Fréderike Geerdink - independent journalist

Crying babies

14/10/2007/0 Comments/in Other /by fgeerdink

She had been in a good mood all day, taking care of the guests coming to her house for seker bayrami, the festival marking the end of the fasting month. He came home early from work in his own business, to take time for dinner and exchange the latest family and village news. An average Turkish couple in an average Anatolian city, aged around fifty, with adult and almost-adult children.
About an hour later, they were both crying. I didn’t notice, till my friend, their daughter, drew my attention to it. It was the news that made them sad: again, that weekend Turkish soldiers died in the southeast in the fight against PKK. Young guys mostly, some just married, some young daddys. My friend advised her parents just to change the channel. They did, but the other channels showed the same: crying families, crying babies, funerals, pictures of the deceased, sad music or tunes you would expect in a James Bondmovie. My friend got angry at the journalists presenting this news. Yes, she said, the losses must be mentioned and the grief must be shown, but not 20 minutes in a 25 minutes news show, as if nothing else happens in the world. And not with all this over-sentimental music, slow motion images and loudly crying babies – as if a half-year-old would be conscious of losing his daddy. The more non-objective and over-emotional news items people see, she said, the more people become aggressive and want to kill the terrorists. News shows, she concluded, have become participants in the conflict. Which leads to more deaths on both sides. The dead soldiers also make my friend sad and angry, but the way the conflict is brought to the TV-screen adds to her losing hope in peace.

Focusing on the future

10/10/2007/0 Comments/in Other /by fgeerdink

Tomorrow, the US House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs will vote on resolution 106, the resolution that asks the US president to take into account the ‘Armenian genocide’ in US foreign policy. The papers here in Turkey are full of it. Politicians suggest countermeasures to be taken against the US if the resolution is adopted. Turkey might for example cut logistic support for US troops in Iraq.
What you don’t read about in the newspapers is the opinion of Armenians in Turkey. How do they look at all these developments? These days I’ve been thinking about a talk I had some time ago with some young Armenian men and women in Istanbul. They were not pleased with the attempts of Armenians in, for example, France and the US to have the events at the beginning of the last century acknowledged as ‘genocide’. Some of them even said that Armenians in the diaspora are not even real Armenians. Armenians are people who live on the ground they originated from, in present-day Armenia or in present-day Turkey. Armenians, they say, have lived with Turks and other people on this soil for centuries. And even though the position of Armenians in Turkey has not been easy over the past century, things are very slowly changing for the better. Armenians are not, like before, trying to hide their background, but feel more proud of their identity. Turkish society is also open to that, as was shown at the beginning of this year in demonstrations after the murder of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, when big crowds of Turks shouted ‘We are all Armenians’ on the streets. This living together in unity with respect for each other’s background is a process focused on the future, and that is what young Armenians want. Yes, they want more openness about what happened about a hundred years ago, but that’s different to making political games over it.

A bit sceptical

08/10/2007/0 Comments/in Other /by fgeerdink

This morning I talked to some relatives of Turkish soldiers who died in the fight against the PKK in the southeast of the country. I met the relatives in Ankara, at the national office of a support group for wounded veterans and family of killed soldiers. The interviewees and the head of the organisation were a bit sceptical. Why did I want to write about this? What would be the context of the article? I said I write about people that are news themselves or related to news, and killed soldiers are unfortunately almost daily news in Turkey, that you can see the conflict between Turkey and the PKK from a political perspective, but that you can also focus on the human side of it, and that in this article I want to focus on the human side. People lose their loved ones in armed conflict, and I want to write down how that feels, regardless of the politics.
To them of course the whole matter had lots to do with politics. So I wrote that down, besides their feelings as a widow and a father who lost his son. They were glad a newspaper outside Turkey would publish articles about their losses. But, I asked, there must be more foreign journalists coming? No, actually, there were not. Before me, earlier this year one Japanese TV-journalist came, and now me. That was all. For them that lack of interest was another example of how ‘the west’ is on PKK’s side and doesn’t back Turkey in its part of the ‘war against terror’. They were still sceptical: after two, three hours of talk, one of the men made a remark about foreign journalists. ‘We think foreign journalists in Turkey are spies’, he said. He laughed about this ‘joke’, I laughed too, I said I hadn’t yet thought of such a good way to increase my income. When I left, they asked me to send them the article after publication. Even if it was only in Dutch? Yes, they would find someone to translate it. Well, here it is, translated and all.
I wonder if they trust me now.