Missing Hrant

From now on I will now and then publish guest blog posts on this website, written by Turkish journalists. The first guest blog post is written …

Egged

Throwing eggs: Turkish students are good at it and getting better. This week they brought down an ‘egg rain’ on AKP MP Burhan Kuzu, member of a parliamentary commission that advises on constitutional change. He came to the Political Science Faculty of Ankara University, and was welcomed by the ‘Egg Throwing Collective’. Dozens of eggs landed on him. Well, on …

A and O positive

Soon after the suicide bomb exploded yesterday morning on Taksim Square in Istanbul, several media announced there was a need for blood at the hospitals where the wounded were taken. Two hospitals were mentioned, and the blood types needed were A and O positive. Apparently, colleagues of the wounded policemen were already in line to donate their blood.

We’re not talking …

In his name

I remember visiting Anitkabir (Atatürk’s tomb in Ankara) with a friend of mine who admires Atatürk. He was sort of on top of the world, and I asked him why. He answered: ‘You know, Muslims go to Mecca, Kemalists go to Anitkabir.’

I couldn’t get it out out of my mind today. In the news there was an event that took …

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 …

She laughed along

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

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These kids will read

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 …

The Roma of Selendi

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 …