The co-President of the HDP Ertuğrul Kürkçü, speaking at a meeting of HDP MPs, told those assembled that what suits the Gezi youth is to be demonstrators for peace, not soldiers, and that “we will not die nor we will kill nor will be soldiers for anyone” – according to an article in today’s Özgür Gündem. He went on to [...] → Read the full article…
Hundreds of academic across the world have shown their solidarity with Middle East Technical University (METU) in its fight against the unlawful and destructive highway construction project passing through the campus forest. There are 857 signatories from 278 academic institutions and twenty-six different countries. The statement emphasizes that METU resistance has turned into a fight for environmental rights, freedom of speech, and higher [...] → Read the full article…
Turkey’s Gezi Park protests have clearly reflected the distance between the priorities of the Turkish people and the Turkish government, Socialist International (SI) Secretary-General Luis Ayala has said ahead of the group’s summit in Istanbul, which will begin with a special session on Gezi. We are very interested in listening and learning more of the Gezi Park protests. That’s why [...] → Read the full article…
Did you know there are legitimate and illegitimate lifestyles? That is what Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told a Finnish reporter in Helsinki on Nov. 6. After suggesting the reporter was on a special mission to offend him, Erdogan went on to say that during his 16 years in politics, he has “never intervened in personal lifestyle choices.” Erdogan added that whatever the laws say, that [...] → Read the full article…
It started with a leak, too. The leak was from a closed-door session of the ruling Justice and Development Party’s (AK Parti) latest big event bringing MPs and party organizers together to assess the political atmosphere before the March 2014 local elections. It was exclusively reported by daily Zaman and as part of another political story, not a separate one. [...] → Read the full article…
Gul not ruling out challenging authoritarian prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for presidency next summer. Growing divergence of views over the government’s handling of last summer’s violent street protests, and over what Gul calls Turkey’s “democratic deficit” and the “normalisation” of Islamic values within Turkey’s secular constitutional framework, has prompted suggestions that the two men, who together have dominated the [...] → Read the full article…
Retrospectively it became a foreboding. Or, in other words, reality came to grimly echo the creative intervention of an Armenian youth group in Gezi Park. Shortly after setting up their association’s tent in the middle of the park during the first days of the occupation,Nor Zartonk stapled together two pieces of grey Styrofoam resembling a gravestone and marked with the line, [...] → Read the full article…
On the morning of July 1st, exhausted from the first night of clashes with the riot police but still upbeat, the crowd of young male soccer fans with eyes red from tear gas chanted, “Go on, spray, go on, spray. Go on spray tear gas. Strip your helmet, drop your baton. Let’s see who is the real man!” This would [...] → Read the full article…
A small protest in Istanbul, which began by aiming to protect the urban greenery, was rapidly turned into a full-blown nationwide resistance. The protests should be regarded as the most important outcry of the Turkish people since the 1980 coup, and herald a new period in the history of Turkey. But it would be a mistake to try to understand [...] → Read the full article…
Our living spaces are perpetually threatened by all institutions of the governing political logic. Not long ago, this logic had shown its dark and revanchist face through the clouds of tear gas during Gezi and it’s now re-surfacing on bumpers of bulldozers destroying the Middle East Technical University (METU) campus, one of the few remaining green spaces of Ankara. What [...] → Read the full article…