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EP: EU and Turkey must renew their mutual engagement, MEPs say

18 April 2013 | 13:58 | FOCUS News Agency

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Strasbourg. Renewed mutual engagement is needed to maintain constructive relations in EU-Turkey relations in the context of the negotiation process, MEPs said on Thursday, a press release of the European Parliament informs. In a resolution on the 2012 progress report on Turkey, they call for opening of negotiations on the judiciary, fundamental rights, and home affairs and praise recent talks which might help settle the Kurdish issue.
“We need commitment from both the EU and Turkey,” said Ria Oomen-Ruijten (EPP, NL), the EP rapporteur for Turkey. “Turkey needs to step up efforts to guarantee freedom of expression, media freedom and all other fundamental freedoms in line with the values of the EU. The EU must do its utmost to support Turkey in the reform process – renewed efforts for the opening of further negotiation chapters are important,” she added.
Judicial reform
Reform of Turkey’s judiciary is central to its democratic consolidation and modernisation, MEPs stress. They welcome the adoption of the third and fourth judicial reform packages but insist on fully narrowing the broad definition of criminal offences, namely of the act of terrorism, shortening excessively long pre-trial detention periods and curbing the role of special courts in practice.
To accelerate the reform process, MEPs call on the Council to open negotiations on the judiciary and fundamental rights (chapter 23) and justice, freedom and security (chapter 24).
Women’s rights
Parliament hails Turkey’s efforts to fight “honour killings”, domestic violence and phenomenon of forced marriages and child brides but is concerned that violence against women is still recurrent. MEPs also call for active promotion of women’s rights, education and participation in the labour market and in politics.
Kurdish issue
MEPs welcome direct political dialogue between the government and former PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan and say this might open the perspective of a historic agreement settling the Kurdish issue peacefully and democratically.
Cyprus Presidency “missed opportunity”
MEPs regret that Turkey had “missed an important opportunity to start a process of engagement and normalisation of relations with Cyprus” during the Cypriot Presidency of the Council.
Syria and foreign affairs
MEPs praise Turkey for its humanitarian assistance to the increasing number of Syrian refugees but insist that the EU and Turkey should also develop joint strategic vision allowing ending the tragic crisis in Syria. They also say Turkey should develop its foreign policy in closer dialogue and coordination with the EU than in 2012.

April 19, 2013
More Children in Greece Start to Go Hungry

Michalis Petrakis, who is jobless and whose son Pantelis has been going to school hungry, shows his nearly empty refrigerator.

By LIZ ALDERMAN

ATHENS — As an elementary school principal, Leonidas Nikas is used to seeing children play, laugh and dream about the future. But recently he has seen something altogether different, something he thought was impossible in Greece: children picking through school trash cans for food; needy youngsters asking playmates for leftovers; and an 11-year-old boy, Pantelis Petrakis, bent over with hunger pains.

“He had eaten almost nothing at home,” Mr. Nikas said, sitting in his cramped school office near the port of Piraeus, a working-class suburb of Athens, as the sound of a jump rope skittered across the playground. He confronted Pantelis’s parents, who were ashamed and embarrassed but admitted that they had not been able to find work for months. Their savings were gone, and they were living on rations of pasta and ketchup.

“Not in my wildest dreams would I expect to see the situation we are in,” Mr. Nikas said. “We have reached a point where children in Greece are coming to school hungry. Today, families have difficulties not only of employment, but of survival.”

The Greek economy is in free fall, having shrunk by 20 percent in the past five years. The unemployment rate is more than 27 percent, the highest in Europe, and 6 of 10 job seekers say they have not worked in more than a year. Those dry statistics are reshaping the lives of Greek families with children, more of whom are arriving at schools hungry or underfed, even malnourished, according to private groups and the government itself.

Last year, an estimated 10 percent of Greek elementary and middle school students suffered from what public health professionals call “food insecurity,” meaning they faced hunger or the risk of it, said Dr. Athena Linos, a professor at the University of Athens Medical School who also heads a food assistance program at Prolepsis, a nongovernmental public health group that has studied the situation. “When it comes to food insecurity, Greece has now fallen to the level of some African countries,” she said.

Unlike those in the United States, Greek schools do not offer subsidized cafeteria lunches. Students bring their own food or buy items from a canteen. The cost has become insurmountable for some families with little or no income. Their troubles have been compounded by new austerity measures demanded by Greece’s creditors, including higher electricity taxes and cuts in subsidies for large families. As a result, parents without work are seeing their savings and benefits rapidly disappear.

“All around me I hear kids saying: ‘My parents don’t have any money. We don’t know what we are going to do,’ ” said Evangelia Karakaxa, a vivacious 15-year-old at the No. 9 junior high school in Acharnes.

Acharnes, a working-class town among the mountains of Attica, was bustling with activity from imports until the economic crisis wiped out thousands of factory jobs.

