Kamil Pasha

Image from Radikal

The image caption is “Enough!” Women’s groups have been demonstrating all over the country against the seemingly unstoppable juggernaut of violence against women, particularly honor killings. Women’s life is cheap, lightly taken at the least pretext. (See the extended Murder Count lists on this blog under ‘Women’.) Women who seek to separate, divorce or run away from an abusive situation or toward a happy one are at high risk because they (and their lives) are considered the property of their husbands and families. Disobedience brings death. She’s mine or she’s dead. Many of the killings are brutal with multiple stab wounds or gun shots. In one horrifying case in 2009, a young girl was buried alive by her father and grandfather.

One week’s bloodbath (from this article, in Turkish):

February 22: 44 -year-old Özlem Yılmaz’s husband of three years slit her throat. She is in intensive care.

February 23: In Mersin Saime B. was killed by her Mustafa Ç to whom she was “married” only by religous rites.

February 23: In Istanbul Arzu Odabaşı was shot by her husband from whom she was separated.

February 24: In Adana, Semiha K. was killed by her husband when she initiated divorce proceedings.

February 25: In Maltepe, Şehri Filiz, the mother of two children, was killed by her lover Tarık E.

Fevruary 28: In Antalya, Tuğba Dilekwas killed by her husband from whom she wished to separate.

March 1: In Mersin, 19-year-old Hatice Fırat was killed by her brother in an ”honor” killing ordered by her family because she ran away to live with her boyfriend.

March 2: In Bartın, Nilgün Usta was killed by Ahmet Unutur, who it is said was her lover.

Tags: Women // 3 Comments »

Thousands of people– members of  the media, trade unions and opposition parties — have been demonstrating in recent days in Ankara and Istanbul  against the continuing arrest of  journalists and writers for a variety of things they have written, most recently the results of the journalists’  investigations into state complicity in the murder of Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink, the Ergenekon coup plots, and the Fethullah Gülen Islamic organization. Journalists have also been tried for publishing about the Kurdish PKK. The days of book burning, it seems, have been replaced by computer file confiscation.

The Turkish Journalists Association (TGC) issued an announcement related to eleven people, most of them journalists, who were taken into custody on Thursday (3 March) in the scope of the Ergenekon investigation… The TGC stated that the year 2011 would be a dark one for press freedom compared to 2010.

“60 journalists are currently detained in prison; more than 2,000 journalists are being prosecuted. Investigations have been launched against 4,000 journalists. Death threats against journalists and trials carrying hundreds of years of imprisonment and are continuing“… Laws and death threats made it almost impossible to work in this profession, the association claimed.

“The government seems to remain a passive spectator of the threats against press freedom and journalists by giving the impression that they are not disturbed by the situation that the source of the threats is not being removed. Crimes of thought are on the rise again in this country with journalists being taken into custody, arrested and tried”. (click here for the full article)

And here is a more detailed account of the journalists most recently detained in the Ergenekon trials. Why are they being detained? Excerpt:

Eleven homes in Istanbul and Ankara were raided by the police on Thursday (3 March). Several people were taken into custody: Journalists Ahmet Şık and Nedim Şener, writer Yalçın Küçük, Oda TV Co-ordinator Doğan Yurdakul, journalist Sait Çakır, Oda TV Ankara representative Mümtaz İdil and police officer Aydın Bıyıklı. Moreover, the homes of Oda TV writers İklim Kaleli Bayraktar and Müyesser Uğur Yıldız and former National Intelligence Agency (MİT) member Kaşif Kozinoğlu were searched.  

[Şık's lawyer Bülent] Utku argued, “My client was taken into custody because of a book he wrote about the organization within the congregation of Fethullah Gülen. Şık… published the “coup diaries” by ret. Naval Forces Commander Admiral Özden Örnek in the Nokta magazine, an outline of different coup plans. Together with journalist Ertuğrul Mavioğlu, he wrote two books on the Ergenekon trial [for which they are on trial]… It was reported that drafts of Şık’s latest book which has not gone into print yet was found on the computers of OdaTV, an internet news portal whose office was searched by the police last week…

Şener has been working for the nation-wide Milliyet newspaper since 1994. He is facing 28 years in prison in a trial on his book “The Dink murder and the Intelligence lies”. In his latest book entitled “Red Friday, who broke Dink’s pen?” Şener reveals secret information on the murder of journalist Dink, founder of the Armenian Agos newspaper. The documents published in the book prove that the MİT and the Police had notice of the preceding death threats against Dink…

Tags: Deep state/Ergenekon, Rights // 15 Comments »

State Minister and Turkey’s chief European Union negotiator Egemen Bağış has announced that the Secretariat-General for EU Affairs (ABGS) has offered Turkish-Armenian Leo Süren Halepli the position of EU specialist. Halepli was notified of the offer on March 1 but has not yet responded with a decision…

Although many people of Armenian descent were appointed to civil service positions in the era of the Ottoman Empire, there was a state policy in the Turkish Republic of not allowing non-Muslims to state posts in accordance with the 1926 Memurin Law.

