Turkish Forum

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.

  • Turkish community warns of continued racism in Germany

    Turkish community warns of continued racism in Germany

    (IRNA) – Germany’s Turkish community warned of continued racism in the country, while marking the 15th anniversary of an anti-foreigner arson attack in the western city of Solingen which killed five Turkish women and girls, the press reported Thursday.

    There is still a high degree of xenophobia in Germany society which has to be combated through better education, stressed the Turkish community of Germany (TGD) and the Foundation of Turkish Studies (ZfT) in a statement.

    “Aggressive behaviour and prejudices are already being taught at the age of a child. Therefore, one must act pedagogically at an early stage,” ZfT director, Faruk Sen was quoted saying.

    There are 7.5 million foreigners living in Germany of which 2.5 million are Turks.

    A recent confidential government report revealed widespread xenophobia among millions of teenagers in Germany.

    Almost every German youth said there are too many foreigners living in Germany.

    Nearly every 9th grader has Islamophobic tendencies while every 13 teenager admits to having committed a right-wing motivated criminal act.

    Germany has been the scene of a series of vicious neo-Nazi attacks in recent months, especially against foreigners.

    German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble has repeatedly warned of a growing far-right problem in his country, branding it a “steadily growing danger.”

    Schaeuble had voiced concern that the number of far-right crimes between 2005 and 2006 rose from 15,000 to 18,000 offenses, indicating a 9.3 percent increase.

    Meanwhile, the number of anti-foreigner attacks hovered at 511 in 2006, showing a 37 percent rise from the previous year.

    Political observers link the dramatic rise in the number of far-right crimes to the recent success of neo-Nazi parties in key regional elections in several east German states.

    Young neo-Nazis feel also more and more emboldened to commit hate crimes, knowing that police won’t charge them with an offense.

    Most of the suspects implicated in far-right crimes are juveniles.

    Hate crime experts and sociologists have repeatedly stressed that Germany’s political leadership lacked a clear and effective strategy to fight neo-Nazi and racist crimes.

    The Journail of Turkish Weekly

  • Russian troops to pull out, amid EU sanctions threat

    Russian troops to pull out, amid EU sanctions threat

    PHILIPPA RUNNER

    Today @ 09:28 CET

    Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, has ordered troops to pull out of Georgia starting from noon local time on Monday (18 August), following calls by French and German EU leaders over the weekend.

    French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, secured the promised withdrawal in a telephone call to Moscow on Sunday, in which he threatened “serious consequences” unless Russia retreats to positions held before fighting broke out on 7 August.

    Georgia: Russian tanks entered on 7 August (Photo: prezydent.pl)

    “If this ceasefire clause [on pre-7 August positions] is not applied quickly and in its entirety, I will convoke an extraordinary council of the European Union to decide what consequences to draw,” he explained later in a statement in French daily Le Figaro.

    “I expect a very fast, very prompt withdrawal of Russian troops out of Georgia,” German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said at a press conference in Tbilisi on Sunday. “Georgia will become a member of NATO if it wants to – and it does want to,” she added, AP reports.

    On Monday morning, Russian troops remained dug-in just 35 kilometres from the Georgian capital, as well as holding the Georgian Black Sea ports of Poti and Senaki while roaming freely up and down the country’s main roads.

    Troops also deployed SS-21 earth-to-earth missiles in the breakaway Georgian province of South Ossetia, the New York Times says, with the rockets capable of striking Tbilisi.

    Russian soldiers and Russian-backed South Ossetian paramilitaries have spent the past few days destroying Georgian military bases and infrastructure, as well as looting homes and roughing up ethnic Georgian civilians.

    Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has said that Georgia can “forget” about its territorial integrity, indicating that troops might stay in South Ossetia and a second pro-Russian, rebel province – Abkhazia – for the long term.

    The UN refugee centre estimates the conflict has displaced 98,000 people in Georgia proper and a further 60,000 people in South Ossetia. Hundreds of civilians are also thought to have died.

    “We will have to determine if the Russian intervention against its Georgian neighbour was a brutal and excessive response,” Mr Sarkozy wrote in Le Figaro. “In which case…there will be inevitable consequences for its relations with the European Union.”

    EU’s eastern front

    EU foreign ministers meeting last week put off until 5 September a debate on whether to impose diplomatic sanctions, such as suspending talks on a new EU-Russia strategic treaty or a future visa-free travel deal.

    Former communist EU states, backed by the UK and Sweden, want a strong line on Russia, worrying that the Georgia incursion could be the start of a wider campaign to undermine pro-western countries in Russia’s old sphere of influence.

    A flash poll by the Pentor institute in Poland said that 49.8 percent of Polish people are scared of a potential Russian military attack in the next few years.

