RIYADH (Reuters) – A Turkish soap opera that flopped when first broadcast in its native Turkey three years ago has taken the Arab world by storm, provoking a flood of Gulf Arab tourists to Turkey that even includes royalty.
“Noor” became an immediate hit when Saudi-owned MBC satellite television began airing it earlier this year, partly because of its unconventional usage of colloquial Arabic dubbing — and because its blond-haired, blue-eyed leading man had women swooning.
Turkey is expecting the number of Saudi tourists this year to top 100,000, including King Abdullah’s wife Hissa al-Shaalan, who has been the subject of YouTube videos showing her swanning through the markets and sweet-shops of Istanbul.
“From 41,000 (tourists) last year to 100,000 this year — the same year this show became phenomenally successful,” said Turkish diplomat Yasin Temizkayn. [sic.] “It’s more than just a coincidence.”
Spanish-language soap operas have been shown on Arab television in the lucrative Saudi and Gulf markets in recent years with classical Arabic voice-overs.
But with “Noor” — the main character whose name means “light” — the names of the characters in the original Turkish soap “Gumus” have been swapped for Arabic, and Syrian vernacular has replaced the formal classical Arabic of modern media and religion.
“I don’t like all that Maria Mercedes nonsense,” says Dania Nugali, 16, referring to a popular Mexican soap. “I feel like I am in Arabic literature class when I watch Mexican shows. But when I watch Noor, I definitely feel that it is entertainment.”
Yet the main pull has been the co-star Muhannad, 24-year-old Turkish actor and model Kivanc Tatlitu.
“It seems most viewers are female,” said Hana Rahman, who runs an Arab entertainment blog (waleg.com). “They’re so swept away by the main character. He’s become a heartthrob here! He has even caused divorce cases in Saudi Arabia.”
The drama, which made poor ratings when first shown in Turkey in 2005, centres around a family whose patriarch strives to ensure his sons focus on the family business and maintain cohesion without straying into romantic temptation.
“We made the series with a Turkish audience in mind,” Tatlitu told al-Arabiya Television during a recent visit to Dubai. “The fact that it has amassed such a following in the Arab world just proves how much our cultures have in common.”
Many Saudi women explained their devotion to the show as a form of escapism from stifling, love-less marriages.
“Our men are rugged and unyielding,” quipped a 26-year-old house-frau who preferred to remain unnamed. “I wake up and see a cold and detached man lying next to me, I look out the window and see dust. It is all so dull. On Noor, I see beautiful faces, the beautiful feelings they share and beautiful scenery.”
(Editing by Summer Said and Mary Gabriel)
Source: Reuters, Jul 26, 2008
[2]
Saudi cleric slams Turkish soaps as “wicked”
RIYADH (Reuters) – Saudi Arabia’s top religious figure has slammed Turkish soap operas as “wicked” and “malevolent”, despite the wild popularity of one show, a paper said on Sunday.
Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul-Aziz Al al-Shaikh told a seminar in conservative Saudi Arabia this week that Arabic television channels airing the soaps were un-Islamic.
“Any channel that helps to further perpetuate the popularity of these shows is ultimately a warrior against God and his Prophet,” he said in comments cited by al-Watan newspaper.
“It is not permitted to watch Turkish series … They are replete with wickedness, evil, moral collapse and war on virtues that only God knows the truth of.”
He said he was speaking in the name of the Higher Council of Religious Scholars, the government body charged with advising on religious affairs.
It was not clear what specific objection the Mufti had to the programmes. Saudi clerics demand gender segregation in public places and women are not allowed to drive cars.
They have previously objected to young Saudis taking part in popular music talent shows along the lines of American Idol.
The show “Noor” this year became an overnight sensation in the Arab world when it was first aired on Saudi-owned satellite channel MBC. It it was a flop when first shown in Turkey in 2005 with the title Gumus.
It has since spurred a large number of Gulf Arab tourists to visit Turkey, including the Saudi first lady Princess Hissa Al-Shaalan. Its blonde and blue-eyed star Kivanc Tatlitu has become a heart-throb for many Arab women.
By Christopher Hudson
Last updated at 11:46 PM on 24th July 2008
Three days after the fall of France in 1940, Napoleon, lying in his marble tomb in Paris, received a visit from his greatest admirer.
Adolf Hitler, on his one and only visit to the French capital, made an unannounced trip to the tomb in Les Invalides.
In his white raincoat, surrounded by his generals, Hitler stood for a long time gazing down at his hero, his cap removed in deference.
Dictator: Napoleon was responsible for thousands of executions
He was said later to have described this moment as ‘one of the proudest of my life’.
The next day, during his official sightseeing tour of Paris, Hitler again visited Napoleon’s tomb to salute him.
Conscious that his hero was known to the world simply as Napoleon, Hitler boasted that he would not need a rank or title on his gravestone. ‘The German people would know who it was if the only word was Adolf.’