The law was changed in 1965 to state that a public official needed only to be a Turkish citizen. But, non-Muslims have been reluctant to seek official state positions; some have taken advantage of the change to pursue work in state universities but not in civil servant positions… (click here for article)

Tags: Armenians // 1 Comment »

A 2009 report, “Income Distribution and Living Conditions” was released by the Turkish Statistical Institute, or TurkStat. (click here for the report, here for a news article) The results are interesting given Turkey’s economic boom. Clearly it’s not booming for everyone. Some results:

The people in Turkey’s highest income group are 8.5 times richer than those in the poorest, up from 8.1 times in the previous survey. The richest 20 percent earned 47.6 percent of the country’s total income in 2009, while the poorest 20 percent earned 5.6 percent.

The overall poverty rate increased from 16.7 percent in 2008 to 17.1 percent in 2009.  The monthly income set as the official poverty line for a four-person household was increased from 767 Turkish Liras in 2008 to 825 liras ($509) in 2009.

Poverty rates increased in both urban and rural areas (15.4 percent and 16.1 percent, respectively).

59.3 percent of the Turkish population is in debt, 44 percent is not able to buy new clothes and 60.5 percent is unable to afford to eat meat. Eighty-seven percent of the population does not have enough money to take a one-week holiday.

Wages constitute the largest income source for the Turkish population, 42.9 percent, compared to entrepreneurial income, at 20.4 percent.

Istanbul residents continued to have the highest levels of disposable income in 2009, with an average of 12,795 liras ($7,905) annually in 2009. Southeast Anatolia had the smallest amount of disposable income, an average of 4,655 liras ($2,877).

Tags: State of the Nation // 5 Comments »

Ishak Alaton is a courageous Turkish businessman who for decades has had his ear to the ground, following politics and changes in society. He has connections in many walks of life, high and low, and with people of different ideological stances. He is one of the people in Turkey I most respect for his honesty and courage, despite threats and harm to his own associates. Here is an excerpt from a recent interview about the deep state (click here for the full article):

The 1990s were the most shameful years for Turkey, with a despotic state oppressing 10 million Kurds in the Southeast, torturing and killing them to profit from the illegal drug trade in the region.

These were also the years when the state encouraged illegal gangs within state organs and years that saw many assassinations, such as the killing of journalist Uğur Mumcu, which remain unsolved to this day. This is how İshak Alaton, a businessman known for his democratic stance, which makes him somewhat of an outcast in the business world, sees that decade. However, the real shame was brought about by the silence of Turkey’s civil society and business world, Alaton said in an in-depth interview with the Aksiyon weekly this week….

Tags: Deep state/Ergenekon // 5 Comments »

Photo from Radikal

February 3rd, Mersin. 19-year-old Hatice Fırat tells her family that she’s going to the grocery store, but instead runs away with her boyfriend. Her parents (her father is a construction worker) report her missing to the local police. Her elder brother Mahsum asks around among friends and family and finally gets a cell phone message from a friend telling him he has spotted his sister. “Don’t let her out of your sight”, Mahsum Fırat tells him. The brother tracks Hatice down and wins her confidence. He and his friend take her to dinner and listen to her story, that she is living with her boyfriend and is happy. He kisses his little sister and goes home, having promised not to reveal her whereabouts. Mahsum tells his family everything and the family holds a meeting where they decide to execute Hatice. Mahsum is chosen to do it.

He returns to the town where his sister lives, finds her alone at home. He suggests they take a walk along the beach. In a secluded spot, he takes out a knife and slits her throat, then stabs her body forty times, and rolls her corpse into a ditch.

Mahsum runs away. No one claims Hatice’s body from the morgue. Finally, fifty women from her neighborhood get together and bring the body for burial, cursing and shouting slogans: ”An end to the murder of women,” “We won’t become anybody’s honor”, Let those hands that threaten women be broken”. The girl’s family refuses to attend the funeral. The police arrest eleven members of the family, but are still looking for Mahsum.

Click here for the article, in Turkish. (Thanks Nihat for pointing it out.) Update: Here’s an article in English.

