Category: Germany

With an estimated number of at least 2.1 million Turks in Germany, they form the largest ethnic minority. The vast majority are found in what used to be West Germany. Berlin, Frankfurt,Hamburg, Rhine-Ruhr (Cologne, Duisburg and Dortmund) have large Turkish communities. The state with the largest Turkish population is North Rhine-Westphalia.

Turkey pursues neo-Nazi cases

Turkey pursues neo-Nazi cases

Source: XINHUA | 2011-11-20 | ONLINE EDITION

ISTANBUL, Nov. 19 (Xinhua) — Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said here Saturday that Turkey would bring those who killed Turks in Germany to justice in its effort to intervene in the neo-Nazi cases.

The minister made the statement at a “session of ministers” as part of the World Turkish Entrepreneurs Congress in Istanbul on Saturday.

Davutoglu said that no one should doubt Turkey’s intention to bring those responsible for the killing of Turks in Germany to justice.

“They were killed due to racism. We consider them to be martyrs. They were killed just because they were carrying the Turkish identity that we carry. We will follow up on the acts of the racists who killed the Turks in Germany,” Davutoglu said.

Turkey is preparing an application to German courts to get involved in the judicial process being launched against far-right extremist suspects accused of killing eight Turkish citizens between 2000 and 2004.

German security forces recently revealed that a neo-Nazi cell calling itself the National Socialist Underground is suspected of committing a string of racist murders, including the killing of eight Turks.

The crimes have caused soul-searching across the country, which is concerned about tarnishing its image in the eyes of the international community.

Germany is home to nearly 3 million Turks with 700,000 of them holding the German citizenship.

The revelation of the neo-Nazi cell fueled concerns among the Turkish community, which has suffered from similar extreme-right attacks in the past.

via Turkey pursues neo-Nazi cases — Shanghai Daily | 上海日报 — English Window to China New.

November 20, 2011
Turkey to offer legal support to neo-Nazi victims

German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich (L), and Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, during a summit on Friday to discuss the fight against neo-Nazis.

Turkey will be offering legal counseling services to the victims of racist violence in Germany, according to a statement by the Prime Minister’s Overseas Turks Agency (YTB) on Friday that comes after the discovery that a neo-Nazi cell in Germany with shady links to German intelligence killed at least 10 people, including eight Turkish and one Greek immigrant.

The announcement also comes one day after Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu urged German officials to find the “extensions” of the Neo-Nazi groups within the German state. The YTB announced on Friday that legal counsel services will be provided to all the victims’ families. YTB President Kemal Yutanç said there was nothing acceptable about a series of murders in Germany over the past ten years that were only recently linked to a neo-Nazi cell. “There is nothing understandable here. We trust foreign countries for the safety of our citizens abroad. Likewise, we are responsible for the safety of people from foreign countries here.” He said the YTB will provide both legal assistance and any other support that the families of the victims might require. He said the YTB will be discussing the issue with the foreign ministry, adding that YTB employees had already begun contacting the families of the Turkish victims.

Head of the parliamentary Human Rights Commission Ayhan Sefer Üstün also made harsh remarks about Germany’s failure to protect immigrants from the murderous gang. He blamed European politicians for the rise in xenophobia in Europe, saying, “Any Neo-Nazi listening to [French President Nicholas] Sarkozy and [German Chancellor Angela]Merkel would be proud of what they are doing.”

Üstün continued his accusations, saying: “Currently, we have about 10,000 immigrants in Hatay near our border with Syria. We can take care of them for years. But they [EU politicians] have changed the Schengen rules to block the possibility that 3,000 immigrants might come in from Libya. Such implementations feed racism.”

He said the commission will thoroughly investigate the incident, where the traces of a structure (inside the state) were visible. Üstün said there was every indication that racism was a major concern, but said Germany ignored all previous signs, including the death of five Turkish citizens in a fire started by Nazis. “There was no effective investigation there,” he said, adding that the Neo-Nazis had relied on the support of sympathizers inside the German state.

Germany was shocked by the murder, with Germany’s Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger pledging a quick and comprehensive investigation into how a group of neo-Nazis managed to operate under the radar of authorities for years, allegedly killing 10 people and robbing a string of banks.

