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Turkey
جدلية صعود أبو الفتوح وإمكانية استنساخ النموذج الأردوجاني
![[AP عبد المنعم أبو الفتوح المرشح للرئاسة في مصر. تصويرخليل حمرا. المصدر]](/content_images/3/sm_Mideast-Egypt_Horo-7-635x357.jpg "[AP عبد المنعم أبو الفتوح المرشح للرئاسة في مصر. تصويرخليل حمرا. المصدر]")
جاء الصعود السريع لحضور ودور أبو الفتوح في سباق الرئاسة المصرية ليعيد إلى الأذهان تجربة الصعود السياسي لأردوجان في تركيا في نهاية التسعينات وبداية القرن الحادي والعشرين. ولعل العودة إلى السنوات الخمس البارزة في تاريخ النظام السياسي التركي، خصوصا بين عامي 1997- 2002، تعين على فهم وتفسير عمليات وسياسات وسياقات صعود القيادات والحركات السياسية من خلال المقارنة بين أبو الفتوح وأردوجان وكشف جوانب التشابه والاختلاف بين النمطين والسياقين. ويلاحظ بداية أن تجربة خروج أبو الفتوح من عباءة الإخوان تشبه من أوجه عدة خروج أردوجان من حزب الرفاه وتحديه لقيادة الحركة الإسلامية التي كان يمثلها نجم الدين أربكان خصوصا بعد الصدام بين أربكان والمؤسسة العسكرية في عام 1997 الذي أدى إلى عزل ...
Keep Reading »Syrian Refugees in Turkey
![[Map of border area between Syria and Turkey. Image from Al Jazeera]](/content_images/3/sm_syrianturkishborder.jpg "[Map of border area between Syria and Turkey. Image from Al Jazeera]")
[The following report was published in the Fahamu Refugee Legal Aid Newsletter on 1 April 2012. It was prepared by by Oktay Durukan and Zaid Hydari of Helsinki Citizens Assembly-Regugee Advocacy and Support Program.] Update: Syrian Refugees in Turkey 16,000 and Counting … Since the Syrian conflict began over one year ago, the Government of Turkey has kept its borders open to individuals who have fled the turmoil. According to latest official figures, over 22,000 Syrians entered the camps erected in Turkey’s Hatay province near the border with Syria, and approximately 16,000 Syrians currently remain in the camps. News reports over the last two weeks have ...
Keep Reading »A New Kind of Armenian-Turkish Reconciliation
In October 2011, the newly renovated Sourp Giragos Armenian Apostolic Church reopened in Turkey’s southeastern province of Diyarbakir. Among the hundreds gathered to celebrate its first mass in over ninety years were local men and women who had chosen the occasion to be baptized into the Armenian Apostolic Church. Raised as Sunni Muslims, these men and women were the children and grandchildren of Armenians who had converted to Islam to escape persecution in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire. Living in a society that glorified cultural homogeneity and in a country that still bore the scars of its Ottoman past, the first generation of converts often kept their ...
Keep Reading »Turkey and Syria: A Breakup Bound to Happen
![[Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan meets with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Image from unknown archive.]](/content_images/3/sm_assad-erdogan.jpg "[Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan meets with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Image from unknown archive.]")
While Syria and Turkey have called it quits for now, a possible regime change in Syria could bring them even closer together. The sultans must be green with envy. At no time since the fall of the Ottoman Empire have Turks held such sway over the Middle East. In the context of Arab uprisings, Turkey has been able to solidify a position it has been carefully trying to establish for the past decade. So far, Turkey appears to have made all the right choices. Now, it is navigating everyday turns in the Arab uprisings with a dexterity that is only more salient when juxtaposed with the failed, often barbaric attempts by the region's bumbling dictators to quash revolts, which ...
Keep Reading »"Operational Accidents": On the Turkish State and Kurdish Deaths
![[Funeral of killed Kurdish citizens of Turkey. Image from i.radikal.com]](/content_images/3/sm_fft5_mf885702.jpg "[Funeral of killed Kurdish citizens of Turkey. Image from i.radikal.com]")
Reading the press release issued by the Turkish Armed Forces on Thursday, 29 December 2011, it is impossible to get the sense that during the previous night, its warplanes struck and killed thirty-five citizens of Turkey, many of them high school students and all of them civilians. When referring to the young Kurdish villagers it killed, the Turkish Armed Forces merely noted that it received drone-generated intelligence showing a group of people advancing along Turkey’s southeastern border with Iraq. The army, the press release stated, “judged it necessary” to launch an air-strike at “the target” between the hours of “21:37 and 22:24” precisely. The Turkish Armed Forces ...
