The BDP, that’s the Barış ve Demokrasi Partisi, the Peace and Democracy Party. Never heard of such a party in Turkey? You soon will, because it’s the new pro-Kurdish party, established already in the spring of this year because there was a closure case pending against the pro-Kurdish DTP party , represented in parliament by 21 MP’s. And yesterday it …
Istiklal Street in Istanbul is famous. It’s Istanbul’s main shopping street, also known for it’s countless bars, cinemas, historical buildings – and countless people: on the weekend, about 3 million people a day visit Istiklal.
Being the thriving heart of this metropolis of 16 million people, this is also the place to be if you want to make yourself heard. Whenever …
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, …
You can see helicopters over Istanbul daily for all sorts of reasons, but yesterday, there was a “Cem Garipoğlu alarm”. Cem Garipoğlu is a young guy suspected of killing his 18 year old girlfriend Münevver Karabulut earlier this year, in March, and ever since he has been on the run. Somebody phoned the Istanbul police yesterday because he said he …
Again the judiciary has shown itself in its most fiercely secularist mode: an Ankara court has ruled that President Abdullah Gül can be tried for a fraud case that dates from his past involvement in a political party that no longer exists. According to the Constitution, the president can only be prosecuted for treason, but the court ruled that everybody …
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