She acknowledged criticism — focused on the domestic intelligence agency — of the fact German authorities let the gang slip through their fingers until earlier this month, when two founding members apparently committed suicide after police closed in on them following a bank robbery.

“We are all asking how it could be possible that the security authorities allowed a known group of neo-Nazis to go underground at the end of the ‘90s and apparently for over 13 years murder people in various German cities, carry out bombing attacks, and lethally attack police officers,” she said.

Federal prosecutors took over the investigation of the neo-Nazi case on Friday under German anti-terrorism laws, listing the group as a domestic terrorist organization.

The group called itself the National Socialist Underground (NSU).

The investigation into the group’s activities has grown into a nationwide search of previously unsolved crimes, including attacks in Cologne and Düsseldorf from 2000 to 2004 that are now linked to the NSU. Those attacks injured more than 30 people, mostly of foreign origin.

Meanwhile, German officials met at a security summit on Friday to discuss the murders.

Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich and Justice Minister Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger are chairing the meeting, which has a long list of participants including Federal Crime Department (BKA) Chairman Jörg Ziercke; head of the Organization for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) — the German intelligence service under fire over the murders — as well as state interior and justice ministers and heads of local BfV branches.

Interior Minister Friedrich told the Deutschlandfunk radio station ahead of the meeting that the meeting will see an evaluation of the current state of the investigation and what measures can be taken to avoid a similar incident from happening in the future.

The involvement of the BfV has sparked outrage in the German press as well as among the opposition. Main Opposition Social Democratic Party chairman Sigmar Gabriel, who visited Turkish storeowners in Cologne’s Keupstrasse, known as Little İstanbul, where the NSU detonated a bomb in 2004, said if the perpetrators had been Islamists or the victims had been German, all the streets would be closed, helicopters would be looking for the murderers and all the units of the state would cooperate to find the perpetrators.

Claudia Roth, an MP from Germany’s Green Party, said it was a scandal that the investigators were treating the case as the result of infighting between neo-Nazi groups at a time when the BfV’s involvement is so out in the open.

Gesine Lötzsch, co-chairwoman of the Left Party, said it was against the constitution for BfV members to take part in the activities of the NSU and other extremist groups.

Meanwhile, the Interior Minister of Austria, Johanna Mikl-Leitner, released a statement on Friday saying investigators in her country had found no evidence linking the murders to any Austrian groups. Austria, where extreme rightwing politicians have wide public support of as much as 30 percent, is the usual suspect in neo-Nazi investigations. Leitner referred to the killings as “tragic,” and said she felt sorry for the victims.

Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdağ on Thursday said ensuring the safety of Turkish citizens or non-citizens of Turkish origin in Germany is Germany’s responsibility. “We are in contact with the German authorities. The relevant laws should be implemented fully and the perpetrators should be given the punishment dictated by the law. Investigations should not be delayed or stalled.”

In related developments, a memorial ceremony is planned for three neo-Nazi victims on Nov. 23, 2011, in the city of Mölln. Turkey’s Hamburg Consulate General released a statement on Friday, saying that a ceremony will be organized jointly with the Mölln Municipality, “The Association of Living Together,” a local civil society group, and the Mölln Association of Fatih Mosque to commemorate Bahide Arslan (50) and her grandchildren Yeliz Arslan (10) and Ayşe Yılmaz (18), who were killed 19 years ago in a fire started by Neo-Nazis.

November 19, 2011
Relief, anger in Cologne’s Little Istanbul after neo-Nazi revelations

Seven years have passed since a bomb attack rocked an immigrant neighborhood in Cologne. Originally thought to have been caused by Turks or Kurds, the attack has now been traced to a militant neo-Nazi cell.

There is a sense of relief among the residents of Cologne’s Mülheim district these days, paradoxical as it may be, that has come from recent revelations that a militant neo-Nazi cell was behind unchecked attacks around Germany over the last decade.

The group, National Socialist Underground, whose name is an explicit reference to the racist ideology behind Hitler’s Third Reich, has claimed responsibility for a bomb attack that took place here in 2004, on one of Mülheim’s – and Cologne’s – most Turkish streets, the Keupstrasse.

