Kamil Pasha

Sebahat Tuncel has written an overview of the current state of the process of rapprochement between the Turkish government and the PKK (here) and the position taken by various groups, parties, and actors vis-a-vis this process. This is an important process for Turkey and for the region, but is fraught with the possibilities for wrong steps and failure. To help the process along, Tuncel suggests that international powers that, she writes, have meddled in these affairs before, should now step up to the plate and help solve them:

For Turkey to manage this process by itself, for there to be no yielding to internal factions who oppose a democratic peaceful resolution, international powers also have a part to play in terms of duties and responsibilities, especially the United States and the European Union. It would be a contribution to the process of peaceful resolution in Turkey if the United States and members of the European Union were to review their “terrorist organizations” list and remove from it the PKK, which has taken strategic steps to transition from armed struggle to democratic struggle in response to the call by the Kurdish people’s leader Abdullah Öcalan.

Tags: Kurds // Add Comment »

There are 324,770 official Syrian refugees in Turkey (Turkish government estimates are 400,000). 17 out of 23 of the region’s refugee camps are in Turkey, which has decided to halt construction of any new camps. The main issues are cross-border attacks by pro-regime forces (as witnessed recently in Reyhanli where two car bombs killed at least 51 people) and unrest in Kurdish areas (which many hope may be calming as a result of a recent peace agreement between the Turkish government and the PKK). The main threat to Turkey as a result of the refugee crisis  is a spillover of sectarian tensions into Turkey’s Alevi and Sunni communities (although Turkey’s Alevis differ extensively from Syria’s Alawites). The Turkish population’s opinion is hardening against Turkish intervention in Syria and any further truck with refugees, despite widespread sympathy for their plight. 

Although the total funds pledged by donor countries are impressive, few countries have fulfilled their promises, making it difficult for UNHCR and other organizations to provide basic essential services.

The Institute for Iraqi Studies at Boston University has just published an up-to-date, fact-filled report on the condition and fate of Syrian refugees, country by country, with sections written by scholars and activists who have visited the camps. (The full report can be found here.) The report also usefully looks at the Iraqi refugee situation for insight into the trajectory of the Syrian crisis. Years after the precipitating event, some 1.5 million Iraqis remain displaced.

The report also makes recommendations based on the specific problems in camps in different countries.  In some of the camps, for instance, especially in Jordan, sexual predation has become so common that the most requested medications are for birth control.  The requesters are women and girls fearing rape. Fifty-one percent of Syrian refugees are children under age 18. The Jordanian camps are overcrowded, leading to protests and internal tensions. Also, the Jordanian border is closed to Palestinians seeking to flee Syria.

Although there are 455,665 Syrians displaced in Lebanon (the Lebanese government estimates over 1 million), they are not given refugee status and instead are referred to as “displaced Syrians.” There are no refugee camps for Syrians, so they are living amongst the populace, often hosted by individual families, which makes their identification and assistance more difficult. They  are not allowed to construct shelter, including tents.

Iraq has about 142,395 Syrian refugees in Iraq. This is in addition to nearly one million Iraqis still officially displaced as a result of the ongoing civil war, or Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). There are three refugee camps for Syrians, which are not accessible for the Iraqi IDPs. Cross-border attacks launched both by Iraqis and by Syrians destabilize the camps.

The report contains a description of conditions in the Atmeh refugee camp on the Syrian side of the Turkish border, controlled by the Free Syrian Army. The camp originally held 17,000 people, but hundreds arrive every day, mostly women and children, many displaced multiple times within Syria. 18 percent are under age four. There are 40 operational toilets and three schools (one an Islamic school) for 8500 children. Some of the schools are made of cement blocks or tents without flooring.

