Category: Europe

  • Turkey’s media has a watchful eye on NSU trial

    Turkey’s media has a watchful eye on NSU trial

    Turkey’s media has a watchful eye on NSU trial

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    Turkish media closely watched the opening of the NSU trial in Munich on Monday. Newspapers describe the feelings of the victims’ families and the main defendant’s attitude in court.

    Beate Zschäpe’s appearance in room A 101 of the Munich court on Monday was the main topic in many Turkish newspapers a day later.

    “Nazi-bride in a Hitler pose,” the paper Habertürk headlined, showing a photo of Zschäpe with folded arms next to an image of Adolf Hitler in a similar pose.

    Other Turkish papers also commented on the main defendant’s attitude on the first day of the trial. On its front page, Hürriyet calls Zschäpe an “impudent Nazi”, emphasizing that the 38-year-old turned her back on the court and the relatives of the eight Turkish NSU victims. The day in court, the paper continues, was a stage for the defendant’s “show.”

    Air of defiance

    The papers report Zschäpe’s appearance in the courtroom deeply affected the relatives of the NSU victims present for the trial. Sabah and other papers quote Dilek Özcan, the daughter of Ismail Yasar – shot dead in 2006 in Nuremberg – as saying she “shivered when she saw Zschäpe and felt deep hatred.” A tearful Özcan is reported to have added she was certain Zschäpe would get her just punishment.

    Semiya Simsek wants to know why her father was singled out

    Other relatives focused on the many open questions in the trial. Enver Simsek’s daughter Semiya says she wanted to know why neo-Nazis singled out her father of all people as a victim. According to the Vatan daily, she says her trust in the Federal Republic of Germany has been destroyed by the murders.

    Offended by a crucifix

    The Turkish media are particularly interested in the court’s shedding light on the bungled investigation. The Milliyet daily terms the trial “Germany’s Nazi check.” However, even ahead of the trial, commentators doubted the German judiciary was up to the task. Speaking to Turkish reporters before proceedings began in Munich, Ayhan Sefer Üstün, chairman of the human rights committee in the Turkish parliament, expressed hopes for a just verdict, despite the defense’s obvious delaying tactics. “That is what we expect and we will continue to keep a close eye on developments,” he said.

    Opened and adjourned

    Not all Turkish observers were as open-minded, however. Mahmut Tanal of the opposition CHP party and a member in Üstün’s delegation, called for the removal of a crucifix from the courtroom. He argued the Christian symbol is a “threat” to all non-Christians that contradicts the principles of a secular constitutional state.

    Anti-democratic forces

    The court’s upcoming assessment reminds some Turkish observers of the situation in their country. The Star newspaper compares the NSU trial with proceedings against the nationalist killer of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. Zschäpe, the prime suspect in the German case, presented herself with as much defiance as Dink’s murderer, Ogün Samast – who, according to Dink’s lawyers, had willing supporters from within the Turkish state.

    Erdal Safak, chief editor of Sabah – the Turkish paper whose German subsidiary successfully complained to Germany’s highest court about the allocation of seats for foreign media at the trial – also draws a comparison with Turkey.

    The Munich trial is about Germany’s “deep state,” Safak says, referring to the Turkish term for an interdependence of rightwing forces in the state and violent criminals.

    The Turkish government regards members of the alleged ultra-nationalist underground network Ergenekon, currently on trial in Turkey, as representatives of the “deep state” that planned to seize power from elected politicians. That is why Turkish organizations must continue to keep a close eye on the NSU trial, Safak says: after all, the “German Ergenekon” is on trial in Munich.

    via Turkey’s media has a watchful eye on NSU trial | Germany | DW.DE | 07.05.2013.

  • Turkey Fears Russia Too Much to Intervene in Syria

    Turkey Fears Russia Too Much to Intervene in Syria

    Turkey Fears Russia Too Much to Intervene in Syria

    Ankara won’t step into the conflict because it’s terrified Moscow will retaliate — again.

    SONER CAGAPTAYMAY 6 2013, 10:16 AM ET

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    Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and his Turkish counterpart Ahmet Davutoglu (R) reach out to shake hands following a joint news conference at Ciragan Palace in Istanbul on April 17, 2013. (Murad Sezer/Reuters)

    Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov visited Ankara on April 17th, but the event went almost unnoticed. Despite deep differences between Ankara and Moscow over Syria, Turkey has refrained from rebuking Moscow. That’s because Turkey fears no country more than it fears Russia.