    Ukraine president, Viktor Yushchenko, has also offered the west the use of Ukrainian radar facilities in the hope of obtaining security guarantees in return, with an EU-Ukraine summit tabled for 9 September.

    The country’s Crimea peninsula has a large ethnic Russian population and well-organised separatist movements. Meanwhile, Russian generals dismissed as “nonsense” a recent Ukrainian law limiting the movements of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, which is stationed in the region until 2017.

    Sanctions unlikely

    But Germany and Luxembourg have already spoken out against isolating Russia – one of the EU’s biggest energy suppliers – as a result of the Georgia war.

    “I do not advise…any knee-jerk reaction such as suspending talks on a partnership and cooperation agreement [with the EU],” German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said in an interview with weekly Welt am Sonntag. “Our interest in this is as great as Russia itself. Talks in the NATO-Russian Council are essential too. Because we need open lines of communication.”

    Speaking in Moscow on Friday, Ms Merkel also took a softer line than in Tbilisi, saying “Some of Russia’s actions were not proportionate…[but] it is rare that all the blame is on one side. In fact, both sides are probably to blame. ”

    “We must stick to the partnership with Russia, even after these recent events which of course do not please us,” Luxembourg foreign minister, Jean Asselborn, said in an interview with Deutsche Welle.

    “There will be no consequences of this conflict,” a diplomat from a former communist state told EUobserver. “It’s almost as if Germany and Russia had a meeting and said ‘this is our territory and this is yours, you can do what you like there’.”

  • The Sultan’s Nose – Caricatures from Turkey

    The Sultan’s Nose – Caricatures from Turkey

    Exhibition at the Museum der Weltkulturen Frankfurt
August 9, 2008 to November 16, 2008

Organizer:
DiYALOG in cooperation with the Museum der Weltkulturen and
Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation

Museum of World Cultures, Schaumainkai 37, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

On August 8, on the occasion of the Book Fair, the Museum of World
Cultures in Frankfurt will open the exhibition "The Sultan's Nose -
Caricatures from Turkey."

This exhibition has been initiated and organized by the Turkish Cultural
Initiative DIYALOG in cooperation with the Museum of World Cultures, the
Turkish branch of the Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation, and with support from
the Organizing Committee of the Frankfurt Book Fair 2008.

Since the debate on the Muhammad caricatures that were published in
Denmark, Europeans have been engaged with the question of caricature and
humour in the Muslim world. Presenting a selection of old and new examples
of Turkish caricatures, the exhibition aims to show the central role
satire has played as a form of socio-political argument since the time of
the Ottoman sultans in Turkey.

The exhibition includes work by caricaturists who are regarded as
classics in Turkey, first during the late Ottoman period and moving
forward to the 1950s with work by graphic artists like Turhan Selçuk
and Tan Oral. Simultaneously, the exhibition shows for the first time
in Germany a selection of works by today's generation of Turkish
caricaturists. Works come from saucy and/or satirical political daily
newspapers and magazines such as "LeMan," "Penguen" and "Uykusuz."

The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication on the history of
Turkish caricatures. The book is published by Istanbul University Press
and the Berlin publisher Dagyeli in a bilingual German-Turkish edition.

Full publication information:

"Die Nase des Sultans - Karikaturen aus der Türkei"
Istanbul Bilgi University Press and Dagyeli Publishers, Berlin
ISBN 978-3-935597-68-5
Price: 28 Euros
  • Kurdish Exiles in Germany Feel Pain of Protracted War at Home

    Kurdish Exiles in Germany Feel Pain of Protracted War at Home

    When twin bombings ripped through a busy square in Istanbul Sunday, some in Turkey blamed the militant Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) for the blasts. That renewed focus on the group doesn’t bode well for many Kurds abroad.

     

    Citing security sources, CNN-Turk television said that intelligence reports suggested the group was planning a bombing campaign in Turkish cities.

     

    Though the Firat news agency reported Monday that the PKK had denied responsibility for the blast — which killed 17 and injured more than 150, making it the worst in the city since 2003 — suspicions about Kurdish involvement still abound.

     

    “There are signs of links to the separatist group,” Istanbul Governor Muammer Guler told reporters.

     

    “Of course it’s the PKK,” Orhan Balci, a 38-year-old textile businessman from the area told Reuters news service. “This has nothing to do with politics, this is all about the PKK.”

     

    Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday could not be called out into naming the PKK as the culprits behind the pair of bombings saying only, “Turkey’s fight against terrorism will continue” and that “the terrorist group’s biggest aim is to make propaganda.”

     

    Fears of a foray to western Turkey

    Whether responsible or not, the rebel movement has been blamed for a number of events in Turkey since its inception in 1984. The most recent headline-making action before this weekend’s blast — the kidnapping and eventual release of three German climbers from the slopes of Mount Ararat — has led many to worry that the battle for an autonomous Kurdistan may spread into western Turkey.