Here, in Little Istanbul, as the street has come to be known to residents, the news that a right-wing extremist group was behind the attack, though itself alarming, has proven once and for all that it wasn’t perpetrated by Turks, as originally believed by German authorities.

False accusations

Öznur ÖzkocacıkÖzkocacik says she is still shaken by the bomb attackOn June 9, 2004 a nail bomb was detonated in front of the Kuaför Özcan hair salon, injuring 22 people and sending shockwaves through Keupstrasse and all of Mühlheim. Öznur Özkocacik, now 23, still vividly remembers the scene.

“You could see people lying on the ground and screaming. You could hear them crying,” she said. “At first there were rumors that Kurds were behind the attack, because they had had a run-in with the hair salon. But afterwards it became clear to us that that just wasn’t true.”

Despite residents’ claims that it was a xenophobic attack, authorities concentrated their investigations on Turkish suspects. First they thought the Kurdish terror organization, the Turkish Workers’ Party (PKK), was behind the attack. Then investigators blamed the Turkish mafia.

Several local residents, included the hairdresser Özcan Yildirim, were interrogated for days, as Yakup Arslan, who owns a jewelry shop near the site of the attack, told Deutsche Welle.

“Police thought he was with the mafia, or with the PKK,” he said. “But now we know for sure that the attacks were carried out by someone else. And we, the people who live and work here, are happy to be rid of this guilt.”

Sancak TopalTopal complains of a two-tiered society in Germany’They don’t care’

But not all of the people who live and work in Mühlheim are so delighted about the 2004 bombing now being “cleared up.” Bahri Kayakiran, who works at another of the jewelry shops on Keupstrasse, is still outraged that German authorities took so long to get to the bottom of the attack.

“Two years after the bombing, when the authorities still had absolutely no information, many people here thought they were simply covering it up,” he said. Kayakiran said authorities, and even local politicians, used the bomb attack to label Mülheim’s Turkish district as a “criminal milieu.”

“We’ve been living and working here for years. We’ve never seen any such ‘milieu’. They just want to avoid any responsibility for this area and forget us,” he said.

“Why has it taken so long [to find out who was responsible for the bombing]?” asked Sancak Topal, a local translator. “Because German authorities don’t care, that’s why. They just want the foreigners to leave. That is the truth. If Germany really wanted to find such murderers and assassins, they would do it immediately. But they don’t care, and they didn’t put forth any effort.”

This week, German politicians apologized for the first time for mistakes made in conjunction with such investigations, with Social Democrat chairman Sigmar Gabriel even visiting Keupstrasse to convey his “disgust and shame” at what happened.

Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich said Friday after an emergency summit of state and federal ministers in Berlin that the government officially apologized for “all the people who have made mistakes – whoever they are and wherever they are.”

‘Real problems remain unsolved’

Scene of 2004 explosion in CologneThe individuals responsible for the bombing remain unknownBack on Keupstrasse, with its myriad shops and restaurants reminiscent of Turkey, daily business has long since returned to normal. But although the people here speak more Turkish than German and discuss events transpiring in Ankara rather than those in Berlin, they still want to be treated like everyone else in Germany.

They are well aware that the journalists and even politicians that have been here to offer words of apology and reconciliation will soon disappear. Then they will return to being forgotten.

“Nobody wants to feel like an instrument,” said one shop owner, wishing to remain anonymous. “The journalists and politicians will come and go, but the real problems remain unsolved. I object to this.”

He and residents like him will continue to demand justice and equality from the German government. Seven years after the bombing in Keupstrasse, it’s now finally clear that Turkish residents weren’t responsible. But it’s also still unclear who exactly was.

Author: Başak Özay / glb

Editor: Martin Kuebler

via Relief, anger in Cologne’s Little Istanbul after neo-Nazi revelations | Germany | Deutsche Welle | 18.11.2011.

November 19, 2011
Turkey to intervene in neo-Nazi case

Turkey is preparing an application to German courts to get involved in the judicial process being launched against far-right extremist suspects accused of killing of eight Turkish citizens between 2000 and 2004 described as the “döner kebab killings.”