    Ankara has nearly a dozen neighbors if you include its maritime neighbors across the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Emboldened by its phenomenal economic growth in the past decade and rising political power, Turkey appears willing to square-off against any of them; Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has publicly chided the leaders of Syria, Iran, and Iraq. In fact, none of the country’s neighbors can feel safe from Ankara’s wrath — with the exception of Russia, that is.

    “The Russians can make life miserable for us, they are good at this.”

    The Turks suffer from a deep-rooted, historic reluctance to confront the Russians. The humming Turkish economy is woefully dependent on Russian energy exports: More than half of Turkey’s natural gas consumption comes from Russia. Consequently, Turkey is unlikely to confront Moscow even when Russia undermines Turkey’s interests, such as in Syria where Russia is supporting the Assad regime, even as Ankara tries to depose it.

    Historically, the Turks have always feared the Russians. Between 1568, when the Ottomans and Russians first clashed, to the end of the Russian Empire in 1917, the Turks and Russians fought 17 wars. In each encounter, Russia was the instigator and the victor. In these defeats, the Ottomans lost vast, and often solidly Turkish and Muslim, territories spanning from the Crimea to Circassia to the Russians. The Russians killed many inhabitants of these Ottoman lands and expelled the rest to Turkey. So many Turks descend from refugees from Russia that the adage in Turkey is: “If you scratch a Turk, you find a Circassian persecuted by Russians underneath.”

    Having suffered at the hands of the Russians for centuries, the Turks now have a deeply engrained fear of the Russians. This explains why Turkey dived for the safety of NATO and the United States when Stalin demanded territory from Turkey and a base on the Bosporus in 1945. Fear of the Russians made Turkey one of the most committed Cold-War allies to the United States.

    Recently, Turkish-Russian ties have improved measurably. Russia is Turkey’s number-one trading partner, and nearly four million Russians vacation in Turkey annually. At the same time, Turkey’s construction, retail, and manufacturing businesses are thriving in Russia. Turkish Airlines, the country’s flag carrier, offers daily flights from Istanbul to eight Russian cities.

    Still, none of this has erased the Turks’ subconscious Russophobia. In 2012, I asked a policymaker in Ankara whether Turkey would take unilateral military action to depose the Assad regime in Damascus. “Not against the wishes of Moscow” my interlocutor said. Adding: “The Russians can make life miserable for us, they are good at this.”

    At least some of the Turkish fear of Russia appears grounded in reality. Turkey is dependent on Russia more than any other country for its energy needs. Despite being a large economy, Turkey has neither significant natural gas and oil deposits, nor nuclear power stations of its own. Ankara is therefore bound to Moscow, which has often used natural gas supplies as a means to punish countries, such as Ukraine, that cross its foreign policy goals.

    There is also a security component: Russia helped set up the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a group that led a terror campaign against Turkey for decades, causing over 30,000 casualties. The PKK emerged under Russian tutelage in Lebanon’s then-Syrian occupied Bekaa Valley during the 1980s, and it has enjoyed intermittent Russian support even after the collapse of Communism.

    Turkey recently entered peace talks with the PKK, and many in the group are likely to heed the advice of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan and lay down their weapons. Yet, a pervasive fear in Ankara is that some rogue elements and hardliners could emerge from the PKK, denouncing the talks and continuing to fight Turkey.

    Meanwhile, Ankara has been confronting the Assad regime in Damascus since late 2011 by supporting the Syrian opposition. This had led to a spike in PKK attacks against Turkey, most coming from Iran, which apparently has allowed the PKK freedom of movement in its territory to punish Ankara for its stance against Assad.

    The fear in Ankara is that Russia might just do the same if Turkey were to invade Syria, propping up rogue PKK elements inside that country to lead an insurgency against Turkish troops. Together with other concerns, such as the risk of the conflict in Syria spilling over into Turkey, the Turkish fear of Russia has led Ankara to avoid direct intervention in Syria.

    Such fears have also led Turkey to pivot further toward the United States, once again seeking protection under the NATO umbrella against the looming Russian giant. Taking into consideration Turkey’s fear of Russia, any Turkish military action against the Assad regime will have to be predicated on full NATO support and involvement.