Keep Reading »Letter from Istanbul Bakirkoy Women's Prison
![[Ayşe Berktay. Image from WTI archive]](/content_images/3/sm_ayse.jpg "[Ayşe Berktay. Image from WTI archive]")
[An October 2011 report on the so-called “KCK operations,” carried out in Turkey by Prime Minister Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party for the past two years, noted that the Erdoğan government has been using the judiciary, the police, and the media to penalize all civic activism in support of rights demanded by Kurdish citizens in Turkey. Since 2009, as many as 7748 people have been taken under custody on the alleged grounds that they are associated with the KCK—an organization claimed to be the urban branch of the armed organization known as the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party)—while 3895 people have been arrested and imprisoned without even the ...
Keep Reading »Turkey's Foreign Policy Towards the Middle East: An Interview with Asli Bali (Part 1)
![[Cartoon by Ingram Pinn]](/content_images/3/sm_turksihfp1.jpg "[Cartoon by Ingram Pinn]")
This is Part 1 of a two-part interview in which Asli Bali discusses Turkey's foreign policy interests and obejectives with regards to the Middle East. In Part 1, Asli tackels the question of whether Turkey's foreign policy positions vis-a-vis the Middle East have changed with respect to what is otherwise described as a "western orientation." She also explores whether whatever changes have occured can be traced directly to the AKP's rise to power within Turkish domestic policy, or rather form part of a larger strategic calculation on the part of Turkey's political elites. The interview was conducted on 30 November 2011 by phone. It was transcribed by Ziad ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Ayca Cubukcu, On Cosmopolitan Occupations: The Case of the World Tribunal on Iraq
Ayça Çubukçu, “On Cosmopolitan Occupations: The Case of the World Tribunal on Iraq,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 13.3 (2011): 422-442. Jadaliyya: What made you write this article? Ayça Çubukçu: The origin of this article goes back to my fieldwork with the global network of activists that constituted the World Tribunal on Iraq from 2003 to 2005. The World Tribunal on Iraq was an experimental project of the global anti-war movement, which emerged in response to the occupation of Iraq by the United States and allies. I say “experimental,” because although civil society tribunals (or, in another parlance, people’s tribunals) had been ...
Keep Reading »Turkish Politics, Kurdish Rights, and the KCK Operations: An Interview with Asli Bali
![[Arrested individuals being transported to their hearing in Diyarbakir as supporters look on. Image from hurriyetdailynews.com]](/content_images/3/sm_kckpicture.jpg "[Arrested individuals being transported to their hearing in Diyarbakir as supporters look on. Image from hurriyetdailynews.com]")
Turkey recently has witnessed a massive police operation against activists, advocates, academics, and publishers who are pro-Kurdish on the grounds of alleged links to the outlawed “Union of Communities in Kurdistan” (sometimes also referred to as the Kurdish Communities Union), known by its Kurdish-language acronym, the KCK. In the following interview, Aslı Bali provides some context for the “KCK Operations,” with particular reference to the role of the Justice and Development Party—known by its Turkish-language acronym, the AKP—and what these operations reflect about the broader struggle for civilian rule and democratization. The interview was conducted via Skype on 2 ...
Keep Reading »Turkey: Arrests Expose Flawed Justice System
![[Image form hrw.org]](/content_images/3/sm_HRW_logo650.jpg "[Image form hrw.org]"){kind=logo}
[The following statement is the latest from Human Rights Watch (HRW) on domestic developments in Turkey. It was released in both English and Turkish.] Turkey: Arrests Expose Flawed Justice System Academic, Publisher Held in Crackdown on Pro-Kurdish Party (Istanbul) – An Istanbul court’s decision on 1 November 2011 to imprison a publisher and a political science professor pending their trial on terrorism charges exposes the huge deficiencies of Turkey’s criminal justice system, Human Rights Watch said today. The arrests are part of a crackdown on people engaged in legal political activity with the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party. Ragip Zarakolu, the publisher, ...
