That I would ever come to love Harem bus station (the biggest bus station on the Anatolian side of İstanbul) is sort of a miracle. The first time I was there – on the way to cover this story – I was totally overwhelmed by the shouting of the guys trying to sell tickets, the people […]
The AKP has, as predicted, won the local elections in Turkey. It’s a pity there is no research into why the voters chose to vote AKP. It would reveal the corrupt side of the Turkish political system. The AKP has had a lot of support from conservative Muslims in Anatolian cities and villages since the […]
Good election results for opposition party CHP: they reached 23% of the vote, up from 18% in the last local elections in 2004. The AKP is losing support, ending up with only 39%, after almost 42% in 2004 and 47% in the general elections two years ago. AKP-leader Erdogan announced before the elections that he would […]
These four Turkish women grew up in the Dutch cities of Rotterdam, Hengelo, Oss and Zwolle. A few years ago, they chose to leave Holland for Turkey. Their future, they say, is in Turkey! published in February issue Red Magazine, the Netherlands “Look!” says Arzu enthusiastically when the twilight falls in Turkey’s capital Ankara. […]
So what do you do when you’re a small business man in a Turkish village, you’re not an AKP supporter, but the AKP candidate seems to be winning in your village and you need some favours concerning your business after the elections? Then you don’t support the AKP openly, because that would go too much […]
More and more factories closing down? That has nothing to do with any crisis, these people are just not such good businessmen. A global economic crisis? No, it’s not, the crisis will bypass Turkey. Unemployment rising too much? Okay, it’s 13 percent now, but that’s mainly because more elderly people started to look for a […]
ISTANBUL – He himself is rather dismissive about it, but it hit Turkey like a bomb: during his official two day visit to Iraq, the Turkish president Gül said the ‘K-word’, that is: Kurdistan. The majority of Turks agitate strongly against the term, since it would bring closer an independent Kurdistan and thereby threaten the […]
Okay, I’ve sort of recovered from yesterday. I went to a big AKP rally in Istanbul’s Zeytinburnu district, the last big local election event organised by the governing party, and I came home at the end of the afternoon totally worn out. At first, I didn’t want to go to Zeytinburnu. Actually, when I left […]
ISTANBUL – The Turkish Directorate for Religious Affairs, a state organ that oversees religious life in Turkey, will translate the Koran into Kurdish, daily newspaper Vatan reports today. After Kurdish the Koran will also be translated into other languages spoken in Turkey, like Azeri and Georgian. The Koran was already translated into Turkish in the […]
It looks sad, the whole wall covered with posters of AKP candidate Bilici in the city centre of Adana, (Turkey’s fifth biggest city with more then a million inhabitants, close to the Mediterranean Sea): somebody has attacked the posters with a knife. In one his eye is gone, in another his stomach is torn apart, […]