Once again, a young Kurd has been killed by the police, again in Cizre. A twelve year old this time, and his name was Nihat Kazanhan. May he rest in peace. Let’s try to look at trying to produce balanced journalism in Turkey on this topic. What you can do is go to Cizre, interview […]
Türkçe burada okuyabilirsiniz! A picture I tweeted of a group of Kurdish youths at the Kobani border crossing, holding PKK and Öcalan flags. The front page of my Facebook account. A photo I took of Salih Muslim when I met him last month at a conference in Brussels, where we both spoke. Parts of columns […]
(Türkçe burada okuyabilirsiniz!) At noon on the first day of this year, a few hundred people gathered at a cemevi (place of worship for Alevis) in Istanbul. They were there to pay their last respects to their friend and comrade Lütfü Taş. He died on the last day of 2014 in Diyarbakir prison. He had […]
You are so huge, so heavy, so impersonal, but still, I have this deep urge to grab you by the shoulders. If I, one of your tiny meaningless citizens, could, I would then shake you firmly. Wake up!, I would shout in your face. Come on Europe, wake up! I giggled last week, when I […]
Busy travelling again these days between Ankara, Imrali and the Qandil mountains. And the topic that the media seem to get excited about is disarmament. Are the Kurdish movement and the government trying to make a deal about the PKK laying down its arms? Öcalan, after all, said a few days ago that a solution […]
I had already seen him at the symposium, sitting in the conference hall with a large framed image next to him. I didn’t ask him what it was, I thought that he must be one of the speakers and we would find out eventually. And yes, we did find out eventually. Right after the closing […]
Six, I think every evening when I go to bed. I should get up at six. That’s around the same time the sun rises, so I would be able to catch as much sunlight as possible and not spend most of my waking hours in the dark. But of course I hardly ever manage to […]
A friend of mine has been living in Turkey for years, but has now moved to another country. From Turkey to a country with a full and working democracy. She said that she has just begun to realize again how nice it is to live in a democracy, after which she asked: ‘Don’t you miss […]
The beards are a good example. The beards that were shaved off by men in Diyarbakir and other south-eastern cities and towns, because they feared that if they did not shave their beards, they would come under attack from pro-PKK Kurds for being ‘Islamists’ or ‘IS supporters’. Many papers published articles about it, everybody took […]
Ne zaman Kürdistan’a gitsem ve onlarla konuşsam her zaman Kürt olmak dışındaki diğer kimliklerini keşfetmeye çalışıyorum. Bir Kürt kendini Kürt olarak tanımlayan birisi ama bunun altında hangi kimlik saklı? Bu, 25 Ekim 2014’te Bilgi Üniversitesi’nde düzenlenen ‘Sınırlar Aşılırken Kürtler: Değişen Mekanlar ve Kimlikler’ isimli konferansta yaptığım bir konuşmanın konusuydu. (Read the English version of this speech here) İki […]