Throughout the war, Hitler had sandbags placed around Napoleon’s tomb to guard against bomb damage.
Wooden floorboards were laid across the marble floor of Les Invalides so that they would not be scarred by German jackboots.
Until recently, the French would have been incensed by any comparison between Napoleon and Hitler.
But to their rage and shame, new research has shown that France’s greatest hero presided over mass atrocities which bear comparison with some of Hitler’s worst crimes against humanity.
These reassessments of Napoleon have caused anguish in France. Top politicians backed out of official ceremonies to mark what was possibly Napoleon’s greatest victory, the battle of Austerlitz, when Napoleon’s Grande Armee defeated the combined armies of Austria and Russia in just six hours, killing 19,000 of their adversaries.
A street in Paris named Rue Richepanse (after Antoine Richepanse, a general responsible for atrocities in the Caribbean) has recently had its name changed to Rue Solitude.
Hitler
Admiration: Hitler had a great respect for Napoleon – and perhaps his killing ways, it has now emerged
During his reign as Emperor, concentration camps were set up and gas was used to massacre large groups of people.
There were hit squads and mass deportations. And all this happened 140 years before Hitler and the Holocaust.
Claude Ribbe, a respected historian and philosopher and member of the French government’s human rights commission, has been researching Napoleon’s bloodcurdling record for some years.
He accuses him of being a racist and an anti-Semite who persecuted Jews and reintroduced widespread slavery just a few years after it had been abolished by the French government.
The most startling of these findings, the attempted massacre of an entire population over the age of 12 by methods which included gassing them in the holds of ships, relate to the French Caribbean colony of Haiti at the turn of the 19th century.
In Ribbe’s words, Napoleon, then First Consul, was the man who, for the first time in history, ‘asked himself rationally the question how to eliminate, in as short a time as possible, and with a minimum of cost and personnel, a maximum of people described as scientifically inferior’.
Haiti around 1800 was the world’s richest colony, a slave-powered export factory which produced almost two-thirds of the world’s coffee and almost half its sugar.
The black slaves were lashed and beaten to work and forced to wear tin muzzles to prevent them from eating the sugar cane.
If the slaves were fractious, they were roasted over slow fires, or filled with gunpowder and blown to pieces.
When the slaves began to fight for their freedom, under the leadership of a charismatic African military genius called Toussaint L’Ouverture, Napoleon sent 10,000 crack troops under the command of his brother-inlaw, General Leclerc, to crush Toussaint and restore slavery.
In 1802, a vast programme of ethnic cleansing was put in place. Napoleon banned inter-racial marriages and ordered that all white women who’d had any sort of relationship with a black or mulatto (person of mixed race) be shipped to France.
He further commanded the killing of as many blacks in Haiti as possible, to be replaced by new, more docile slaves from Africa.
The French troops were under orders to kill all blacks over the age of 12. However, younger children were also killed – stabbed to death, put in sandbags and dropped into the sea.
The Haitians fought to the death for independence, which they finally declared in 1804.
Prisoners on both sides were regularly tortured and killed, and their heads were mounted on the walls of stockades or on spikes beside the roads.
Non-combatants, too, were raped and slaughtered. According to contemporary accounts, the French used dogs to rip black prisoners to pieces before a crowd at an amphitheatre.
Allegdly on Napoleon’s orders, sulphur was extracted from Haitian volcanoes and burned to produce poisonous sulphur dioxide, which was then used to gas black Haitians in the holds of ships – more than 100,000 of them, according to records.
The use of these primitive gas chambers was confirmed by contemporaries. Antoine Metral, who in 1825 published his history of the French expedition to Haiti, writes of piles of dead bodies everywhere, stacked in charnel-houses.
Auschwitz victims: Did Hitler learn genocide from Napoleon?
‘We varied the methods of execution,’ wrote Metral. ‘At times, we pulled heads off; sometimes a ball and chain was put at the feet to allow drowning; sometimes they were gassed in the ships by sulphur.
‘When the cover of night was used to hide these outrages, those walking along the river could hear the noisy monotone of dead bodies being dropped into the sea.’
A contemporary historian, who sailed with the punitive expedition, wrote that: ‘We invented another type of ship where victims of both sexes were piled up, one against the other, suffocated by sulphur.’
These were prison ships with gas chambers called etouffiers, or ‘chokers’, which asphyxiated the blacks, causing them terrible suffering.
Even at the time, there were French naval officers who were appalled at this savagery, claiming they would rather have braved a court martial than have forgotten the laws of humanity.
But from the Emperor’s point of view, gassing was a way of cutting costs. Ships continued to transport prisoners out to sea to drown them, but corpses kept being washed up on beaches or tangled in ships’ hulls.
