Anger at the deadly mine explosion in Turkey spread across the country on Thursday as thousands of workers joined a protest strike, demonstrators clashed with security forces, and families began to bury scores of men killed in the disaster. As the death toll at the Soma coalmine pushed towards 300, with hopes extinguished for at least 100 more miners thought [...] → Read the full article…
Anger at the deadly mine explosion in Turkey spread across the country on Thursday as thousands of workers joined a protest strike, demonstrators clashed with security forces, and families began to bury scores of men killed in the disaster. As the death toll at the Soma coalmine pushed towards 300, with hopes extinguished for at least 100 more miners thought [...] → Read the full article…
A stream of ambulances continued to bring the dead from the Turkey’s Soma mine today. The bodies are carried 2km from inside the mine by a stream of volunteers — many of who are miners themselves. As many as 787 miners were in the mine at the time of Tuesday afternoon’s explosion, which is thought to have been caused by [...] → Read the full article…
Turkey has been plunged into grief and swelling anger after an explosion in a coalmine in the west of the country left at least 274 people dead, amid fears that the bodies of scores more people still need to be recovered. The accident at Soma in the western province of Manisa, north of Izmir, is Turkey’s worst modern mining disaster in a country already notorious [...] → Read the full article…
Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Istanbul on Thursday in May Day rallies, confronting riot police officers to protest a government mired in a corruption scandal and accused of imposing a creeping authoritarianism in Turkey. The police fired tear gas, used water cannons and shut down main streets to disperse hundreds of protesters seeking to challenge a government [...] → Read the full article…
Police detained 4 children for chanting “Berkin Elvan is immortal” during Istanbul’s official April 23 celebrations attended by Governor Mutlu. Police detained 4 children for chanting “Berkin Elvan is immortal” during Istanbul’s official April 23 celebrations attended by Governor Mutlu. The incident took place as Governor Mutlu headed toward the podium for an award ceremony. The aforementioned children initially faced [...] → Read the full article…
Erdogan sent in the police to crush the demonstrators of Gezi Park last year, went berserk when it was suggested his party and relatives were involved in corruption scams, and fired or removed hundreds of police and security officers. Then he promised to wipe out “social media” before the municipal elections which he inevitably won, and uttered the kind of [...] → Read the full article…
In the run-up to Turkey’s municipal elections on March 30, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declared that the popular vote would serve as a referendum on his scandal-plagued leadership. With the help of his Justice and Development Party (AKP), which centered its campaigning on him, Erdoğan was able to redefine the elections. His opponents blindly played along, hoping that the [...] → Read the full article…
Both the police department and Istanbul’s governor have been cleared of using excessive violence against protesters during last year’s Gezi events in a report from Interior Ministry inspectors assessing their response to the demonstrations, daily Radikal has revealed. In the report dated Sept. 18, 2013, those responsible for the escalation of the local protests into nationwide demonstrations were declared [...] → Read the full article…
When Gezi protesters occupied the park last summer and took their frustration with the government to the streets, Prime Minister Erdoğan told them to “be patient and face off at the ballot box.” It was exactly Erdoğan’s reductive framing of democracy, which limits political legitimacy to elections and takes an uncompromising, polarizing stance against opposition, that Gezi protesters stood against. Nonetheless, unlike [...] → Read the full article…