     

    This fear poses a special problem for Germany, which is home to one of the largest Turkish expatriate communities and provides shelter for more than half a million Kurds. Much of the fear and hostility felt toward ethnic Kurds in Turkey as a consequence of the PKK’s actions has long simmered among the immigrant population in Germany.

     

    In November, demonstrations over Turkey’s foray into Kurdish territory in northern Iraq broke out in Berlin’s Neu-Koelln neighborhood and members of the Turkish nationalist “Gray Wolf” gang attacked people at a Kurdish culture center in the German capital. In February, the Berliner Zeitung reported on the bullying and harassment a 7-year-old Kurd received at school after wearing a scarf in the colors of Kurdistan.

     

    “We’re trying to live in peace with the Turks,” Evrim Baba, a representative of the Kurdish community in Berlin told the newspaper.

     

    “We want peace,” a young man named Achmed told DW-WORLD after the November attacks.

     

    A community divided

     

    That peace has proven difficult to attain. Even among members of the Kurdish community itself, there is disagreement about the PKK. Though Germany officially banned the PKK in 1993, many of the exiles here openly sympathize with the organization’s struggle to obtain an autonomous homeland in the triangular area of southern Turkey, northern Iraq, and northwest Iran.

     

    “The Kurds have an incredible debt toward this organization,” Mahmut Seven, who runs the only Kurdish daily newspaper Yeni Özgür Politika, told the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel. “They gave us back our pride and our identity.”

     

    Baktheyar Ibrahim, an Iraqi-Kurd who had to flee a well-paying government job in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, sees things another way. As a supporter of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan political party, he believes in the attainment of an independent Kurdistan through democratic processes. The group, which supports Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, often finds itself at odds with other organizations fighting for the same goals.

     

    But the PKK has made things especially difficult for Ibrahim and for other exiles like him in recent months as Germany’s instituted a major crackdown on the Kurdish population to curb PKK sympathies.

     

    Kurdish associations in Hannover, Kassel, Bremen, Koblenz and Berlin have all been raided by German security agencies and suspected members of the separatist movement taken into custody.

     

    Roj TV, the sole Kurdish television station in the country, was banned last June, followed shortly by a ban on the production company Viko, which is located in the western Germany city of Wuppertal.

     

    Citing political reforms in Turkey, the German government has carried out a number of asylum revocations, making the search for political refuge more difficult and angering moderate Kurds who don’t see the situation in Turkey as having improved.

     

    “Go back to Turkey?” asked Mostafa, a 32-year-old refugee from Istanbul who’s since become a naturalized German. “For me, that’s impossible.”  

    Courtney Tenz

  • Turk who saved Jews from Auschwitz remembered

    Turk who saved Jews from Auschwitz remembered

    RHODES, Greece (AFP) — Dozens of families from around the world gathered Saturday on the Greek island of Rhodes to pay tribute to the man who in 1944 saved 40 Jews from being deported to a Nazi concentration camps.

    Selahattin Ulkumen, Turkish consul general on the island in 1943, is remembered for his role in saving the Turkish Jews by persuading a German general to release them the day before they were due to be transported to Auschwitz.

    Nearly 2,500 Jews from Rhodes and the nearby island of Kos were deported on July 24, 1944. All but 150 perished in the Nazi gas chambers or concentration camps.

    However, some months later Ulkumen persuaded the German general on the island to release the 40 Turkish Jews, by reminding him of Turkey’s neutrality.

    “I was 13 years old and I can still picture the long discussions in front of us between Selahattin Ulkumen and the German general,” said Sami Modiano, one of the deportees who survived.

    Ulkumen’s 64-year-old son, Mehmet, joined the commemoration and was presented with a plaque by the president of the Central Jewish Council of Greece, Moisis Constantinis.

    Ulkumen was arrested at the end of 1944 by the Germans after Turkey sided with the Allies. The Turkish consulate on Rhodes was subsequently bombed and his wife, pregnant with Mehmet, and two employees were wounded. His wife died a week after giving birth.

    None of the Holocaust survivors ever returned to live on the island.

    An attempt to re-establish the Jewish community there in the 1950s by settling families from different Greek regions did not have much success and the island’s Jewish population currently stands at no more than 40, said secretary of the Rhodes Jewish community Carmen Levi.

    Concentration camp survivor Stella Levi said she made the journey to her birthplace from her home in New York every year.

    This tribute “is a historic moment for the Jews of Rhodes,” she said.

    Once dubbed “Little Jerusalem” Rhodes took in several hundred Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in the 15th century who joined those already on the island.

    Between the two world wars, the Jewish population of the island reached about 6,000.

    Some 67,000 Greek Jews perished in the Holocaust, 86 percent of the country’s entire Jewish community.

