While Erdogan rises to the presidency, his ally and foreign minister Davutoglu is set to be the new Turkish prime minister. His intellectual gifts are matched only by his political failures.
Tag: turkey
Turkey is a NATO ally of the United States, but American officials have summarily dismissed its input about airstrikes in Iraq, even with Turkish lives on the line. Why Turkey needs to clarify itself in so many ways.
-OpEd- It’s anything but a surprise, given the weakness of the opposition and an election played out in advance: Recep Tayyip Erdogan won after the first round of voting in Sunday’s presidential election — the first ever in Turkey by direct universal suffrage. Erdogan thus perfects a political career marked, for 20 years, by one […]
ISTANBUL — What does voter turnout in Sunday’s Turkish presidential election tell us about the popularity and ambitions of President-Elect Recep Tayyip Erdogan? So far, we know the number of Turks who went to the polls for the country’s first direct presidential election in history was about 13% lower than the number who turned out […]
ANKARA — Turkish foreign policy is having a serious identity crisis. The Turkey that had largely achieved an equilibrium in its relations with the West and the East, a shining star in the international arena between 2003 and 2010, unfortunately no longer exists. The high morale and sense of moral superiority of being a country […]
Four years into Syria’s conflict, cannabis has become an unlikely key source of financing for a number of groups in the opposition-held north. It’s used mostly to buy weapons. Jabal al-Zawiya in the province of Idlib is a mountainous area close to the Turkish border. Once famous for growing olives, it is now used to grow pot. Farmers here say the plant grows quickly, and yields higher revenues than olives. Most villages in Idlib province are living off the spoils of goods smuggled between Syria and Turkey, and many basic commodities available for purchase here now come from Turkey, too. […]
ISTANBUL — The Syrian regime today presents itself to the international community as a partner in “fighting terrorism,” and Bashar al-Assad is happy to leave his enemies on the northern front (where the Nusra, Islamic Front, Free Syrian Army, and YPG fight ISIS) to wear each other out. The proposed anti-terror partnership would function just […]
ISTANBUL — A one-page document. That’s it. All right, let’s include the appendix — that makes a total of two and a half pages. And with a big font too. I am talking about the Draft Law for Ending Terrorism and Increasing Social Unity, which the government recently presented to Parliament. Five articles in total, […]
Categories
Fresh From The Bosphorus
In 1968, Istanbul’s Galata Bridge was already famous for its throngs of fishermen. They would present their catch on the bright red trays you can see in the foreground. We bought two (don’t ask me to remember what kind of fish!) and had them grilled nearby.
Sure to be the leading candidate in August’s first-ever direct election of Turkey’s president, the current prime minister is touring Europe to woo Turks living abroad. Not all are convinced.
Categories
Strange Rocks International
From the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland to Arizona’s Grand Canyon, we’ve seen our fair share of geologic wonders over the years. These fairy chimneys in Turkey’s Central Anatolia region are more modest, but still as baffling as the rest.
Categories
A Challenger For Erdogan
The main opposition parties have chosen Edmeleddin Ihsanoglu to run against Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the Aug. 10 presidential election. A summer campaign is about to heat up.
ISTANBUL — In our divided existences, everyone lives their own reality, with their own priorities. Right now, the demand that this city’s Hagia Sophia museum be transformed into a mosque has suddenly become the singular issue for a certain segment of the Turkish population. The Anatolia Youth Association announced a gathering at the iconic location […]
Categories
Turkey And Israel, Frenemies Forever?
Much has changed, but some has not, in the complicated relationship between Israel and Turkey.
DIYARBAKIR — When Aykan Erdemir, a parliamentary member from Turkey’s Republican People’s Party, tried to visit the website of a Christian church located in the country’s southeastern city of Diyarbakir, he was surprised to see that the parliament’s filtering system recognized it as pornography. The preacher of Diyarbakir Protestant church, Ahmet Guvener, said he thought […]
Categories
A New Chapter
There is a French saying that goes les voyages forment la jeunesse (“traveling is learning”). Well in that case, I am quite happy to keep learning, at age 84: A couple of weeks ago, I traveled back to Turkey with my family to visit one of my two granddaughters who now lives near Izmir. We […]
-OpEd- BERLIN — There’s a cold civil war in Turkey. An event like the mining catastrophe and its 301 victims could have united the deeply split country, emotionally. But not even the grief of so many Turks could bring supporters and opponents of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan together. Turkey is split into at least […]
With more than 300 dead, survivors of last week’s Soma mine disaster in Turkey say their gas masks were useless. Turns out they were 20-year-old dirt cheap models. All apparently legal.