Photo from Hurriyet

Tags: Women // 6 Comments »

Slogan on sign: If Arabs had an Ataturk, they wouldn't have fallen behind. (Source: Radikal)

Turkey has been bandied about this past week as a model to be emulated by the new nations being born like small supernovas across the Middle East. Turkey was founded by a powerful military that doesn’t flinch from coups, but has also had a functioning and fair, if flawed, electoral democracy since 1950. The country currently appears to have found a place for Islamic piety within its political system without jamming any of its democratic wheels, although the process has been noisy and contentious. Its present elected government, under the Justice and Development Party (known by its Turkish acronym AKP), consists primarily of politicians who see themselves as pious individuals running a secular system. Some Turks believe that their intentions are secular, some don’t, but the democratic wheels keep turning. The AKP government has managed to make Turkey’s economy the fifteenth biggest in the world in GDP, only lightly sideswiped by the global turndown. There’s another election coming up this June and AKP leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan has promised that if his party doesn’t win, he’ll leave politics. All indicators show that he has nothing to worry about, but the critical element of his promise is the assumption that his party could lose, and then he would leave. That’s the trick of democracy that “eternal leaders” in the Middle East haven’t come to terms with. You lose, you leave. What has to be in place for this simple equation to become as second-nature as it is in Turkey? I happen to be teaching a course on Turkey this semester, so I posed the question to my students: Would the “Turkey Model” work in the Middle East?  Here are some of the variables they came up with… (click here for the rest)

Tags: Foreign Relations, Politics, Religion // 29 Comments »

Not here:

The Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors (HSYK) has elected 211 judges to the Supreme Court of Appeals and the Council of State. Six are women. (click here, in Turkish)

But here (click on the video in the link):

The governor of Ankara province wanted the stands handing out brochures to be removed from Yüksel Boulevard, one of Ankara’s main thoroughfares. A mass of police in full riot gear arrived to carry out his order and got into a discussion with a young woman at a stand promoting organ donorship. Young people gathered and surrounded her protectively, chanting “No to Fascism.” Watch the film. In seconds the police had moved in violently, as they have done with other protests and public civic actions in recent years, often by students and other young people. You can see them dragging people off (the news account said some were dragged away by the hair), throwing them about like paper dolls, and in the film if you watch carefully, you will see a policeman punching one of the young women hard in the face twice.

What was it that Erdogan said about the praiseworthy youth in Egypt demonstrating for their rights, that Mubarak should heed his people’s wishes?

Over-the-top police violence against men and women has been the norm in Turkey since I first went there in the 1970s. The problem has been police immunity and a continuing culture of disrespect for youth, for women, and for civil rights; a widespread acceptance and even approval of violence as a sign of masculinity and love of nation; and a lack of understanding of the principles of liberal democracy — making a safe space for alternative views and lifestyles. Democracy too often means I got the most votes, so everyone else should fall in line with my ideas and my values. A 2006 survey by Çarkoğlu and Toprak shows that the majority of the population values democracy and civil liberties, but shows little sensitivity toward others’ rights. Democracy is understood as a system that represents the views of the majority, rather than protecting the rights of minorities.

And here:

31-year-old Şehri Filiz, mother of two children, had been separated from her husband for three years and lived with 26-year-old Tarık E. During an argument in the street he killed her, stabbing her in the neck and stomach with a bread knife. He told police that he did it because while they were arguing “she pushed me.”

Moral to women: Don’t be pushy. Know your place. Agree with your betters.

Tags: Rights, Women // 14 Comments »

Elif Shafak, the author, most recently, of the novel The Forty Rules of Love, wrote an OpEd in today’s New York Times (click here for the full essay):

I started reading the fiction of the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz with a delay that embarrasses me, not until my early 30s. In the Turkey of my formative years, he was not well-known. His famous “Cairo Trilogy,” published in the 1950s, wasn’t widely available in Turkish until 2008.

We were far more interested in Russian literature — Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Chekhov and Tolstoy — and European literature — Balzac, Hugo, Maupassant and Dickens — than in Arab literature. (more…)

Tags: Culture, Fiction and Art, Foreign Relations // 31 Comments »

A court in Mardin has reduced the sentences of 26 men charged with rape to unlawful sex with a minor after it concluded the 13-year-old victim was willing and on account of “good conduct” on the part of the accused. The decision appeared to place some of the blame for the incidents on the victim herself.

While the men involved with the case – a group that included soldiers, civil servants, tradesmen and teachers – were sentenced to no more than four years and 10 months in jail each, the two women who sold the young victim, identified only as N.Ç., were given sentences of nine years.

The heavier punishments to the two women were justified by the Mardin 1st High Criminal Court as being due to “the virtueless life of the two women.”…

In its decision, the Mardin court recalled a comment by the Forensic Medicine Institute that “N.Ç. could have stood against these incidents.” The decision also said the victim later “contacted suspects E. and T. of her own will in order to earn money [for sex] and was involved in a relations with other suspects related to these men.”…

“The [court’s] refusal of the complainant’s health report, which proved the physical and psychological harm she has undergone, is an arbitrary decision that violates penal code provisions,” the lawyer said…

Previously, N.Ç. had written a letter to then-Justice Minister Cemil Çiçek when she learned that all the suspects had been released pending trial. “What would do you if it was your daughter and not me?” she wrote in the letter. (click here for the article)

Tags: Rights, Women // 2 Comments »