“The Vienna Convention gives this right to us. When it comes to protecting the interests of a Turkish citizen, we have the right to get involved in such a judicial process. We are still investigating it,” a senior Turkish diplomat told the Hürriyet Daily News yesterday. “Apart from this, we will also give legal assistance to our citizens who lost their relatives in these killings.” German security forces recently revealed that a neo-Nazi cell calling itself the National Socialist Underground is suspected of committing a string of racist murders, including those of eight Turks. The crimes have caused soul-searching across the country, which is concerned about tarnishing its image in the eyes of the international community.

Turks concerned on neo-Nazi cell

Germany is home to nearly 3 million Turks with 700,000 of them holding German citizenship. The revelation of the Neo-Nazi cell fueled concerns among the Turkish community, which has suffered from similar extreme-right attacks in the past. “We are following the developments very closely and are in close contact with the German officials,” the diplomat said. Germany was in the same position when German citizen Tilman Ekkehart Geske was killed along with two Turkish missionaries at the Zirve Publishing House, a Christian publisher, in Malatya in 2007, the diplomat added.

Turkish Ambassador to Berlin Ahmet Acet met with German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle upon the minister’s invitation and the two visited a Turkish association to ease the concerns of the Turkish community. Acet has also demanded a meeting with Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich. He is also expected to raise the issue of unresolved murders of Turks since late 1990s and demand these cases be re-opened. The German government’s approach to this issue has been so far satisfactory.

via Turkey to intervene in neo-Nazi case – Hurriyet Daily News.

November 19, 2011
There’s a Kebab in My Tapestry!

By ANDREW FINKEL

ISTANBUL — In 1990, the year that globalization shifted into high gear and McDonald’s opened an outlet in Moscow, a paper delivered at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery entitled “The Bayeux Tapestry Shish Kebab Mystery” had French academics reaching for indigestion tablets. Its author, the textile specialist Robert Chenciner, pointed to a panel of that famous embroidery in which Norman knights celebrate their victory over the Saxons by grilling skewers of meat over an open fire. From this, Chenciner drew the bold conclusion that the tapestry must be a forgery or at least a much oversewn bit of cloth. There were no kebab takeaways in the Hastings of 1066, he reasoned, and it wasn’t until the Ottomans visited Versailles in the mid-18th century that Turkish food came to France.

Julia Child, the renowned populist of French cuisine, was in the audience that day. She clapped enthusiastically. But curators at the museum housing the Bayeux Tapestry found Chenciner’s theory hard to digest. They countered that archival sources from the late 15th century confirmed the cloth’s authenticity. If there was a problem at all, it must be with the shish kebab itself. Was it even Turkish?

Can any one cuisine call the kebab its own? Was the meat skewer born somewhere — or everywhere, of the primal urge to put flesh to fire?

This year commemorates the 50th year that Turks were first recruited to work in Germany. Many believe that these gastarbeiter managed to wriggle a way into their hosts’ affection by presenting to them an alternative to wurst. A cylinder of meat spinning on an upright spit in front of a vertical open fire — the famous döner kebab — became Germans’ entrée into the culture of their new neighbors. Or so they thought. But no less an authority than The Economist claims that the kebab is an example of cultural reflux: a bit of ethnicity cultivated in Germany and transplanted back to Turkey, where it then thrived.

This argument is pooh-poohed by someone who should know: Beyti Güler, the Horatio Alger of grilled meat and probably the only man alive to have a kebab named in his honor. After spending his boyhood peddling fruit from a barrow in the abattoir district on the outskirts of Istanbul, Güler was to turn his family’s kitchen into the landmark restaurant that bears his (first) name. He opened his first grill house in 1945, but he was soon forced to move it to a barn of a place in order to cope with the throngs who queued up for the house specialty: lamb and beef döner kebab cooked in front of a wall of oak charcoal. In 1983, Beyti’s moved to even grander premises near the airport.

