The fight between Kurdish seperatist movement PKK and the Turkish army was at its dirtiest in the nineteen-nineties. Hundreds of (alleged) PKK sympathisers were killed or disappeared without a trace. Who was responsible? It was thought “Jitem”, a secret anti-terrorism unit of the military police. The bodies were dumped in wells, fields and rivers. Now that Turkey is …
What I like about being in ‘the village’ in Kapadokya in central Anatolia are the seasons that are defined by which kind of crop is in the center of everyday life. At the end of september, it’s grapes (and pumpkins): they are ripe and being harvested. In the streets there are horse carts with wooden boxes full of grapes, on …
So bayram, as they call the holidays here, is over. Three days of eating, kissing hands and visits to family and friends, people seem to love it but I’m happy I’m not really part of it. The children are rather generous with kissing the hands of their parents, aunts and uncles, adult brothers and sisters, and, well, everybody who has …
Network site myspace.com has been closed down in Turkey. It’s not totally clear yet why, but it’s said it has to do with copyright laws being infringed. On myspace, a lot of music is shared among members, and it’s of course feasible that in the process copyrights are not always respected. Which is illegal, but hardly a reason to close …
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 …
What to think of the immense tax fine that Dogan Media Group was hit with this week? At 3.7 billion Turkish Liras ($ 2.5 billion), it’s a shocking amount of money. Of course, the debate about whether Dogan Media Group has really been cheating on taxes or whether it’s just another step in the efforts by the AKP government to …
Istanbul cleans up while waiting for new rain
ISTANBUL – At a flooded clothes store a large group of women and children are scrambling in the mud: they are collecting clothes from it, push them into big plastic bags and take them away in small wheelbarrows. Around the corner the streets are full of wet muddy furniture, curtains and domestic appliances, the whole day people have been shovelling …
When I came out of the post office, I saw a woman standing in a corner, hiding herself a bit. I looked again, and saw she was eating some kind of muesli bar. I guess she didn’t want anybody to see she was eating during Ramadan. She was wearing a headscarf. Maybe she was trying to fast but just couldn’t …
I’m watching the Turkish news. Last weekend, four soldiers were killed by a PKK bomb in the southeast of the country, and yesterday and today they were buried. Some TV news bulletins start with pictures of the funerals: slow motion images of the coffin, wrapped in a Turkish flag, the now widowed wife falling on the coffin crying, the soldier’s …
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