Kids in southeast Turkey: smuggling to survive
SMUGGLING – At the end of December 35 people lost their lives in a bombardment by the Turkish army. Seventeen of them were less than 18 years old. They were smugglers, who brought diesel and sugar from Iraq to Turkey. There is a war going on in the area between Turkey and the PKK, a forbidden Kurdish movement. That makes …
Denderleeuw – ‘We won!’ An employee of the Kurdish channel RojTV, broadcasting under a Danish license, enters the newsroom with a phone in his hand. He is on the line to Denmark, where the judge just announced the verdict in a case against RojTV, which is accused by the Turkish government of being a terrorist channel. Then everybody cheers: ‘We …
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, …
Ilker Basbug last ‘old fashioned’ Turkish army leader
DIYARBAKIR – Ilker Basbug was the last Turkish army leader who belonged to the ‘old guard’ of Turkish army leaders. He commanded the second biggest army in NATO from 2008 to 2010, and clashed several times with the AKP government of Prime Minister Erdogan.
Basbug (68) was detained on Friday as a suspect in a coup plot against the government. He …
(I went to Gülyazi this week, one of the villages in the Uludere district where 35 villagers got killed in an airstrike of the Turkish army. Read this news agency article I wrote about it here, and a blog post here.)
In the old days, says one of the smugglers, there were no …
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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Uludere victims’ families don’t want compensation
GÜLYAZI – The families of the 34 boys and young men killed last week in a bombing by the Turkish air force, will not consider accepting the compensation the Turkish government is offering them. Prime Minister Erdogan announced on Tuesday that within a few days he would pay the families of the men, who were smuggling across the Iraqi border …
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