Now, several of Evangelia’s classmates are frequently hungry, she said, and one boy recently fainted. Some children were starting to steal for food, she added. While she does not excuse it, she understands their plight. “Those who are well fed will never understand those who are not,” she said.

“Our dreams are crushed,” added Evangelia, whose parents are unemployed but who is not in the same dire situation as her peers. She paused, then continued in a low voice. “They say that when you drown, your life flashes before your eyes. My sense is that in Greece, we are drowning on dry land.”

Alexandra Perri, who works at the school, said that at least 60 of the 280 students suffered from malnutrition. Children who once boasted of sweets and meat now talk of eating boiled macaroni, lentils, rice or potatoes. “The cheapest stuff,” Ms. Perri said.

This year the number of malnutrition cases jumped. “A year ago, it wasn’t like this,” Ms. Perri, said, fighting back tears. “What’s frightening is the speed at which it is happening.”

The government, which initially dismissed the reports as exaggerations, recently acknowledged that it needed to tackle the issue of malnutrition in schools. But with priorities placed on repaying bailout funds, there is little money in Greek coffers to cope.

Mr. Nikas, the principal, said he knew that the Greek government was laboring to fix the economy. Now that talk of Greece’s exiting the euro zone has disappeared, things look better to the outside world. “But tell that to the family of Pantelis,” he said. “They don’t feel the improvement in their lives.”

Dimitris Bounias contributed reporting.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 18, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: More Children In Greece Start To Go Hungry.

via More Children in Greece Start to Go Hungry – NYTimes.com.

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April 18, 2013
Sentencing of Turkish pianist marks new low

MEP: Sentencing of Turkish pianist marks new low

16.04.2013Posted in: Foreign Affairs, human rights, Policy Map, Timeline, Top Stories, Turkey

Dutch Member of European Parliament Marietje Schaake (D66/ALDE) is concerned about the sentencing of the well known Turkish pianist Fazil Say. A Turkish court sentenced Say to a suspended 10 months in jail for posting tweets in which he criticised religion and declared himself an atheist. Schaake is a long time critic of the on going erosion of the rule of law in Turkey that tramples fundamental rights. “This is only the last example in a series of sentences following criticism on religion or politics, while the statements are legal according to universal human rights and European law. The growing number of convictions leads to fear among journalists and artists and spurs self-censorship. This is a major problem and hampers the democratic reforms that Turkey so badly needs”, Schaake says.

Statement
The European Commission released a statement today saying Turkey has to respect freedom of expression, as enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights, to which Turkey is a party. Schaake: “The deterioration of freedom of expression is a growing problem. As the government is becoming more authoritarian, and the Turkish judiciary threatens to lose its independence. The EU should draw its consequences if the Turkish government does not show though actions it is committed to substantial democratic and judicial reforms.”

Accession process
Schaake wants the EU to put freedom of expression at the heart of Turkey’s accession process. “The fact that Turkey is an important ally for the EU in facing shared challenges in the Middle East should not overshadow Turkey’s domestic human rights problems. When EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton recently visited Turkey she did not address these very real problems during the official press conference while these issues should be directly addressed with the Turkish government”, Schaake adds.

Progress report
This week the European Parliament will vote on its annual report assessing Turkey’s progress towards EU accession. Through several amendments Schaake pleads for respect for freedoms such as freedom of expression and digital freedoms as well as the rule of law in Turkey.

——

For more information:

Marietje Schaake 0031 6 3037 7921

or her press officer Anna Sophia Posthumus 0032 484 201 518

April 17, 2013
Trial of German Neo-Nazi Is Delayed Over Media Concerns – NYTimes.com

Trial of a Neo-Nazi in Germany Is Delayed Over Media Concerns

By MELISSA EDDY

BERLIN — After weeks of outrage in Germany and Turkey over how seats for members of the foreign news media were allocated at the trial of a prominent neo-Nazi, a state court in Munich said Monday that it would delay the opening of the trial by three weeks to allow for a new accreditation process.

Reuters

Beate Zschäpe

The decision — only two days before Beate Zschäpe, the sole survivor of a neo-Nazi cell that killed 10 people, was to go on trial — was met with a mixture of relief and anger. Representatives of the relatives of victims expressed frustration that the court had waited so long to find a solution to a problem that had drawn in government officials.

Revelation of the cell’s existence in late 2011 shocked Germans and raised questions about how security authorities could have failed for the better part of a decade to stop the group from killing minorities. The cell’s members killed eight men of Turkish descent, a Greek and a German policewoman.

Among the most dismayed at the trial’s delay were the victims’ relatives, many of whom had made travel arrangements and taken time off from work to attend the trial, said Barbara John, the ombudswoman appointed by the German government to represent their interests.