Keep Reading »عن ساحاتنا ومآلاتها
في عصر الديمقراطية الزاهي في اليونان القديمة، على ماتقول الروايات التاريخية والأدبيات المسرحية، لعبت الساحة أو الآغورا دوراً رئيساً في التعبير عن إرادة المواطنين، أو الرجال الأحرار منهم على أقل تقدير. فهم كانوا يجتمعون فيها لمناقشة مايستجد من أمورهم العامة واتخاذ قرار جماعي بشأنها. ويقفون كتفاً لكتف، عراةً أو شبه عراة، لاتميزهم ملابس أو شارات، ويتناقشون ويتخالفون أو يتفقون، ثم يتخذون القرارات الملزمة لكل سكان المدينة ويصوتون عليها بالأغلبية. هذه الصورة، المتخيلة قليلاً والتي جمّلتها قرون من الكتابات ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Nergis Ertürk, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey
Nergis Ertürk, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Nergis Ertürk (NE): One of my motives was to try to deepen our understanding of the phoneticizing Turkish alphabet reform of 1928, which replaced a Perso-Arabic script with a Latin alphabet, as well the language reforms of the 1930s, which replaced many Arabic and Persian loanwords with Turkish neologisms. Of the effects of these reforms, the ...
Keep Reading »Turkey's Foreign Policy Towards the Middle East: An Interview with Asli Bali (Part 2)
This is Part 2 of a two-part interview in which Asli Bali discusses Turkey's foreign policy interests and objectives with regards to the Middle East. In this second part of the interview, Asli discusses Turkey’s foreign policy in the face of the Arab uprisings, with particular reference to Egypt, Libya, and Syria. The interview was conducted on 11 February 2012. It was transcribed by Ziad Abu-Rish and Kristina Benson. Edited Transcript (Complete audio file below) Ziad Abu-Rish (ZA): Last time ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Hakan Ozoglu, From Caliphate to Secular State
Hakan Özoğlu, From Caliphate to Secular State: Power Struggle in the Early Turkish Republic. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2011. Jadaliyya: What made you write this book? Hakan Özoğlu: Critical works on the early years of the Turkish Republic are quite rare, especially in Western scholarship. In the field of history, scholarly works on the Ottoman Empire overshadow the republican period. In Turkey, the transition period from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey has long been considered “sacred” for ...
Keep Reading »My Lonely and Beautiful Country: Recent Work on the Cinema of Turkey (Part Two)
Gönül Dönmez-Colin, Turkish Cinema: Identity, Distance, and Belonging. London: Reaktion Books and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Asuman Suner, New Turkish Cinema: Belonging, Identity, and Memory. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2010. Deniz Bayrakdar, Aslı Kotaman, and Ahu Samav Uğursoy, editors, Cinema and Politics: Turkish Cinema and the New Europe. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. [Part One of this review essay, which considers Gönül Dönmez-Colin's Turkish ...
Keep Reading »My Lonely and Beautiful Country: Recent Work on the Cinema of Turkey (Part One)
Gönül Dönmez-Colin, Turkish Cinema: Identity, Distance, and Belonging. London: Reaktion Books and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Asuman Suner, New Turkish Cinema: Belonging, Identity, and Memory. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2010. Deniz Bayrakdar, Aslı Kotaman, and Ahu Samav Uğursoy, editors, Cinema and Politics: Turkish Cinema and the New Europe. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. Upon being awarded the Best Director honor at Cannes in 2008 for his film Üç ...
Keep Reading »The New Kurdish Movie
Turkey’s decades-old “Kurdish Question” has recently changed its trajectory. There is a new movie playing in town. The Turkish state is determined to follow a new kind of politics in order to resolve the issues that have been haunting Turkish-Kurdish relations for almost a century. In this commentary, I would like to describe what this new politics looks like. Let us begin with the question, Why did Prime Minister Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) choose a new and contentious political path? ...
Keep Reading »AKP's Passion For Kurds: Either You Belong to Me, Or to the Courts
The collective imprisonment of political figures who are expressing the desires of the Kurdish people is an old reflex of Turkey’s state tradition. Collective arrests that started in 1959 with the imprisonment of forty-nine Kurdish intellectuals turned into collective executions in the 1990s and now—in proportion to the Kurdish people’s political development during the tenure of the AKP [the governing Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party) of Prime Minister Erdogan]—they have taken ...
Keep Reading »Van Earthquake Exposes Turkey's Ethnic Fault Lines
The recent earthquake in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish province of Van not only caused loss of life and damage, it also exposed the country’s political and ethnic fault lines. In the last two decades, there were ten earthquakes with a magnitude of six or more in Turkey. In 1999, two powerful earthquakes struck the country’s northwestern provinces, causing massive damage, costing billions of dollars and leaving more than eighteen thousand dead. The latest natural disaster on 23 October reminded the ...
Keep Reading »Where the Truth Lies
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Turkey, 2011. Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia opens with a scene in which the truth is buried; it is there in front of us but hidden. The first thing we see is an image that is shot from outside a dirty window. The camera remains outside, but the faces behind the window slowly become visible: three men are having drinks inside a car-mechanic's workshop. We are left outside, the sound is distant, and the image is blurry. A ...
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