Kamil Pasha

New visa rules for foreigners go into effect February 1st.

Until now, many foreigners have done “visa runs” to neighboring countries, exiting Turkey after their 90-day visa ends and then immediately re-entering with a new 90-day visa. However, the new law prepared by the Labor and Social Security Ministry will only allow foreign citizens entering the country with a tourist visa to stay in Turkey for three months, after which time they will be obliged to wait for another three months abroad before they can return…

Foreign citizens who arrive in Turkey by means of a tourist visa and later obtain a work permit will be allowed to extend their stay in the country for a year or more…  Foreign workers, however, will then be obliged to pay a hefty premium of 400 Turkish Liras as well, while they will also be barred from obtaining employment in a sector where Turkish citizens demand work. (click here)

Exceptions are envisioned for foreigners, mainly Georgians, Armenians and Moldavians, doing house labor, babysitting and patient care.

Tags: Foreign Relations // Add Comment »

This post has been updated. The film has been shown. Here’s a new account.

Turkish public television will show an epic French documentary about the Holocaust, the first broadcast of its kind by national media in a Muslim state… A spokesman for Turkish public television TRT said the 1985 film “Shoah” would be shown on one of the network’s 14 channels…

The director of nine-hour-plus documentary, Claude Lanzmann, called the Turkish move historic. Turkey’s broadcast of the film is the culmination of work by the Aladdin Project, a Paris-based group which tries to improve Jewish-Muslim relations.

The group said in a statement the film would be shown Thursday, the day before International Holocaust Remembrance Day, adding that it had never before been shown in its entirety in a Muslim country. Consisting largely of Holocaust-survivor interviews, the film examines the killing of European Jews in Nazi death camps during the Second World War… (click here)

Tags: Foreign Relations, Jews // 6 Comments »

An article by Karolina Tagaris about how much Greeks love Turkish soap operas (click here for full essay).

ATHENS (Reuters) – When an Athens taxi driver learned his passenger was the boss of an Istanbul-based company that brings Turkish TV dramas to Greece he reached for his phone, called his wife and put her through to the man sitting in the back seat ”She had to know what happens next,” Global Agency chief executive Izzet Pinto said with a laugh. “I was expecting success but not like this.”

It all began when crisis-stricken Greek TV channels realized that buying the glitzy tales of forbidden love, adultery, clan loyalties and betrayal from long-standing regional rival Turkey, was cheaper than filming their own.

The action-packed dramas quickly came to dominate the ratings despite the fact that they are broadcast in Turkish with only subtitles in Greek and have gained a devoted following among a Greek populace disheartened by the country’s biggest financial crisis in decades.

Local commentators even talk of a Turkish invasion…

Between stamping passports in a packed Athens police station, a young officer keeps an eye fixed on a tiny portable TV on the edge of her desk showing repeats of the latest prime-time hit, “Ask ve Ceza” (Love and Punishment).

TV ratings for the shows in the small country of 11 million reached 40 percent in the summer, knocked off the top spot only by the occasional Champions League soccer match. Major channels ANT1 and Mega competed by showing a drama each at 9 p.m. and re-runs in the late afternoon.

“I realized hatred is manufactured by the guys at the top,” said Angeliki Papathanasiou, a 21-year-old law student. “You don’t see the bad enemy, you see the real Turk who falls in love, who gets hurt, who is like us,” she said of the shows…

Tags: Fiction and Art, Foreign Relations // Add Comment »

According to Hurriyet Daily News, Syrian opposition Kurdish parties are preparing to announce the formation of their own “National Kurdish Council” in the northern Iraqi capital of Arbil. The National Kurdish Council will become the second national council established by Syrian opposition forces after the establishment of the Syrian National Council. (click here)

The Syrian National Council described itself as the largest Syrian opposition group – including Islamists, leftists, liberals, Arabs, Christians and Kurds – when it was established in Istanbul on Aug. 29, 2011 under the leadership of Burhan Ghalioun.There are around 15 different Kurdish parties in Syria, a few of which are represented in the Syrian National Council.