Beyti’s namesake kebab is now served widely throughout Turkey — only it’s nothing like Beyti’s beyti. The street-food favorite is ground lamb and beef kneaded together with parsley, garlic and flakes of red pepper. The original is an outer cutlet of lamb wrapped around loin, a combination inspired by a butcher named Möller whom Beyti met on a trip to Switzerland – in other words, it isn’t Turkish at all.

Some of Beyti’s other delicacies are made of a well-kneaded mince that has a slight spring under the tooth. This is very different from the feel of kebabs from the Kurdish and Arab southeast of Turkey. The meat of those is chopped by hand, with enough fat left in so that while cooking the fat drips onto the slow-burning coals, sending fragrant smoke back up toward the spit. The result is a crispy, crumbly lattice of meat.

Chewy or crusty, kebabs are now part of a global multimillion (some say, billion) dollar industry. There are fine Turkish restaurants outside Turkey, but most spots are takeaway joints that cater to anyone on the prowl for a snack and a brawl after a night out. A British government official once bemoaned the “kebab and fight” culture plaguing pub land. Like most Chinese restaurants — and Indian or Thai ones, for that matter — kebab houses operate like unbranded franchises. Customers recognize the décor and know what to order. These outlets are to McDonald’s or Burger King what Linux is to Microsoft: a free and open resource controlled by users, not large corporations.

But in Turkey itself, there’s now a move to drive the little guys to the wall. Food engineers are busy converting local delicacies into supermarket standards. Within the last decade, they’ve turned the simit — a sort of bagel — from street food to fast food, and many now hope that the kebab will follow suit. Food courts in ever-mushrooming shopping centers boast kebaberies every bit as characterless as their foreign cousins. Unforgivably, some of them even deep-fry their meat.

No one has yet found the way to prepackage the taste of a slowly grilled kebab, whatever the mince or the seasoning. The limp, bluish döner kebab that sells in a wrap outside every German bahnhof doesn’t hold a candle to what I think of as the real thing: a thin sheet of freshly grilled lamb mixed with beef, crisp on one side and moist on the other. For the moment at least, the kebab’s juicy mystery seems to have halted the forces of globalization.

Andrew Finkel has been a foreign correspondent in Istanbul for over 20 years, as well as a columnist for Turkish-language newspapers. His latest book, “Turkey: What Everyone Needs to Know,” will be published next year.

via There’s a Kebab in My Tapestry! – NYTimes.com.

November 8, 2011
Fifty Years After the Invite, Turks Are Still Outsiders in Germany

By Henning Hoff / Berlin Thursday, Nov. 03, 2011

German Chancellor Angela Merkel congratulates German midfielder Mesut Özil in the dressing room after the Euro 2012 soccer game in Berlin between Germany and Turkey

Guido Bergmann / AFP / Getty Images

It was a memorable game. On Oct. 8, 2010, the national soccer teams of Germany and Turkey met in front of a full-capacity crowd of 75,000 at Berlin’s Olympic Stadium. The fans who had flown in from Turkey, together with some of Berlin’s sizable Turkish community, turned it into something of an away game for the German side, but this wasn’t the evening’s biggest surprise. It was the name of the man of the match: Mesut Özil. Initially greeted by deafening hisses, the unassuming 22-year-old forward, also of the Spanish überclub Real Madrid, was the star of the night. His cool goal 10 minutes from the final whistle secured victory for his team: Germany.

Born to Turkish immigrant parents in Gelsenkirchen — in Germany’s former industrial heartland along the rivers Rhein and Ruhr — Super-Özil, as some papers call him, is the first celebrity player of Turkish descent on a team that has been Germany’s premier outlet for national pride ever since die Mannschaft first won the World Cup in 1954. Özil is the most visible sign that something has changed recently in the story of Turkish immigration to Germany. And as German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Nov. 2 commemorated 50 years since the signing of the recruitment treaty that planted the seed of that community, Germany was forced to face the fact that the story has been, by and large, a rather sorry one. (See a brief history of the World Cup.)