The refugees all receive a basic breakfast from the Turkish government, and then a late afternoon lunch, which is prepared by three volunteers in one kitchen, which is supposed to supply all the refugees with meals while lacking a floor (it is a mud floor), and consisting of walls that are cement with large gaps. The roof is tin. The three volunteers begin cooking at 5:30 am to serve more than 17,000 people…

[T]he most requested medications were for birth control. The prevention of unwanted pregnancies is a top priority; at least 60 women had been raped and are now carrying children conceived by the rape. Another pressing health issue is the proliferation of diseases caused by contaminated water, limited hygienic facilities and malnutrition including cholera, scabies, and leishmaniasis…

Tags: Foreign Relations, Rights, Uncategorized, Women // Add Comment »

Photo by Jenny White

Peonies 
by Mary Oliver

This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready
to break my heart
as the sun rises,
as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers

and they open–
pools of lace,
white and pink–

…

Tags: Uncategorized // Add Comment »

It has been a shamefully long time since my last post. My new book, Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks – to my great delight — has been very well received. As a result, I’ve been on the road almost every week giving talks and interviews on top of my usual busy schedule. Now that classes are over, I can breathe a bit and come home to KamilPasha, who I have missed! (Just before heading off on another insane travel jaunt to give talks in Istanbul, Israel, Sweden, then Istanbul again. I promise to blog from the road, internet connectivity permitting.)

One of the interesting tidbits that have been piling up beside my computer:

In early April, the Turkish Republic Health Ministry decided to drop the ‘Turkish Republic’ part of its name that usually appears as “TC” in front of  the names of ministries and their related institutions. Health Minister Mehmet Muezzinoglu explained that adding TC was unnecessary. He noted that if you have a sign that says “Istanbul Umraniye Official Health Hospital”, it makes no sense to add “Turkish Republic” as well.

Having just been in Washington DC, I was imagining “US” on signs all over town: “US Department of State” instead of just “Department of State” as it is now. Or US Environmental Protection Agency, US Congress. Where ELSE would a Washington agency be but in the US. It made me wonder why Turkey has all those “TC’s” on their ministries. In Turkey, TC refers not to the national name, but to the state. TC tells the citizen where the authority lies. Enter here and you will be subject to the authority (and guidance and care) of the state. Removing “TC” makes sense as part of the process of reuniting the state with the nation and citizen that has been ongoing in Turkey over the past two decades.

MPs from MHP and CHP immediately requested an inquiry in parliament. MHP Aydin representative Ali Uzunirmak asked whether this was the beginning of a slippery road that would lead to accusations of racism if a company used the word “Turk” in its name. What was equally interesting was the reaction on social media. According to the Turkish press and eye witness of some of my students, people on a number of social media sites, including Facebook, have changed their image to “TC”. TC came up as the leading name of Turkey’s 9 million social media users.

This is an example of clicktivism, a term I only recently learned (again from my students). Clicktivism means feeling that you are politically active by forwarding something on Facebook or following a social media trend to express support or disapproval (like changing your picture to TC in Turkey– or as in the US recently when 2.7 million people changed their image to a red = to voice support for same sex marriage in a case being heard before the [U.S.!] Supreme Court). There is a debate about whether clicktivism is effective in initiating change, whether its symbolic force has an impact, or whether it’s a lazy way for people to feel they are politically active even though they’re not. Well, the TC social media campaign in Turkey seems to have worked and TC is back on the Health Ministry’s door.

And predictably, in the comments section of one of the Turkish news articles about the elimination of TC, someone vehemently argued that this was a CIA plot. That’s the U.S. CIA.

Tags: Nationalism, Politics // 25 Comments »

Main gate of the old Ottoman Archive, 11 March 2013. Photo by Michael Christopher Low. From jadaliyya.com.

Three graduate students in Ottoman history have written an impassioned review of the new Ottoman archive that has just opened its doors in Istanbul’s Kağıthane neighborhood on April 22. The old archive was housed in a romantic and easily accessible, but crowded, historic building in Sultan Ahmet behind the storied gate of Bab-ı Ali. The new site is modern and not unpleasant, although far from the hands-on visual and sensual experience of the empire that the old archive afforded generations of researchers. The new archive has many advantages — space, lighting, apparently climate-controlled rooms for document storage. But the authors, as some of the first researchers to find their way to the new site, give some important warnings. The most important is that the documents have not made their way to the new building and the staff is unsure of when they will arrive.

The reading room is open for digital document services, providing access to a fraction of the total documents available. However, we were told that the paper documents themselves had not even begun to be moved from the old depot… As we dug deeper for the staff’s predictions for the resumption of normal service, we were met with extremely pessimistic prognoses. Two months was the most optimistic estimate, but this was offered with a shake of the head and a warning to brace for a wait of as long as six months before normal services were restored. Thus, it is probable that research plans for spring or early summer are essentially ruined. This will likely leave most of the archive’s collection inaccessible perhaps even into the fall, leaving doctoral students and professors scrambling to adjust their research plans and renegotiate fellowships and grants.

