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, …
Two nights in a hotel for 120 American dollars. That’s an OK deal in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish region in northern Iraq. Stupidly enough I wanted to pay the bill with my credit card. The guy I travelled with had already warned me that a credit card might be useless, but I dismissed that: even in the remotest …
When talking about the Kurdish issue and the initiative that the AKP government is taking to solve the problems, it sometimes seems that there is a big gap between Turks and Kurds. That the whole matter is black and white, two adversaries standing opposite each other. That this is not the case becomes clearer now that the Kurdish question is …
Is opposition party CHP launching its own initiative to help solve the Kurdish issue? Some people say they are working behind the scenes, talking to NGO’s and representatives of the Kurds. It’s also pointed out that more than ten years ago the CHP wrote a report about democratisation as a possible solution to the Kurdish issue. The CHP is nowadays …
Even though Minister of the Interior Atalay said nothing concrete in his declaration on the Kurdish question last Wednesday, many newspapers think it’s a brave step by the government to aim for democratic solutions and to discuss the matter with as many different groups in society as possible. This includes talks with two important opposition parties, the CHP and the …
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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