    Source: AFP, 27 July 2008

  • Norway’s Nazi offspring claim compensation

    Norway’s Nazi offspring claim compensation

    From Times Online
    March 8, 2007

    David Byers

    They were conceived because of the desire of invading Nazi troops to create an Aryan master race to rule the world — and now they are demanding compensation because of the stigma and discrimination it has caused them.

    In a landmark case, a group of Norwegian war children whose mothers were deliberately impregnated by German soldiers as part of a Nazi plan to build a blond-haired blue-eyed race, are today demanding a payout from Oslo for the suffering and discrimination it has caused them.

    The applicants — numbering 154, plus four Swedes and a German — claim that the Norwegian Government was guilty of failing to protect them from the Nazis’ Lebensborn scheme during the German invasion of Norway in the Second World War between 1940 and 1945. They also claim the state institutionally discriminated against the children of Nazi soldiers for years afterwards.

    Up to 12,000 children with a Norwegian mother and German father were born under the scheme, meaning Fountain of Life, which was founded by Heinrich Himmler, the SS chief, in 1935.

    Norway was the jewel of Himmler’s programme and, if today’s cases at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) are successful, they are expected to lead to a flurry of complaints from other Nazi children in the country as well as children of German troops from neighbouring Sweden, which was also part of the scheme.

    “We want it to be recognised that the Government of Norway violated the rights of these people, and we are asking for financial damages,” Randi Hagen Spydevold, a lawyer for the group, said.

    The application was lodged with the ECHR after Oslo’s City Court in 2003 rejected a case by seven of the applicants because their claims came too long after a statutory time limit.

    Norwegian courts have always ruled against any compensation claimants in the past, saying the country’s government cannot be held responsible for failing to sufficiently protect the Lebensborn children before 1953, when it signed the European Convention on Human Rights — however, the group of claimants argues that the ill-treatment continued long afterwards.

    “They claim the violations are continuing in the sense that they are still reminded in negative terms of their origin and value,” the ECHR said in a statement.

    The court said that many mothers of war children claimed they had been marginalised, had difficulties in obtaining employment, and their children were often adopted or placed in foster homes or institutions for their own protection.

    Many Norwegian war children, meanwhile, were deprived of their original names and identity, subjected to discrimination, harassment and ill-treatment and left with psychological problems and registered disabled at an early age, the statement adds.

    The cases include that of a woman who was regularly locked up when she was a child, sometimes with a dog chain, by her foster father, and had a swastika marked with a nail on her forehead when aged nine or 10.

    One man, Paul Hansen, claims he was placed in psychiatric institutions until 1965 without his mental health ever having been assessed, while another, Karl Otto Zinken, said he was placed in a school for mentally disabled children where he was raped by two men.

    In an attempt to settle the dispute, the Norwegian Government in 2002 offered to pay the children 200,000 kroner (now worth £16,700), provided they could prove that they had suffered sufficient discrimination. However, the group is now demanding £34,000 per person, and up to four times as much for those who suffered the most.

    The ECHR will hear the group’s arguments today before deciding whether the case is admissible. A decision could take several months.

    One of the world’s most famous Nazi children is Anni-Frid Lyngstad, the brunette member of the pop group Abba, who was one of thousands of Swedish children known to have been born to a German soldier.

    In Sweden the youngsters were often referred to as Tyskerbarnas, or German children, and Ms Lyngstad has spoken in the past of being persecuted and isolated in her own country.

    It is a shame that these children have received no compensation and are discrminated against by their own countrymen. Countries need to admit their wrong doing and begin to make compensation instead of trying to continue the coverup.

    Kay Merrill, Baltimore , United States/Maryland

    I think piggy Kruger needs to brush up on his WW2 History and show some humanity and compassion for his fellow men – two things neither Hitler or Stalin were capable of. Holding the children begotten by this eugenics experiment responisble for the actionsof their fathers is despicable and barbaric . They are as much victims as the thousands of childern murdered by lethal injection through the Nazi’s Euthanasia programme for the disabled and mentally ill.

    island monkey, Shropshire, England

    I never cease to be amazed at how adults blame children for the sins of their parents. The Norwegian state and society should be ashamed for not protecting these children. Their only crime was to be born.

    Finn Olav, Drammen, Norway

    If Hitlerism had succeeded, and these Nazi-fathered children had grown up holding authority in the German empire, would they have been as bestially cruel as their fathers and leaders?. We can only thank God, and Stalin, and Churchill, and all the millions of decent men and women who stood up against fascism, that we never had to find out.

    Piggy Kruger, Bridgwater, UK

    If Hitlerism had not been destroyed, largely through Russian efforts, and these Nazi- fathered children had held the whip, would they have been as beastly as their fathers and leaders?. We can only thank God, and Joseph Stalin, and Sir Winston,and Roosevelt, that we never had to find out.

    Piggy Kruger, Bridgwater, UK