The gay men in the film Zenne Dancer kiss on the cheek, not on the mouth. The only time they go further than that is when they need photographs of gay sex, to convince a military committee they are actually gay and for that reason get exempt from doing their military service (which is not a procedure invented for the …
Uludere two weeks later – a sweep up
On 28 December 35 civilians died in an air strike of the Turkish army. The victims came from the villages of Gülyazi and Ortasu, in the district Uludere in the southeastern province of Sirnak.
In two weeks time, I wrote seven stories about it. Some of them are based on what I saw and heard in Gülyazi, where I went …
The verdict is there: RojTV, the Kurdish TVchannel broadcasting from Belgium with a Danish license, will not be closed. Good news! A victory for the freedom of speech. Having said that, I deeply wish for RojTV to disappear naturally, or at least to radically change.
I have the same wish for many Turkish TVchannels. They all glorify violence.
I don’t know if …
‘Look’, says C., one of the people I went to Uludere with this week, pointing to the side of the road. ‘That’s where the governor ran down to, remember?’ I do remember; I saw the footage. The governor of the Uludere district came to the Gülyazi and Roboski villages to console the families of the victims, …
This week, I went to Gülyazi, one of the villages in the Uludere district where 35 citizens were killed by the Turkish air force. I talked to families of the victims, and to young smugglers. I’d like to share my findings on two subjects in blog posts: village guards, and smuggling as a totally normal part
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What’s it worth, this apology that Prime Minister Erdogan made yesterday for the Dersim massacres? He said it, he actually said that he apologizes on the state’s behalf for what happened in 1937 and 1938. A novelty in Turkish politics. But at the same time it is not a novelty at all. It is not the first time people’s pains …
History and tear gas in Diyarbakir
I’ve often wondered about the use of tear gas against Kurds who for example demonstrate or attend a funeral of PKK members. You sometimes hear that the police ‘just started’ throwing tear gas bombs, but is that really the case? As of yesterday I can say: yes, that is really the case.
I’m in Diyarbakir for a conference on the history …
Paper policies won’t help womens and childrens rights
‘Similar rulings will be out of the question from now on,’ said Minister of Justice Sadullah Ergin. He was talking about a verdict against 26 men who raped a 13 year old girl: the Supreme Court of Appeals upheld an earlier decision by a lower court to give only minimum punishments, because the men claimed the girl approved of having …
We’re counting around eighty deaths this last week. In the early hours of Wednesday the PKK killed 24 Turkish soldiers, on Tuesday five soldiers died, and now the Turkish army is hunting down the perpetrators and has, they claim, killed around fifty of them. It is totally obvious that this will only lead to more deaths. But politicians don’t seem …
Shocking news this morning: a pregnant woman and her six year old daughter were killed in the Southeastern province of Batman. Many Turkish media were quick to say it was the PKK who did it, Kurdish Firat news agency reported, on witnesses account, that mother and daughter were killed by police bullets. A big TV-station sought the truth in the …
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