    For the Turks, history repeats itself every day when it comes to Moscow: don’t stand in Russia’s way lest it torment you, again.

    via Turkey Fears Russia Too Much to Intervene in Syria – Soner Cagaptay – The Atlantic.

  • Armless artist Karipbek Kuyukov ‘denied entry’ to UK

    Armless artist Karipbek Kuyukov ‘denied entry’ to UK

     

     

    İstanbul’daki İngiliz Konsolosluğu kolları olmayan Kazak sanatçı’ya parmak izi bırakmadığı için vize vermedi!

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    Karipbek Kuyukov says he is disappointed he could not enter the UK

    A Kazakh artist who was born without arms says he could not get permission to enter the UK last month because he could not give fingerprints.

    Karipbek Kuyukov planned to attend an anti-nuclear conference in Edinburgh.

    But he got a letter from the British Consulate in Istanbul saying his “biometrics were of poor quality” and asking him to resubmit his application.

    The UK Home Office said his visa was not refused and it may have been the result of a “miscommunication”.

    Mr Kuyukov, 44, who was forced to cancel his attendance at the conference, spoke of his disappointment.

    ‘Did not understand’

    “Maybe they did not understand that I am disabled or check the information provided,” said the artist.

    “But in my online visa application it was written that I am an artist and that I don’t have hands. I paint by holding a brush in my mouth and between my toes.”

    Mr Kuyukov was born in the region of Semipalatinsk, the former Soviet Union’s main nuclear testing ground.

    Many thousands of children were born with disabilities during the nuclear test programme.

    Mr Kuyukov has used his painting to campaign for nuclear disarmament for the past 20 years.

  • German-Turks Leaving Germany For Turkey

    German-Turks Leaving Germany For Turkey

    When a majority of fellow citizens believe that the religion you follow is incompatible with their nation then you may be inspired to move elsewhere.

    When you are less likely to get a job that you are as qualified as anyone else to perform because of the way your name sounds that may inspire you to want to leave.

    It appears that after years of being treated as second-class citizens a large number of Turks are going back to Turkey. No doubt Islamophobes will be partying, but who will they scapegoat now?

    The euro crisis and Islamophobia are making Turkey more appealing to the descendants of Turkish immigrants who have been living in Germany.
    The euro crisis and Islamophobia are making Turkey more appealing to the descendants of Turkish immigrants who have been living in Germany.

    In 1961, desperate to increase its labor force, West Germany signed an employment agreement with Turkey and launched a wave of immigration that continues to have repercussions today.

    Now, after years of being treated as second-class citizens in Europe’s economic powerhouse, large numbers of Turks — descendants of the first wave of immigrants — are returning to Turkey.

    In A Strange Land

    Yucel Yolcu, 44, has a good life in Istanbul. He likes his job as a film director; his sunny apartment on a hill above the Bosphorus is alive with the sounds of guests and pets.

    But when he thinks back to his early childhood in Germany, he’s amazed things worked out this way. His early memories are of being left on his own at age 5 while his parents went off to work in a German factory.

    “It was a backyard of an old Berlin building, and I saw there were other black-haired kids like me … staying all the day in the backyard, and we didn’t know what we are doing there,” he says. “And there were other kids, blond, looking a little bit different, and we couldn’t understand each other.”

    Some would argue that Germans and their growing Turkish minority never learned to understand each other.

    Reasons To Leave

    At first, the Turks believed they would soon be returning home with the wealth to start a better life. But as Turkey’s political situation was roiled by violent unrest and military coups, more and more Turks opted to stay in Germany.

    Semra Guzel-Korver with the European Broadcasting Union has made two documentaries on Turks in Germany. She’s not surprised that a growing number of them are leaving Germany, now that Turkey’s economy is robust and growing.

    “A lot of Turkish, especially young generation, come back to Istanbul and other Turkish cities, because … they cannot find jobs anymore in Germany,” she says.

    “They finished the university, they know three or four languages, everything is perfect — but their name is Turkish,” Guzel-Korver adds.

    She says the euro crisis has increased racism and Islamophobia.

    Resorting To Gangs

    Racism and Islamophobia are what drove some Turks in Germany to make a stand. They watched in dismay as a recession in the 1980s and the reunification of Germany after 1989 brought a rise in neo-Nazi violence against immigrants.