Jens Rabe, a lawyer for Kerim and Semiya Simsek, whose father was the cell’s first victim in 2000, called the last-minute decision “more than annoying.”

“The delay of the trial opening is the result of the court’s unyielding position and refusal to accept criticism or constructive suggestions for solutions,” Mr. Rabe said.

Since it became clear last month that no Turkish journalists were among the 50 reporters — out of more than 100 who applied — to be guaranteed a seat in the courtroom, calls for their inclusion spread from the news media to politicians in Turkey and Germany.

On Friday, Germany’s highest court ruled in favor of a Turkish journalist who had filed a petition to be allowed into the courtroom, citing what he called an unfair distribution of seats. The journalist, Ismail Erel, an editor at the Turkish newspaper Sabah, had argued to the constitutional court in Karlsruhe that the e-mail informing him about the accreditation arrived 19 minutes later than at several German newspapers, enough of a delay to jeopardize his chances for a guaranteed seat.

Officials including Philipp Rösler, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s deputy, and Germany’s minister for immigrant affairs, had urged the court to show “sensitivity” in handling the Turkish media’s appeals to attend the trial.

Margarete Nötzel, a spokeswoman for the Munich court, said in a statement that given the constitutional court’s ruling on Friday, “a new accreditation process will be necessary. ” She gave no details about how the process would be conducted.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 16, 2013, on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Trial of a Neo-Nazi in Germany Is Delayed Over Media Concerns.

via Trial of German Neo-Nazi Is Delayed Over Media Concerns – NYTimes.com.

April 17, 2013
Fear is a very dangerous thing

Elif Shafak: ‘Fear is a very dangerous thing’

The voice of Turkish literature – tells Joy Lo Dico why Istanbul needs to make another great leap

JOY LO DICO

When I invited Elif Shafak to lunch at Julie’s, a smart London restaurant tucked between the Victorian town houses of Holland Park, I hadn’t considered the decor. Carved wooden panels, rugs and leather stools: it looked like someone had made a quick raid on the Ottoman Empire to furnish it. Would Shafak, who is from Istanbul, roll her eyes at the cliché of inviting her to a faux oriental den? She looks around. “How lovely,” she says, a little coolly.

Dressed head to toe in black (she claims that this is the only colour in her wardrobe) and with the looks of a French film star, Shafak is an easy choice to be the face for the London Book Fair, the special focus of which this year is Turkish literature. Her 2006 novel The Bastard of Istanbul was long-listed for the Orange Prize. She followed it with a retelling of the life of the 13th-century poet Rumi folded into the life of a bored Jewish-American housewife, in The Forty Rules of Love. And last year she published Honour, the story of an “honour” killing by a Turkish Kurdish family living between their home country and Dalston.

That diversity comes from her own internationalism. Born in Strasbourg, she’s lived across Europe and America and now divides her time between Istanbul, where her husband is editor-in-chief of a newspaper, and London.

“It’s like a compass,” she explains. “One leg of the drawing compass is fixed in one spot. For me that is Istanbul. The other leg draws a huge, wide circle around this one and I see myself as global soul, as a world citizen.”

Shafak’s writing is not high literature in the Nobel Prize-winning Orhan Pamuk vein: the prose is open, the pages turn easily, plots sometimes twist too conveniently and The Forty Rules of Love‘s spirituality brings to mind Paulo Coelho. But Shafak has big ideas – about women’s rights, identity, freedom of expression – that really challenge readers, and her novels work hard at bringing out unheard voices.

It’s reflected in her readership. The queues at her book signings, Shafak notes proudly, are made up of “people who normally wouldn’t break bread together: liberals, leftists, secularists, Sufis, conservatives; girls with headscarves but also women with mini skirts”.

As we pick over the skeletons of our grilled sardines, it occurs to me that Shafak makes waves with wide-selling literature – so popular that her books are pirated in Turkey – but that the forms and ideas are not so radical to Britons – an exception perhaps is her exploration of “honour” killings. Her real strength lies in her eloquence on politics and culture, she writes columns on both for the newspaper Haberturk.

It is 90 years since Kemal Ataturk declared Turkey a republic, and this past decade has seen it walking tall despite “being left in the waiting room”, as Shafak says, by the EU. The steady government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, economic growth, a grown-up regional policy and, as of last month, a ceasefire with the PKK (the Kurdish nationalist movement fighting for independence for the past 30 years), has returned Turkey as a significant player to the world stage.

Shafak welcomes reconciliation with the Kurds but is already thinking one step ahead: about changing the nature of modern Turkey. “What we need is a new constitution which is more embracing, not only of Turks and Kurds but also the minorities in Turkey who are not feeling comfortable: Armenians, Jews, Azeris, gypsies, and others,” she suggests, seeing this as a time when Turkey could reconstruct its whole self-image. “Our 600-year-old empire was multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-religious, amazingly cosmopolitan. In 1923, the nation state was established and, throughout the republican era, the main discourse was that we are a society of undifferentiated individuals. No classes, no ethnicities. Seeing difference as the source of danger and looking for enemies within created a lot of fear in Turkey, and fear is a very dangerous thing because it produces authoritarian responses. I’m not saying Ataturk’s Turkey should be abandoned: I’m saying we need to take a step forward and have a far more egalitarian and democratic society. What I find frightening is top-down uniformity.”

