Every, really every foreign journalist working in Turkey, writes about the Kurdish question. It’s one of the most urgent topics in the country, there are a lot of interesting developments to report about and the stories are usually pretty sellable as well. And I haven’t heard of any foreign journalist getting into trouble (the last couple of years) with the …
Who is behind the provocation?
That’s the big question these days in Turkey. There has been violence on the streets in two cities, resulting in four dead policemen, a few dead civilians, burnt police cars, roads blocked with overturned cars and angry crowds. Some person or some group, it is believed, must have provoked the violence. What makes emotions heat up as much as they …
Stone throwing kids: problem unsolved
Kids that throw stones at the police during demonstrations in the south east of Turkey (and in other places where many Kurds live, like in Adana and Mersin) will no longer be charged with being a member of a terrorist organization or for making propaganda for terrorists. The 196 children now serving a prison sentence for that offence will be …
A new and strong Kurdish initiative
It’s getting out of hand again in Turkey’s south-east: this weekend a total of 12 soldiers died. That’s more than fifty soldiers killed since the end of April. Over the last four months, 130 PKK fighters have been killed – according to the Turkish army, so let’s call that ‘unconfirmed’.
Opposition leaders try to take advantage of the anger among Turks …
Stone throwers, pick-pockets, murderers
Whatever got into MHP leader Bahceli is a mystery to me, but he actually pleaded for an amnesty for all 5,000 kids in prison. Even more surprising: even the stone throwing kids from the southeast of Turkey should be included in the amnesty arrangement, he said. Why is that surprising? The MHP is a very nationalistic party, and usually they …
She lived a long life, the adopted daughter of Atatürk, Sabiha Gökçen. Istanbuls second airport is named after her – I was there this week, recently a brand new and huge terminal was opened. Of course there is a reason why the airport was named after her: Sabiha, born in 1913 and deceased in 2001, is very well known in …
No, it’s not a civil war. Newspapers in Turkey like to use those words these days, refining them with such expressions as ‘looks like’, or ‘could lead to’, or ‘reminds of’. But it’s definitely also more than just a few demonstrations getting out of hand.
Ever since the Constitutional Court closed down the pro-Kurdish DTP last Friday, there have been …
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 …
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, …
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