    As the neo-Nazi attacks spiked in the early ’90s, young Turkish immigrants began to form street gangs and confront them. Al Jazeera’s English channel aired a documentary about the most famous of the Turkish gangs, known as “36 Boys.” In the film, former gang member Soner Arslan said organizing was a matter of survival.

    “The 36 Boys, people think we’re dangerous and beat people up all the time, but the reality wasn’t like that,” he said. “We had a war here, and we had to protect ourselves. They wanted to kill us, and the German police and politicians did nothing about it.”

    Coming ‘Home’

    For decades, the Turks kept coming, but now the flow is reversing. One recent study concludes that some 193,000 Turks left Germany to come home between 2007 and 2011. The most commonly cited reasons were better job prospects in Turkey and discrimination in Germany.

    Yolcu was a member of the 36 Boys gang (named after the postal code of a tough Berlin neighborhood where many of them grew up). But one day, he decided that he was never going to get work in films if he stayed in a drug- and violence-prone gang.

    “I have to make a new start. I felt like I have to earn money with art, and all my friends were dealers. I mean, they are still dealing,” he says.

    Yolcu wound up in Istanbul, sleeping on a friend’s couch and trying to break into the film business. It was around that time that he began a new, unexpected process of adjustment. For all his efforts to cling to a Turkish identity while in Germany, he now found that in some ways these Turks were utter foreigners to him.

    He was surprised to find a Germanic desire for order welling up in him one day while walking down Istanbul’s teeming downtown thoroughfare, with masses of people jostling this way and that.

    “You know, I can’t understand why all the people are walking like this! And one day I was nearly to cry, ‘Stop! You go right and you go left!’ ” he says. “I mean, I couldn’t understand why there is no people who says, ‘It’s too much people here! You don’t see it?’ ”

    Over time, Yolcu grew to embrace the relative chaos of Turkey and now feels at home here. He also keeps an eye out for his fellow Almancis, or German-Turks, because he knows what it’s like to feel like a stranger in your homeland.

    via German-Turks Leaving Germany For Turkey | loonwatch.com.

  • Turkey’s steps on Kurdish issues help EU integration efforts

    Turkey’s steps on Kurdish issues help EU integration efforts

    ANKARA, Turkey, May 6 (UPI) — Addressing outstanding Kurdish issues will support Turkey’s effort to join the European Union, the EU envoy to Turkey said.

    Turkeys-diplomatic-affairs-please-EU

    Members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known by its Kurdish initials PKK, are to begin a phased withdrawal from Turkish territory this week.

    More than 4,000 people have died in fighting between the separatist PKK and the Turkish military since the 1980s.

    EU Ambassador to Turkey Jean-Maurice Ripert told Turkish newspaper Hurriyet the measure would help with Kurdish cultural and political issues in addition to easing security strains.

    “So an agreement by all the citizens of this country on the structure of the state, on identity, language rights and the fight against all kinds of discrimination, is key for the future of this country, and this will tremendously help the accession process of Turkey to the EU,” he said.

    The withdrawal follows a series of discussions between Turkish government officials and jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan.

    Pro-Kurdish leaders said they were concerned about the lack of security guarantees for withdrawing fighters.

    The European Union lists the PKK as a terrorist organization.

    via Turkey’s steps on Kurdish issues help EU integration efforts – UPI.com.

  • Turkey becomes partner of China, Russia-led security bloc

    Turkey becomes partner of China, Russia-led security bloc

    Turkey's PM Tayyip Erdogan makes a speech during the Global Alcohol Policy Symposium in Istanbul

    Turkey’s PM Tayyip Erdogan makes a speech during the Global Alcohol Policy Symposium in Istanbul (MURAD SEZER, REUTERS / April 26, 2013)

    ALMATY (Reuters) – NATO member Turkey signed up on Friday to became a “dialogue partner” of a security bloc dominated by China and Russia, and declared that its destiny is in Asia.

    “This is really a historic day for us,” Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said in Kazakhstan’s commercial capital Almaty after signing a memorandum of understanding with Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Secretary General Dmitry Mezentsev.

    “Now, with this choice, Turkey is declaring that our destiny is the same as the destiny of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) countries.”

    China, Russia and four Central Asian nations – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan – formed the SCO in 2001 as a regional security bloc to fight threats posed by radical Islam and drug trafficking from neighboring Afghanistan.