Tags: Foreign Relations, Kurds // 1 Comment »

Tags: Foreign Relations, Uncategorized // 16 Comments »

This post has been updated TWICE.

"For Hrant, For Justice". Image from Radikal

It is satisfying that after five years of courtroom anguish (click here) after the assassination of the Armenian Turkish journalist Hrant Dink, that his killer, Ogun Samast, be given 23 years in prison and the man who instigated the youth to pull the trigger, Yasin Hayal, be given a life sentence.  What was not addressed was evidence that the gendarmerie had known about the assassination plans in advance and did nothing to prevent it (indeed the police upon arresting Samast had chummy photos taken with Samast in front of a Turkish flag and a nationalist slogan).   Throughout the trial, evidence (files, videos) kept disappearing. Given the government and judiciary system’s rabid interest in tracking down plots in every corner of society, and given the high profile nature of this case and its importance in convincing observers that Turkey is serious about protecting its Christian minority, as PM Erdogan claimed in Cairo recently, one would think that such egregious abuse of the judicial process would result in more than just a few slaps on the hand of the officials involved. (click here, in Turkish) Click here for an English-language account of the ruling.

photo from Radikal

According to the newspapers, more than ten thousand people marched silently through Istanbul’s streets to converge at Dink’s Agos newspaper office to protest the ruling. The banner says “We are all Hrant. We are all Armenian.” Click here. Even the head of the panel of judges responsible for the ruling said he was dissatisfied with it, but that there needed to be evidence for collusion and that they did not have the time to go through all the thousands of phone records in the area around the time of the murder.

Tags: Armenians, Deep state/Ergenekon, Religion, Rights, Uncategorized // Add Comment »

Image from Radikal

The surgeon İlker Şahin put on a Santa suit at his Bursa hospital and went together with fifteen nurses to the home of an eight-year-old girl, the daughter of a nurse, who had had an operation on New Year’s day. They wanted to surprise her and cheer her up. Someone complained to the police that he was walking around the hospital dressed as Santa, so Mr. Şahin is now under investigation.  I’m not sure what law that breaks. Especially since in Istanbul’s Taksim square the police have been dressing as Santas to catch pickpockets and in earthquake-ravaged Van municipal authorities dressed as Santas to cheer up the children. Does every “complaint” from a citizen result in an investigation even if no law is broken? An odd use of manpower, especially since so many requests for police assistance by women under threat result in no action. (see the “Women” section of this blog for countless examples of willful police inaction.)

Tags: Culture, Religion, Rights // Add Comment »

In a disturbing article, Gareth Jenkins parses what exactly General Başbuğ is accused of and on what evidence. Click here for the full article. Here is a brief excerpt from the introduction:

In the early hours of January 6, 2012, General İlker Başbuğ, who served as chief of the Turkish General Staff from 2008 to 2010, was arrested and imprisoned on allegations of “founding or directing an armed terrorist organization” and “inciting the overthrow of the government of the Turkish Republic or the prevention of it fulfilling its duties”…

The charges follow a judicial investigation into a number of websites allegedly controlled by the military which had published derogatory articles about the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). The investigation is being conducted by the same group of prosecutors and investigators as are responsible for the long-running Ergenekon and Sledgehammer cases, which have become notorious for their numerous absurdities and abuses, including repeated breaches of due process, patently fallacious conspiracy theories and even the inclusion in their indictments of manifestly fabricated evidence.

However, in the case of the military-run websites, the charges do at least appear to be grounded in reality. It is no secret that in the past the Turkish General staff frequently ran black propaganda campaigns against perceived threats to the unitary, secular state; such as Kurdish nationalists and Islamist activists. Nevertheless, both the specific charges against Başbuğ and the manner in which the investigation has been conducted have intensified already serious concerns about the credibility of the Turkish judicial system amid growing fears that the country is slipping into a new era of repressive authoritarianism…

Tags: Uncategorized // 1 Comment »

Excerpts from a Foreign Policy article by Justin Vela. Click here for the full article.