Özil is something of a poster boy for modern Germany — or at least how the country likes to see itself today. After the player’s virtuoso performance at the match against Turkey, Merkel was pictured congratulating a bare-chested Özil in the changing room. The image was a fleeting distraction from the fact that a member of the far-right National Democratic Party had earlier dismissed Özil as a “plastic German” (a reference to the identity card carried by German nationals) and that the game had taken place against the background of a national debate about the hugely popular anti-immigration book Germany Abolishes Itself by Thilo Sarrazin, a former member of the board of Germany’s Bundesbank. In a country of 81 million, the approximately 3 million Turkish nationals or Germans with Turkish roots make up Germany’s largest minority — and often attract the most resentment.

Signed on Oct. 30, 1961, the recruitment treaty allowed booming German industry to bring in Turkish workers to give the labor force a much needed boost. Recent research has shown, contrary to popular belief, that the initiative for the treaty came from Turkey rather than Germany, which agreed, with a little prodding from the U.S., mostly for foreign policy reasons. In Istanbul on Oct. 30, dozens of those early migrants and their relatives boarded a special train to commemorate the original migrants’ first three-day journey to Munich in 1961. “It wasn’t easy for Germany to become Europe’s strongest economy after the war. Our workers played a big part in that,” said Cemil Cicek, head of the Turkish parliament, at the historic Sirkeci station. The workers were recruited by German labor officials from across Turkey, many from tiny villages. Hardly any of them spoke German or anticipated staying longer than their contracts stipulated. Until there was a comprehensive stop announced in 1973, about 750,000 Turkish people, mostly men, went to work in Germany as “guest workers,” as they were called until recently. (Now Germans prefer to speak of those with “a migration background.”) About half of them stayed. (See how Merkel walked a tightrope on German immigration.)

The Turks were relative latecomers; Germany had signed similar agreements with Italy in 1955 and Greece in 1960. But Turkish immigrants often did the dirtiest jobs while remaining invisible to society at large. It took the undercover journalist Günter Wallraff, who exposed the exploitation of Turkish workers in the mid-1980s, to draw attention to their often precarious lives in Germany. Turkish immigrants and their descendants still come last in terms of literacy, education, living standards and employment.

There have been some recent improvements. In 2000, Germany changed its rigid citizen laws and made naturalization easier. Also, attitudes have started to change. The Greens, Germany’s third largest political party, are led by Cem Özdemir, who became the first lawmaker of Turkish descent in Germany’s Parliament in 1994 and was elected joint chair of his party in 2008 (with his supporters chanting: “Yes We Cem!”). In her latest weekly Web-video message, Merkel praised the contribution of Turkish immigrants to Germany’s economic success. “They have become part of our country,” the Chancellor said. Indeed, there are entrepreneurs like Vural Öger, whose Hamburg-based Öger Tours business was bought by Thomas Cook in 2010; prizewinning film directors like Fatih Akin (Against the Wall); actors like Mehmet Kurtulus, whose appearances as an undercover detective in the highly successful Tatort TV crime series were a hit with audiences and critics alike; and writers like Feridun Zaimoglu.

Overall, Deutschtürken are more visible today, but there is still a long way to go before Turkish immigration to Germany can be considered a success story. After decades of closing their eyes to reality and insisting mantra-like that Germany was “no country of immigration,” the country’s leaders in the ’90s declared themselves shocked by the existence of “parallel societies” in Germany and began to demand that Turks integrate. (See pictures of immigration in Europe.)

Turkey’s recent rise on the global stage is mixing things up. With an annual growth rate of 9% last year and a foreign policy that is turning gradually away from Europe and toward the Arab world, a self-confident Turkey changes the terms of the deal. Some leading Turkish politicians have warned Turkish immigrants and their descendants against assimilation, saying they should learn the Turkish language before learning German. Erdogan, speaking to the German tabloid Bild on Nov. 2, criticized Germany for not acknowledging the Turkish contribution enough, noting, among other things, that 72,000 Turkish entrepreneurs in Germany had created 300,000 jobs. He also demanded stronger German support for Turkey’s bid to join the E.U. — anathema to Merkel and her Christian Democratic Union party, which prefers to offer Turkey a “privileged partnership” instead. “It would give integration a boost,” Erdogan argued with some justification. How it would change the face of the national soccer team, though, would remain to be seen.

— With reporting by Pelin Turgut / Istanbul

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November 5, 2011