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 …
I remember getting interested in human rights at primary school. I gave presentations in class about, for example, the work of Amnesty International, which totally impressed me. Prison guards beating up prisoners or secret services making them ‘disappear’, (my main obsessions at the time), I just couldn’t comprehend. Turkey was one of the countries I read about. …
No no no, the youtube ban has not been lifted. Newspapers all over the world announced this on Tuesday, and I was embarrassed about missing it. How can I check almost every day and still not notice, what’s wrong with me? I read about how some parts of the country are taking longer to reconnect – something that I totally …
Lots of criticism this week of the Labour Minister, who suggested that the Tuzla shipyards be closed or replaced in a bid to solve the safety problems endemic there. The immediate reason behind his ‘plan’ are three more deaths this week in Tuzla. What happened? A life boat needed to be tested. Officially the test …
Quite a fuss this week in the Netherlands about immigration laws. A judge ruled that it is not legal to ask non EU citizens to do a language and culture test before coming to the Netherlands to get married or to reunite with their family. The test has been common practice for some years now, …
A total of 98 deaths in the last seven years: the shipbuilding business is booming in Turkey, but to achieve this growth the safety of the workers has been neglected. Turkey’s biggest shipbuilding area is Tuzla, south of Istanbul. Workers went on strike last Monday to demand safer working conditions, but when I went to take a look, I saw …
It’s exactly a month ago today that youtube.com was again closed in Turkey. Previous closures usually didn’t last so long, and this time it’s even a ‘double closure’: when you try to open the site, you now get two notifications of court orders banning youtube. On the other hand, all the wordpressblogs are …
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