bars. It …
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