The blooming of identities she talks of – she includes homosexuals and transsexuals – echoes the voices in her books. But Shafak, remembering how quickly her comments have been twisted in parts of the Turkish media, chooses her words carefully. In 2006, after writing about the Armenian genocide, an ultra-nationalist group had her put on trial under an archaic law for “insulting Turkishness”.

The Turkish Ministry of Justice now intervenes to prevent such trials but the law remains. Shafak drives it home with a British analogy. “The other day I was thinking, when Hilary Mantel was ‘criticising’ Kate Middleton, that there was a discussion in the UK media,” she says. “Everyone was asking, ‘Is she right or wrong?’ But as a Turkish writer, my main interest was not who was right or wrong but that this debate can be heard freely.”

We move on to the mint tea and Shafak points out that Britain and Turkey, both of which she calls home, have taken different routes out of empire. London remains a global crossroads but Istanbul risks forgetting the way porous boundaries helped it thrive. It is the subject of her next novel, which will be set in the 16th century.

Shafak will be taking part in a series of seminars and talks at the London Book Fair next Tuesday, along with other big hitters in the Turkish literary scene, including Perihan Magden, Ayse Kulin and Ahmet Umit. Shafak knows how to pitch to a bigger audience than just those who want to dabble in the Orient: “The conversations we are having about identity, amnesia, past and future don’t concern solely the society in Turkey but they resonate through the Muslim world, and the world in general.”

Honour by Elif Shafak

Penguin, £7.99

‘It was all because women were made of the lightest cambric, Naze continued, whereas men were cut of thick, dark fabric. That is how God had tailored the two: one superior to the other. As to why He had done that, it wasn’t up to human beings to question … ”

The Market Focus Cultural Programme at The London Book Fair is curated by the British Council and begins tomorrow. For more information visit: literature.britishcouncil.org

April 16, 2013
Istanbul INN London brings Istanbul to London

Aiming at bringing the best of a city’s contemporary culture to London, a four-day event titled “Istanbul INN London” in Victoria House in Central London’s Bloomsbury square started on Friday.

The event will focus on a different city from five countries; Brazil, Russia, India, China and Turkey. “It’s focused on the BRICT nations. The acronym has come into widespread use as a symbol of the shift in global economic power away from the developed G7 economies towards the developing world,” explains the curator of the art side of the event, Isabella Kairis Icoz, during an interview with Today’s Zaman.

“Istanbul INN London is a stunning four-day showcase of Istanbul’s contemporary culture, art, architecture, literature, food, fashion, film and design. It is the first of a series of annual events celebrating some of the world’s most compelling and intoxicating foreign cities and will offer visitors the chance to immerse themselves in the city’s culture, discover emerging creative talent and sample authentic food and drink,” Icoz explained.

The Istanbul installation of the event has four main parts based on art, design, food and fashion because these are the parts that make up Istanbul’s contemporary culture, according to Icoz. “For this event we decided to focus on Turkish galleries that show a strong mixture of emerging and established artists, the majority of whom are well respected and widely collected locally, but not yet outside of Turkey, and who we feel are the next generation of Turkish artists who will become increasingly known and sought after internationally, while at the same time showcasing several artists that have already exhibited and entered collections in the US and the Middle East, but who are keen to enter the European market. And with London being such an international hub, it seemed the perfect fit to push this dual agenda,” she elaborated noting that, for this project, her role as curator was more about selecting the galleries and making suggestions to them about which artists and works they felt would work well in London and would showcase their wider portfolio in the best light.

From the art aspect of the event, Icoz encourages visitors to look at Mehmet Ali Uysal’s mono prints, Gulay Semercioglu’s wire work at Pi Artworks, Gozde Ilkin’s fabric piece at artSumer, Ansen’s photograph at X-ist, Ahmet Dogu Ipek’s drawing from Sanatorium, Erol Eskici’s work on paper at Merkur, Kezban Arca Batibeki’s photograph at Leila Heller, Yusuf Sevincli’s photograph at Elipsis, Halil Vurucuoglu’s work on paper at Dirimart and an Azade Koker’s work on paper at Cda-Projects. “I have a much more extensive wish list than this, and will be happy to share my recommendations with visitors at Istanbul INN London,” she also stresses.

There is something for all Londoners at this event that will go until Monday explains Icoz. “For press, trade, collectors, fashionistas, foodies and more!”

Today’s Zaman

April 16, 2013