Usually when a number of soldiers die in the fight against the PKK, you see more flags on the street over the following days. Not this time. Seventeen soldiers died last weekend in the southeast of the country, but even though the national grief is no less than any other time, now there’s a lot of criticism of the army. …
The board of the Telecom authorities has announced that it has closed down 1,112 websites in Turkey since November 2007. No, that’s not a typing mistake: one thousand one hundred and twelve websites have been closed down. These are mostly sites that offer for example pornography or illegal gambling, but sites that (allegedly) support terrorism or separatism are also being …
Earlier this year, my colleagues were protesting new social security laws. At the time, a big package of changes for working people, for pregnant workers and for pensioners was announced by the government. Journalists in Turkey found it necessary to protest a change that would directly affect them: the special rules that gave them the possibility to retire earlier than …
Children, phonecall and chocolates
Next year I will do everything right. At Ramazan Bayrami (end of Ramadan festival) I mean. What went wrong this year? Well, nothing serious, but still. I remember my first bayram in Turkey, which was, I think, three years ago. I knew nothing, really. Children in the street wished me a happy holiday, and I liked that so much. Then the …
When I check my mailbox, there are at least 278 offers in it to interview Mr. Adnan Oktar, a ‘prominent Muslim scholar’ who is mainly known as a Muslim creationist. Okay, I’m exaggerating a bit, there aren’t that many, but Adnan Oktar is exaggerating too: according to the information I got from his PR lady, he has written over 250 …
‘Don’t be rude, and get out of my way!’, Recep Tayyip Erdogan shouted at a group of photojournalists. The Prime Minister is not at his best these days. Not surprisingly, because one crisis has hardly ended (like the closure case against his AKP party, which turned out positively for him), when another crisis begins: the AKP is deeply entangled in …
There’s this feeling of togetherness that I like about Ramadan. Even if, like me, you don’t join in the fasting, you feel the special atmosphere, especially around the time the fast is broken at sundown. Forget for a moment the grumpiness people display when they are hungry and thirsty, and just look around on the street at sunset.
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Picture this: A school in Kayseri, a vibrant city in the heart of Turkey. Not a big school, only 450 students. Girls only, aged between let’s say 13 and 17. And then picture me coming in with Allard, a Dutch photographer I sometimes work with. At first the girls are shy; when we try to get the ones I interview …
Freedom of the press? I don’t think that’s really the issue these days. There’s a sort of war going on between Dogan, owner of the biggest media-group, and Prime Minister Erdogan. Dogan papers (which are all the big ones, like Sabah, Hürriyet, Radikal, and many more) have devoted a lot of space recently to a corruption scandal at Deniz Feneri,
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Every time we visit his parents, his father talks to him. Almost every sentence starts with ‘Oğlum bak’, meaning: ‘Look, my son…’, after which advice and wisdom about life follows. Father tries to get son on the right track. Son is 31 years old now, and to put it mildly we can say that in his parents’ eyes he
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