Two nights in a hotel for 120 American dollars. That’s an OK deal in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish region in northern Iraq. Stupidly enough I wanted to pay the bill with my credit card. The guy I travelled with had already warned me that a credit card might be useless, but I dismissed […]
What to think of the immense tax fine that Dogan Media Group was hit with this week? At 3.7 billion Turkish Liras ($ 2.5 billion), it’s a shocking amount of money. Of course, the debate about whether Dogan Media Group has really been cheating on taxes or whether it’s just another step in the efforts […]
ISTANBUL – At a flooded clothes store a large group of women and children are scrambling in the mud: they are collecting clothes from it, push them into big plastic bags and take them away in small wheelbarrows. Around the corner the streets are full of wet muddy furniture, curtains and domestic appliances, the whole […]
When I came out of the post office, I saw a woman standing in a corner, hiding herself a bit. I looked again, and saw she was eating some kind of muesli bar. I guess she didn’t want anybody to see she was eating during Ramadan. She was wearing a headscarf. Maybe she was trying […]
I’m watching the Turkish news. Last weekend, four soldiers were killed by a PKK bomb in the southeast of the country, and yesterday and today they were buried. Some TV news bulletins start with pictures of the funerals: slow motion images of the coffin, wrapped in a Turkish flag, the now widowed wife falling on […]
When talking about the Kurdish issue and the initiative that the AKP government is taking to solve the problems, it sometimes seems that there is a big gap between Turks and Kurds. That the whole matter is black and white, two adversaries standing opposite each other. That this is not the case becomes clearer now […]
Two weeks ago, Arzu Erbas, a Dutch woman of Turkish descent, was killed in Amsterdam. Amsterdam local newspaper Het Parool quickly found out that the killer was probably a man of Turkish descent as well, and it could be the case that it was the father who was forbidden by court order to see his […]
Ununderstandable really, that I never watched ‘Wilco’s bus’ before. Wilco’s bus (in Turkish: Wilco’nun karavanı) is a programme on Iz TV made by Wilco van Herpen, a Dutchman who has been living in Turkey since 1999. With his bus he travels around Turkey and shows Turks their own country through his Dutch eyes. Wonderful TV, […]
Is opposition party CHP launching its own initiative to help solve the Kurdish issue? Some people say they are working behind the scenes, talking to NGO’s and representatives of the Kurds. It’s also pointed out that more than ten years ago the CHP wrote a report about democratisation as a possible solution to the Kurdish […]
ISTANBUL – Ten years after the devastating earth quake that hit the Turkish city of Izmit and surrounding area, the quake is hardly a subject of conversation any more. The people who were made homeless at the time have a roof over their heads again, the city is standing more solidly on its foundations than […]