…In the past two years, thousands of citizens who have voiced criticism of the government have been detained, usually led away by police in predawn raids on their homes. On Jan. 5, one of the country’s most high-profile detainees, investigative journalist Ahmet Sik, testified in court for the first time to defend himself against charges of propagandizing for a shadowy pro-military conspiracy called Ergenekon, which allegedly plotted to overthrow the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

In his testimony, Sik mocked the evidence presented against him, which included transcripts of telephone conversations, published news articles, and the draft of his unfinished book, The Imam’s Army, which aimed to expose the Islamist Fethullah Gulen movement’s pervasive influence within the Turkish state…

…[I]t’s not the military that has moved against Sik — it’s another, different deep state. The Imam’s Army chronicles the rise of Fethullah Gulen, an aging cleric living in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania who has built up a powerful network that claims to operate thousands of schools in 140 countries. He calls for inter-faith dialogue and promotes the study of both science and religion in his classrooms. Supporters say the group is solely involved in fostering education and an ethic of public service throughout Turkey and the rest of the world…

The criticisms of Gulen, who preaches a moderate version of Islam, are not focused on his religiosity but rather on the movement’s lack of transparency. The group has accrued a large degree of influence over Turkey’s nominally secular government and society, and the AKP’s own parliamentary deputies have confirmed that the party has links to the Gulenists…

“There was a marriage of convenience between the Gulenists and Erdogan because they shared the common goal of trying to demolish the old Kemalist regime,” explained Gareth Jenkins, a Turkey expert and non-resident senior fellow at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute of Johns Hopkins University. Now, with that job nearing completion, the relationship appears to be fraying…

In this coming clash, it’s remarkable how little even the most dedicated researchers understand about the Gulen movement. Sik himself admitted he did not have a clear grasp of its overall goal. He rejected the notion that the group is trying to establish an Islamic republic, making the point that any goal beyond seizing power was not very clear.

“‘Something’ has come to power in Turkey, but not sharia,” he said in his letter. “I can’t name that ‘thing’ properly.”…

Tags: Deep state/Ergenekon, Politics, Religion, Rights, State of the Nation // 7 Comments »

On December 29, 2011, warplanes struck and killed thirty-five Turkish, many of them high school students and all of them civilians. The attack was based on drone-generated intelligence showing a group of people advancing along Turkey’s southeastern border with Iraq. The young men were smuggling products across the border. (click here for full text of an essay by Ayça Çubukçu; excerpt below.)

…Strikingly, neither the Turkish army nor the Turkish government has yet expressed anything resembling an official apology regarding the killing of the thirty-five Kurdish citizens. In telling contrast to his prompt and passionate denunciations of Israel’s “operational accidents” that kill Palestinian civilians, Prime Minister Erdoğan kept completely silent for more than twenty-four hours after the deadly operation by the Turkish Armed Forces. Furthermore, AKP spokesperson Hüseyin Çelik was quick to warn the [Kurdish political party] BDP—which has declared three days of mourning after the killings—not to “provoke” people to protest on the streets, or else “other people may also be harmed.” Such statements can only be received as threats in a country where citizens are arbitrarily detained, accused, and indefinitely imprisoned as suspected terrorists on a regular basis.

Only a few days ago, Interior Minister Idris Naim Şahin publicly redefined terrorism to encompass “artistic terrorism” and “scientific terrorism” along with terrorism’s poetic and journalistic kinds. In his description of how various members of civil society are supporting terrorism, the Interior Minister claimed:

“Maybe by reflecting it in their paintings. They write poems and reflect it in their poems. They write daily articles and columns about it. Not content with that, they are trying to demoralize the soldiers and police who fight against terrorism by making them the subjects of their artworks.”

While this description led some artists and activist to call for the Interior Minister’s resignation, he surely and securely remains in place. This political climate is perhaps best captured by one commentator’s sarcastic description of the situation in Turkey as an extremely infectious epidemic, whereby the population is inflicted with an ideologically transmitted disease (ITD) called terrorism. “Otherwise, how can we explain the large and growing number of terrorists in the country,” the author searchingly asks…

Tags: Education, Fiction and Art, Kurds, Rights, Science // 1 Comment »