If you or an Ottomanist colleague were planning to do research in Istanbul this year, this is crucial information.

The site also is almost inaccessible by public transport. Catching a bus involves “a harrowing scramble across four lanes of high-speed traffic”. And other than a cafeteria on site, there are no restaurants or cafes near the building. The outlook is bleak indeed for those studying Ottoman history, at least in the short term. The article by Patrick Adamiak, Jeffery Dyer, and Michael Christopher Low is on Jadaliyya. Forward it to your colleagues.

Tags: Istanbul, State of the Nation // 1 Comment »

Image from Bulent

There’s a new face around town, an e-journal that aims to fill the sweet spot of desire for fresh, cutting-edge, edgy and real reportage about Turkey. The first issue has hit the e-stands. Get it here.

Here’s what the editors have to say about the journal:

BÜLENT is a quarterly online journal which aims to encourage new ways of thinking about contemporary Turkey.

BÜLENT takes its title from a common Turkish boy’s name. It is the name of Bülent Ecevit, former Prime Minister, poet and translator, and Bülent Ersoy, a much loved transexual singer.

As two of the most iconic Bülents, Ersoy - whose public gender transition coincided with the repressive 1980 military coup  - and Ecevit – who stood at the inception of the Turkish financial crisis when a book was thrown at him across parliament – both present figures which cut across contemporary Turkey’s most interesting tensions. Not least the unpredictable shapes of identity politics, and the brute power of the written word. These two lives offer a basic departure for the journal, which aims, not so much to ‘unveil’ Turkey, as to engage with existing critical debates.

We publish articles, essays, interviews, translations, photos and multimedia works. We are looking for all kinds of collaborators. Please get in touch with us at info@bulentjournal.com

Issue Zero: April 2013

Editors: Isobel Finkel & Thomas Roueché

Tags: Fiction and Art, State of the Nation, Uncategorized // 3 Comments »

A recent article in Variety gave some information about the TV and film industry in Turkey and about social media usage. Here’s the article. Here’s the info briefly (with my comments):

Local movies took 47% of market share last year, despite only 70 local movies produced. (Fetih 1453 — see my review here — made $31 million.) Average movie ticket price is five bucks. But movie attendance is low (0.6 visits per person per year; 2.7 in the UK).

Imax has two theaters in Turkey and plans to open three more. This is particularly galling, given the razing of classic movie theaters like the Emek Cinema that date to the beginning of Turkey’s own movie industry, now sacrificed to the relentless construction of malls — into which Imax would fit perfectly, if completely without character. The entire country at present has 2000 screens. I find it hard to imagine, despite Imax’s optimism, that the present government would like more opportunities for promiscuous mingling of the sexes in the dark.

With 18 million TV homes, Turkey is one of Europe’s major markets. Half of the viewers use satellite TV or cable. More than 3 million subscribe to pay-TV. There are two dozen private national and hundreds of regional and local channels. “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” and “Pop Idol” are big, but the most popular show is Star channel’s historical soap, “Magnificent Century” (Muhteşem Yüzyıl), to which I have admitted being addicted.

42.5% of the population [of 80 million, 70% living in cities] is aged 25-54; 26.2% are under 14. There are lots of cool, stylish kids with the latest smartphones. The country has among the world’s highest social media use through mobile Internet. An estimated 30 million Turks use Facebook. Turkey ranks eighth among nations in terms of Twitter penetration. Some 71% of Turkish Internet users go online every day for entertainment purposes. According to the BKM (Interbank Card Center) data, the Turkish e-commerce market reached a whopping $25 billion in 2012.

Given that most people didn’t have home telephones in the 1980s, this is a remarkable transformation. I still remember the first phone booths in Ankara appearing in the mid-1970s; their cords were immediately cut by vandals. Anyway, who could you call?

I’ve always believed that the introduction of the cellphone at the end of the 1980s and its immediate spread was a major factor in Islamist political organizing, making it possible to set up phone trees and mobilize large numbers of people through their personal networks. I remember the frustration of trying to do research in Istanbul in the 1980s by making appointments from a phone booth, the long lines, men swinging their worry beads at the glass if you were taking too long, and the frustration of finding no one home of the few people who even had telephones that one could call. The unwritten phone booth etiquette rule was that you could dial one call (even if no one answered) and then you went to the back of the line again. Imagine doing business or political organizing like that.

