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BY DANI RODRIK

I no longer recognize Turkey, the country where I was raised and spend most of my time when I am not teaching in the U.S.

It wasn’t so long ago that the country seemed to be taking significant strides in the direction of human rights and democracy. During its first term in government, between 2002 and 2007, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) worked hard to bring the country into the European Union, to reform its legal regime, and to relax restrictions on Kurds.

But more recently, the same government has been responsible for a politics …

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• i want to correct something:
  below the picture in the article written that AKP supporters holding the banner. it’s a clear lie. the pictures on the banner belong to some people who were put in jail because of the mentioned court cases, which are supported by government. and the people who are against these series of cases claim that erdogan is manipulated by the usa, and this dependence on usa causes turkey loose.
  supporters of erdogan are about 30-40 percent. and the total percentage of the islamists in turkey is at most 50%. but the percentage of dislike against usa is about 80%. it’s obvious that turkish people feel some problem with usa politics.
  maybe some people should give up trying to relate dislike against usa to non-democracy. even the lie i mentioned above in this article shows that some powers in usa can give up ethics and can easily slander others for some interests. maybe this can explain the 80%.
  finally, it’s weird that in such a big newspaper, writers can lie publicly, if they want to.

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  • • Catherine Dempsey replied:
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    most of the turkish people believe that they will not accept turkey into the union. it was the same before the developments too. and many people don’t want to be included because of the attitude of the eu. although i don’t mind if they accept us or not, like many others, i support advancements in areas like human rights, in particular rights about ideological issues. it seems there is some progress, but relatively slow. but certainly, it does not go backwards, no matter what some people claim.

    
    

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  Turkey refuses to grant independence to the Kurdish people. Turkish war planes cross over the border to northern Iraq and bomb Kurdish villages practically every day, killing an maiming thousands of people whose only desire is to have their land, Kurdistan, gain independence.
  Turkey, cannot with a clear conscience, support the Palestinian people and at the same time so brutally refuse to recognize the legitimate rights of the Kurdish people.
  We cannot, we must not forget the genocide committed by Turkey against the Armenian people. Turkey s testing us all now. If we sit idle, Turkey will destroy the Kurds too.

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