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, …
Sometimes I just can’t take it anymore. I mean this country, the news. Like the fuss that started here this week about a new state TV series, Ayrılık (seperation), that is pretty anti-Israel. It’s just another ‘dizi’ (series) and in this one Israeli soldiers shoot little Palestinian girls in the heart. The anti-Israeli stance in this country started getting …
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 …
What to think of the immense tax fine that Dogan Media Group was hit with this week? At 3.7 billion Turkish Liras ($ 2.5 billion), it’s a shocking amount of money. Of course, the debate about whether Dogan Media Group has really been cheating on taxes or whether it’s just another step in the efforts by the AKP government to …
I’m watching the Turkish news. Last weekend, four soldiers were killed by a PKK bomb in the southeast of the country, and yesterday and today they were buried. Some TV news bulletins start with pictures of the funerals: slow motion images of the coffin, wrapped in a Turkish flag, the now widowed wife falling on the coffin crying, the soldier’s …
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 …
Two weeks ago, Arzu Erbas, a Dutch woman of Turkish descent, was killed in Amsterdam. Amsterdam local newspaper Het Parool quickly found out that the killer was probably a man of Turkish descent as well, and it could be the case that it was the father who was forbidden by court order to see his child and was several …
Ununderstandable really, that I never watched ‘Wilco’s bus’ before. Wilco’s bus (in Turkish: Wilco’nun karavanı) is a programme on Iz TV made by Wilco van Herpen, a Dutchman who has been living in Turkey since 1999. With his bus he travels around Turkey and shows Turks their own country through his Dutch eyes. Wonderful TV, especially when you …
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 …
For the last one and a half years I have been a regular contributor to the most important news agency in the Netherlands, ANP. People assume I work for them more or less fulltime and send in several stories a week. That is not the case, so maybe I should explain what it means to work as a …
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