I’ve had some emails this week about the House Committee on Foreign Affairs voting on the ‘Armenian Genocide Bill’. Both groups pro and anti informed me about their stance and some asked me to write letters to the Committee to support their point of view.
Now the resolution is accepted. I always thought I was against it mainly because politicians shouldn’t …
The government is doing nice things for journalists: the discounts for press card holders have been extended. Most of the public transport is already free all over the country, but now my colleagues and I can also get discounts (up to 50%!) with some privately owned long-distance bus companies, and for flights with national carrier Turkish Airlines. And, this is …
I went to the Netherlands for a week, and even though I always intend to keep reading the Turkish papers online, I never really manage to do it: when you’re out of the country, somehow the news doesn’t get through your skull very well. Now that I am back, I’m catching up on the news and again I realize why …
The judiciary and the Kurdish initiative
The surrender of a group of 34 men, women and children – some of them PKK members, some of them ordinary inhabitants of a refugee camp for Turkish Kurds in northern Iraq – was the first visible result of the government’s Kurdish initiative, launched this summer. By sending the ‘peace group’ (as the PKK calls it) to Turkey, …
Network site myspace.com has been closed down in Turkey. It’s not totally clear yet why, but it’s said it has to do with copyright laws being infringed. On myspace, a lot of music is shared among members, and it’s of course feasible that in the process copyrights are not always respected. Which is illegal, but hardly a reason to close …
The trouble in north western China is a big news item in Turkey. Of course it is bound to be, since the Uighurs are a Turkish people, just like Turkmens, like Uzbeks, Kazaks and Azeris, to name just a few. It struck me that the newspaper Hürriyet predicted the trouble a few days before it started: President Gül had just …
Didim is a nice town on Turkey’s west coast. For the last four days there have been 65 people lying in the garden of a government building. They sleep on mattresses provided by the government and under Turkish blankets, and the state feeds them. Where do they come from? From the Palestine Occupied Territories, Iraq, Iran, Somalia and Eritrea. Among …
Diyarbakir was a troubled city yesterday: protests by Kurds against the arrest of PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, ten years ago this weekend, lead to riots, some people were wounded and a dozen were arrested. Some of the disturbances took place in front of the headquarters of DTP, the pro-Kurdish party that is also represented in parliament. A crowd gathered there. …
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, …
Waitresses are beaten up, one woman is pulled out of the restaurant by her hair and dragged into a police car. She is held captive for six hours and raped. Police brutality? No, a gang that dressed up as police officers and parked in front of the restaurant in a car with police lights. The first thing the ‘police’ did …
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