‘That is, if Turkey meets the Copenhagen criteria’, says Judith Sargentini, Dutch Green Party representative in the Europarliament. She just attended the first meeting of an informal group of MEP’s who call themselves ‘Friends of Turkey’. They are pro Turkey’s accession to the European Union, but of course, not without the mantra: ‘if Turkey meets the Copenhagen criteria’.
Later this month, …
I’ve had some emails this week about the House Committee on Foreign Affairs voting on the ‘Armenian Genocide Bill’. Both groups pro and anti informed me about their stance and some asked me to write letters to the Committee to support their point of view.
Now the resolution is accepted. I always thought I was against it mainly because politicians shouldn’t …
Some call him the only hope for leftist Turks: Mustafa Sarigül. He is the mayor of Sisli, a district in Istanbul, and he is about to start a new political party, the Turkey Change Movement. A real social democrat party, he promises, with the aim of justice and work for all.
So when the foreign press club announced a meeting with …
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 had an interesting discussion this week with some Dutch friends who all live in Istanbul and follow politics here closely. We wondered: what if we had grown up here in Turkey, where would we stand politically?
One of my friends didn’t hesitate about his answer for one second: he would be a Kemalist. Or in other words: he would be …
Istiklal Street in Istanbul is famous. It’s Istanbul’s main shopping street, also known for it’s countless bars, cinemas, historical buildings – and countless people: on the weekend, about 3 million people a day visit Istiklal.
Being the thriving heart of this metropolis of 16 million people, this is also the place to be if you want to make yourself heard. Whenever …
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 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 …
And once again the governing AKP shows it doesn’t like alcohol: a well known municipal fish restaurant on the Anatolian side of the Bosporus has decided to no longer serve alcohol. The municipality of that part of town has a new AKP mayor, and he made the decision that is all over the newspapers at the moment. It’s the second …
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