‘But you love the party too!’ I couldn’t believe my ears when an acquaintance said that to me last week. By ‘the party’ he meant the BDP. Me, loving a political party? I love life, I can love people, but parties, states, organizations, leaders? Impossible. I was in Agri to report on the aftermath of […]
Somehow I have got used to the sound of shutters being opened in my street, around 7.00 in the morning. It doesn’t wake me up anymore. I still wonder which shop it is that opens at that hour. The pharmacy? The furniture shop? The small bakal maybe, or the tea house? Across the street the […]
Cizre has a 27 year old female mayor now, Leyla Imret, from Germany. Diyarbakir has Gültan Kisanak, Mardin has Turkey’s first ever Syriac mayor, Februniye Akyol. All together the BDP had more than 44% female candidates in the local elections, and many of them won. But do they really have the support of the people? […]
QANDIL – As soon as Chopy Fatah leaves the backstage tent, it starts: girls in guerrilla outfits or in traditional Kurdish glitter dresses want to give her a kiss, journalists want a quote and PKK members can’t wait to get a picture taken with her. Dutch-Kurdish singer Chopy – living in the city of Amersfoort […]
The around two hundred young men and women around a burning barricade in the Istanbul neighbourhood of Okmeydanı joke around, the atmosphere is relaxed. But then an aerosol in the fire explodes, BAM, and the group scatters. Right under the surface, the tension is high. The battle can begin any moment. It’s Thursday evening, 13 […]
How devastating to again wake up to a state murder. The victim this time is Berkin Elvan, fifteen years old. During the Gezi protests in Istanbul last year, he went out to buy bread for his family. He was hit in the head by a teargas canister shot by the police. Taken to hospital, slipped […]
Dressed immaculately in a dark blue suit and with his hair perfectly combed, Seymus Akbulut was sitting in front of a portrait of Kemal Ataturk, Turkey’s founding father, and a huge Turkish flag. On his desk were two more Ataturks: one on a silver plate, one a glass statuette in a red velvet box. “We […]
‘In my view’, President Gül tweeted, ‘in principal no freedom should be curbed. Everybody who wants to should be able to surf the internet freely’. That was on 28 May 2011. It may give some people hope that Gül will use his veto right to stop the new internet law from taking effect. But I […]
A colleague told me that a few months ago. ‘Kurds just ain’t sexy’, she said. As I knew she couldn’t possibly be talking about the attractiveness of Kurds, I figured she must be meaning it in a journalistic sense. Sexy being sellable. That when you propose a story about Kurds to any media, they immediately […]
Ji bo nivîsa Kurdî li vir xînin. Türkçe yazı için buraya tıklayınız. Within two days this month, on 12 and 13 January, information was leaked concerning both the murder of three Kurdish women in Paris (on 9 January 2013) and the Roboski massacre (of 28 December 2011). The core information that came out: the Turkish […]