More than 300 dead in last week’s mining disaster in Soma, rage from the people, and utter insensitivity from an Erdogan government interested only in its own fate.
The number of Syrian refugees in Turkey has reached 900,000. They are our new poor. How we treat them is the great test of a new democracy.
Turkey’s current prime minister has big plans, both for himself and the very way his country is governed.
Categories
Istanbul, USA?
In 1965, Istanbul’s Galata Bridge, which spans the Golden Horn, was still a floating bridge. And the cars and street signs made the whole scene look like we were on U.S. Route 66. Istanbul was just an impromptu part of our trip to Romania and Bulgaria with our 6-year-old daughter Cécile. In the lobby of […]
The current President of the Republic mulls whether to stand against his old ally Prime Minister Erdogan in upcoming direct presidential elections. Turkey’s political future is at stake.
Categories
The Road Back To Turkey
I will be going back to Turkey next month, some 46 years after I took this photo. One of my two granddaughters, Véronique, now lives near Izmir with her Turkish-born husband Mutlu and my great-granddaughter Ada.
ISTANBUL — “I was 13,” said Nezihe. “He had been following me on my way to school and back. One day, he forced me into his car while I was leaving school and kidnapped me. He was somebody I had never seen before. They had made a deal with my family that very evening. A […]
ROME — A prominent Turkish journalist said she has been fired as payback for her Italian husband’s recent interview in La Repubblica with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s arch nemesis, Fethullah Gülen. In an interview published Thursday in La Repubblica, where her Italian husband Marco Ansaldo is a veteran correspondent, Yasemin Taskin confirmed that she […]
ISTANBUL — The current state of Turkey offers little cause for comfort. • The claims of corruption and theft multiply with each passing day. • Those same claims are about to be swept under the rug. • The judiciary is effectively finished. • Limitation of basic freedoms is on the rise. • Authoritarianism is alive […]
-OpEd- ISTANBUL — The saying goes that if the word “but” is featured in a sentence, nothing that comes before it should be taken seriously. Whether this is always true, I don’t really know, but what happened after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan targeted Twitter at a political rally in Bursa reminds me of this […]
A visit to an abandoned corner of Istanbul, where 40 families who fled Syria live in squalor.
-Opinion- ISTANBUL — On one hand, there is an investigation of an imaginary terrorist organization and the claim of a wiretapping list that includes some 7,000 people. On the other, there is the recording of a telephone conversation that has been spreading on YouTube, allegedly between Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his son. The […]
Since soon after the conflict began in 2011, Turkey has always been fiercely opposed to Damascus. Now opposition elements of al-Qaeda across the border may be another reason to act.
One tortured by the regime, another by Islamist rebels, both offer evidence of the worst kind of brutality that reigns in Syria today.
Categories
Inside The Mind Of A Syrian Jihadist
KILIS — Mohammad, a jihadi rebel from northern Syria, is describing his wedding night. His family had insisted on a non-religious ceremony. At the reception, just as his relatives began to dance and celebrate, he went home. “The music made me uncomfortable,” he says. Believing in the same religious tenets that have led extremists to outlaw music and singing in jihad-held areas of Syria, Mohammad chose to spend the night at home with his sister. On this day, in Kilis, across the border in Turkey, the 35-year-old former salesman is running late, but makes a courtesy call to say he’s […]
Seven years after the assassination of Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink, silence remains on the crime of incitement to murder – just like last century’s Armenian Genocide.
Khaled’s family is one of the 190 from Syria that have recently moved to poor and isolated Gaza. Doors elsewhere for refugees are closing, especially to the Palestinian minority fleeing Syria.
Ceyda Sungur became the symbol of the Gezi Park protests that shook Turkey because of photograph of a police officer spraying her with gas. That officer now has an unlikely defender.
ISTANBUL — Racism and discrimination have become a constant in Turkey’s top soccer league. The latest reminder are tweets from Umit Cinarli’s, a leading referee from the Turkish Football Federation (TFF), on the second anniversary of the Uludere Massacre where Turkish fighter jet bombs killed 34 Kurdish smugglers: “Happy second anniversary of the Uludere incident. […]
Over the past two weeks, an alleged corruption scandal has engulfed Turkey. Follow the rapidly changed events in these hectic days as Prime Minister Erdogan fights for his political life.
The unfolding scandal of alleged bribery by people close to the ruling AKP party looked set to reach Bilal Erdogan, but the investigating magistrate was removed from the case.
A widening corruption probe has been consuming Turkey in recent days. Figures close to the leading Justice and Development Party (AKP), including sons of cabinet members, are facing serious allegations of bribery and money laundering. The government is denying all accusations and claims the charges are part of a conspiracy with roots both foreign and […]