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 …
The football part of the match between Turkey and Armenia is totally uninteresting: both countries have already failed to qualify for the world championships in South Africa. But still, the tension is rising in Bursa, the city not too far from Istanbul where the match will be played tonight.
The Armenian President Sarkisyan will come to watch, as Turkish …
The trouble in north western China is a big news item in Turkey. Of course it is bound to be, since the Uighurs are a Turkish people, just like Turkmens, like Uzbeks, Kazaks and Azeris, to name just a few. It struck me that the newspaper Hürriyet predicted the trouble a few days before it started: President Gül had just …
There’s not too much protest against Obama’s visit to Turkey today and tomorrow, but the small groups of protestors are afraid that Obama has come with a ‘secret agenda’ to pressure Turkey to send combat troops to Afghanistan. To an outsider it might sound weird, a ‘secret agenda’, but the terminology doesn’t surprise me at all. Among some groups in …
ISTANBUL – The Turkish Education Ministry has stopped distributing a documentary about the events leading up to the mass killings of Armenians in the latter days of the Ottoman Empire, almost a hundred years ago. The film, distributed to primary schools, was heavily criticised because it could stir up hatred between different ethnic groups, daily newspaper Radikal reports today….
‘We are all Turks! We are all Muslims!’. I still see it scrawled on a wall somewhere in Istanbul. Yeah, sure, I thought, Armenians, Christians, Jews, Arabs, Kurds, never heard of them, in this country we are all just Turks and all Muslims… But then again, how can you really criticise such graffiti in a country where this week even …
‘More freedom of opinion in Turkey’, I read in a newspaper. If only that were true. Another newspaper was more accurate, their headline said: Turkey changes article 301. The changes that have been made to the article that was misused many times to shut up writers, journalists and publishers for ‘insulting Turkishness’, will probably only change the prosecutors strategies in …
Yesterday, there was a trial in Ankara concerning article 301, the infamous Penal Code Article on ‘insulting Turkishness’. Thursday there’s one in Istanbul, Friday in Iskenderun. I get an update on trials that concern ‘freedom of expression’ every week. The trials are not only about 301, but also about other articles that are misused to limit the freedom of expression. …
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