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 …
A new and strong Kurdish initiative
It’s getting out of hand again in Turkey’s south-east: this weekend a total of 12 soldiers died. That’s more than fifty soldiers killed since the end of April. Over the last four months, 130 PKK fighters have been killed – according to the Turkish army, so let’s call that ‘unconfirmed’.
Opposition leaders try to take advantage of the anger among Turks …
More than a year ago she told me she missed our appointment because she was in a car accident. I asked her how bad it was and if she was injured. Luckily, she said, she only got a black eye.
After that, she stopped lying about it. When we talk, eye to eye but increasingly just on msn or by phone, …
Hrant Dink – three years after the murder
I was in an eye hospital for on an assignment when I heard the news: Hrant Dink had been killed. There were TV screens in the hospital, and I couldn’t stop watching, wishing my Turkish was better, wishing I could understand what exactly was going on. But the biggest news, that Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink had been shot
…
There they are in Radikal newspaper: three boys aged seven, nine and eleven. The arms of the kaymakam, a local governor, is wrapped around them as he says: ‘These kids will read’.
The kids have been in the news for days now. It started with the news that a five year old boy, Bedrettin, was found beaten almost to death: he …
There is a debate going on about how it started: did the Roma man light up a cigarette in a teahouse, where it is forbidden to smoke, or did the tea house owner refuse to serve the man tea? The testimonies about how the tea house fight started differ, but the outcome was clear: the windows of the teahouse didn’t …
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 …
She thought she was dreaming. But then it turned out to be really happening: the guy sitting behind her in the night bus from Istanbul to a city in central Anatolia was touching her all over her body and grabbing her breasts. She screamed, cried and trembled, and she told her friend, who called the bus conductor. The problem was …
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 …
Two nights in a hotel for 120 American dollars. That’s an OK deal in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish region in northern Iraq. Stupidly enough I wanted to pay the bill with my credit card. The guy I travelled with had already warned me that a credit card might be useless, but I dismissed that: even in the remotest …
Recent Comments