Istanbul is so big that sometimes I’d spend hours to travel to visit someone (not having been able to tell them I was coming) only to find them not at home. No wonder people took to cell phones like a third ear. The Turkish custom of hosting a visitor at your door, regardless of how inconvenient, is likely related to this inability to plan ahead. Now people don’t have to visit (and getting through traffic is even worse), so why not tweet and twitter instead, like birds comfortably perched on a power line high above the gridlocked city.

Tags: Culture, Fiction and Art, State of the Nation // 2 Comments »

I thought this was very innovative and worth noting: a floating electricity-generating power plant, a “power ship” that can be parked by any shore and used to generate part of that country’s electricity needs. There is currently a Turkish “power ship”, the Fatmagül Sultan, parked off Beirut that is producing 188 MW of electricity daily, the equivalent of two extra hours of electricity for Lebanon, which has been plagued by outages, its system under increased strain with the addition of hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees. A second Turkish ship is on its way. The three-year deal will give Lebanon the breathing space to repair its own power plants and get them up to speed.

In an article in The Guardian, The owner of the Karadeniz energy company, Osman Karadeniz, said he got the idea in his travels in Africa where he noticed that lack of electricity meant that children in hospitals and clinics were dying unnecessarily and the local economy was unable to develop. Small generators were very expensive to use. He thought of the ‘power ship’ as a solution, but with no infrastructure and “not even a hardware store” in some of these areas, large power ships would be difficult to maintain. His company is now working on smaller versions for use in Africa. It is also interesting that the Turkish ambassador to Lebanon places this technical innovation in the context of Turkey’s reviving influence in former Ottoman lands. 

Tags: Foreign Relations, Science // 1 Comment »

Amnesty International is urging the Turkish government to use this crucial moment to act concretely to decriminalize dissent, at a time when a new constitution is being written where such issues are being debated and when promises have been made in this respect to the PKK in return for peace.

A package of reforms called the “Fourth Judicial Package” is before parliament right now, but Amnesty argues that these reforms fail to make the necessary legislative amendments to bring national law in line with international human rights standards.

The notorious and vaguely defined Article 301 of the Penal Code “Denigration of the Turkish Nation”, used arbitrarily to prosecute a broad variety of speech, remains in force, as does Article 318, “Alienating the public from military service”, used to prosecute support for the right to conscientious objection. Anti-terrorism laws have been used extensively in recent years to prosecute legitimate activities including political speeches, critical writing, attendance at demonstrations and association with recognised political groups and organizations. These three laws are the hammers that have continually and arbitrarily taken aim at people’s rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly to the extent that Turkey now leads the world in number of  journalists in jail.

This is a moment of potential change in which the voices of concerned people might make a difference. Please consider signing Amnesty’s petition (in English here and in Turkish here).  Amnesty’s short report is here and long report in pdf form can be downloaded here.

The right to freedom of expression is under attack in Turkey. Criminal prosecutions targeting dissenting opinions represent one of Turkey’s most entrenched human rights problems. Despite a series of legislative reform packages, unfair laws remain on the statute and continue to be abused. In this report, Amnesty International analyses the problems in law and practice relating to ten of the most problematic offences and makes concrete recommendations on the legislative changes needed to bring these abuses to an end.

Their specific recommendations:

In the Penal Code:

•Repeal Articles 301 “Denigrating the Turkish Nation”, 318 “Alienating the public from military service” and 215 “Praising a crime or a criminal” in their entirety

•Decriminalize defamation as outlined in Article 125 to treat allegations of defamation as a matter for civil litigation by taking it out of the Penal Code

•Amend Article 216 “Incitement to hatred or hostility” by repealing paragraphs 2 and 3 to ensure that only advocacy of hatred constituting incitement to violence is prosecuted

Anti-terrorism offences:

•Bring Turkey’s overly broad and vague definition of terrorism in line with the definition of the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism

•Repeal Articles 220/6 “Committing a crime in the name of an organization” and 6/2 “Printing or publishing declarations/statements of a terrorist organization”

•Adopt guidelines for prosecutors on the application of Article 220(7) of the Penal Code that set out clear criteria for when assisting an armed group can be criminalized, including the requirement that such assistance must either in and of itself be a recognizable criminal offence, or be directly linked to the planning or commission of one.

•Amend Article 7/2 “Making propaganda for a terrorist organization” so as to ensure that it only prohibits advocacy of incitement to violence

Tags: Headscarf Debate, Politics, Rights // 15 Comments »

In YaleGlobal,  Mohammed Ayoob writes that the new deal for peace between Turkey’s government and PKK rebels to end more than thirty years of hostilities also has implications for the wider region, especially Iraq, Syria, and Iran. If Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan can convince the various political factions in Turkey to go along with the plan, Ayoob argues, Syria’s threat to harbor the PKK would be neutralized and a successful social and political integration of Turkey’s Kurdish population would provide a model for Kurds in Syria and Iran as well. An end to discrimination against Kurds would strengthen democracy in Turkey.

As I discussed in recent posts (here and here), the Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) is the major partner at the moment with Erdoğan’s AKP in writing a new constitution, a process that has been fraught with arguments and delays as the various parties disagree over wording and, in particular, over Erdoğan’s desired restructuring of Turkey’s political system to one in which the president has more power than at apresent. This is a position Erdoğan would like to occupy. The other two major parties in Parliament — Republican People’s Party (CHP) and Nationalist Action Party (MHP) oppose a presidential system, but do not have enough votes to block BDP and AKP from passing a draft. When put to a referendum, a draft constitution would most likely pass, given the AKP’s popularity and assured Kurdish support. The new constitution also potentially would guarantee minority rights and individual rights (there is some disagreement about the merits of group rights versus individual rights) and redefine Turkish national identity. It is likely that BDP support for the presidential system in the Constitution is in some way linked to AKP’s support for a peace mission in which BDP has been a major player.

Ayoob discusses in some detail the political situation of Kurds in Syria, Iraq and Iran and argues that Erdoğan’s peace deal with the PKK, “if implemented honestly and successfully, is likely to turn Syrian Kurdistan into a friendly entity much like Iraqi Kurdistan.” Iran had long supported the PKK against Turkey until rapprochement with Ankara after AKP’s election in 2002 when Turkey also forged closer ties with Iran’s ally, Syria. However, after Turkey’s split with Syria in 2011 and after Turkey allowed NATO to position an anti-missile defense system in the southeast positioned, despite Turkish denials, to intercept Iranian missiles aimed at the West, Iran reportedly revived its support for the PKK. A Turkish-PKK peace deal would remove these weapons from the hands of other regimes and strengthen Turkey’s hand against Iran and Syria. This would have repercussions in Iraq as well, Ayoob points out, where Iran supports Nouri al-Maliki’s Shia-dominated government, and Turkey supports Sunni Arab opponents of the Maliki government.

In other words, if successfully implemented, the Ocalan-AKP peace process, would bring a blessed end to hostilities that have killed over 30,000 people, would revitalize Turkey’s democratic process, bring into play a vibrant Kurdish population that had been economically and culturally sidelined for decades, but also, as Ayoob points out, would have much larger repercussions regionally.

There is a great deal of hope in Turkey that this time the peace will hold, but also many obstacles in the way of crafting an enduring peace. Some of those obstacles are in populations on both sides weaned on nationalist and militarist ideologies that will likely resist accommodation with what many see as “the enemy”, but much also lies in the manner in which the process is implemented. As Ayoob put it, “One hopes that the Turkish government acts with sagacity, indeed with magnanimity.” A punitive approach or a half-hearted one will likely end up like previous attempts where some small spark, something as trivial as too much Kurdish celebration as a busload of PKK fighters were repatriated into Turkey across the Iraqi border, relit the nationalist fire and restarted the war.

It is possible that a successful peace is now possible in part because of the particular conjuncture of a weakened nationalist military and a strong autocratic leader. But power and will alone won’t make this happen. Given decades of deep and well-placed mistrust and fear, the hands guiding the peace process must remain steady and sensitive to humanitarian concerns and people’s rights. These are not sensibilities generally associated with Turkey’s strong-man prime minister. On the other hand, the stars seem aligned in unique ways that, if interpreted correctly, light the way to a solution.

Tags: Foreign Relations, Kurds, Politics // 1 Comment »