Toussaint, who called himself the Black Napoleon, was kidnapped after accepting an invitation to parlay with a French general and shipped back to France in chains, where he died of pneumonia after being imprisoned in a cold stone vault.
Guadeloupe, an island to the east, suffered a similar fate to Haiti’s.
Once again choosing not to recognise France’s abolition of slavery, Napoleon in 1802 promoted a comrade of his, Antoine Riche-panse, to the rank of General, and sent him with an expeditionary force of 3,000 men to put down a slave revolt on the island.
During his purge, General Richepanse slaughtered any men, women and children he encountered on his route to the capital. Then he worked through a plan of extermination apparently approved by the First Consul.
A military commission was set up to give what followed a veneer of legality. Some 250 ‘rebels’ were shot in Guadeloupe’s Victory Square. Another 500 were herded down to the beach and shot there.
Richepanse and Lacrosse, the former colonial governor now restored to power, thought of piling up the dead in vast mounds to intimidate the islanders, but gave up the plan for fear of starting a disease epidemic.
Instead, using a technique which the French were to copy during the Algerian War, they sent death squads into every part of Guadeloupe to track down farmers who were absent from their homes.
These men were treated as rebels. A bounty was promised for each black man captured, and the rebels were summarily shot or hanged. The ferocity of the repression sparked another uprising, which Lacrosse subdued with the most barbarous methods yet.
‘Being hung is not enough for the crimes they have committed,’ he said. ‘It is necessary to cut them down alive and let them expire on the wheel [prisoners were bound to a cart wheel before having their arms and legs smashed with cudgels].
‘The jails are already full: it is necessary to empty them as quickly as possible.’ In this he was successful, hanging, garotting and burning the rebels and breaking their limbs on the wheel.
Lacrosse developed possibly the most fiendish instrument of slow execution ever created.
The prisoner was thrust into a tiny cage and had a razor-sharp blade suspended between his legs. In front of him was a bottle of water and bread, neither of which he could reach.
He was stood in stirrups, which kept him just above the blade, but if he fell asleep or his legs tired, he was sliced by the blade. Neither fast nor economical, it was pure sadism.
After four months in Guadeloupe, the French lost patience with the islanders, and the ferocity of their repression reached new heights.
Blacks with short hair were shot out of hand, since the expeditionary force considered short hair to be a sign of rebellion. Orders were given that ‘the type of execution should set a terrifying example’.
The soldiers were encouraged ‘to cut open insurgents, to strangle and to burn them’. French officers spoke proudly of creating ‘torture islands’.
In a letter to Napoleon, his brother-in-law Leclerc wrote: ‘It is necessary to destroy all the negroes of the mountain . . . do not leave children over the age of 12.’
Ribbe, in his work in progress, sees continual affinities between Napoleon and Hitler. He argues that many of Napoleon’s actions were later echoed in Nazi Germany, right down to his enthusiasm for slavery reflecting the grim message ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (‘Work Sets You Free’), which appeared over the gates of Auschwitz.
Napoleon, like Hitler, also used his own army like cannon fodder when the occasion demanded.
His retreat from Moscow in 1812 squandered the lives and courage of 450,000 soldiers of the Grande Armee; many of them were found frozen to death while embracing each other to harvest a last flicker of warmth, in what was one of the bitterest winters in living memory.
Nothing shows more clearly the contempt the Emperor showed for his minions than the bulletin announcing the destruction of his Army.
Napoleon blamed his horses and ended by declaring that his health had never been better.
As theatres for Napoleon’s callousness, Haiti and Guadeloupe were too far away to attract much public notice, let alone condemnation.
Syria was a different matter. In the war between France and the Ottoman Empire (most of it modern-day Turkey), Napoleon led the siege of the ancient walled city of Jaffa, whose harbour he needed as a vital shelter for his fleet.
The city fell on the fourth day, whereupon Napoleon’s troops ran amok through the town, slaughtering Christians, Jews and Muslims indiscriminately.
To escape the slaughter, part of the garrison locked themselves into a large keep.
Napoleon sent his officers, who negotiated their surrender and marched them back to the French camp.
Rations were short, so Napoleon now decided that he had been too magnanimous.
For three days he kept the 4,000 mostly Turkish prisoners with their arms tied behind their back; then the massacre began.
Somewhere between 2,500 and 4,000 men were slaughtered there and then, either by shooting them or by running them through with bayonets.
Shortly afterwards plague broke out, decimating the troops on both sides. With real courage, Napoleon led his general staff on a tour of the plague-infested hospitals.
It did not deter him from suggesting to the doctors that seriously ill French troops who could not be evacuated should be given a fatal dose of the opiate laudanum. The doctors forced him to back down.
From Jaffa, Napoleon marched to Acre, a city constructed on a peninsula and therefore impregnable, given that there was British control of the seas. Napoleon launched seven major assaults; each one failed. Marching back to Cairo, Napoleon left 2,200 of his troops dead, and 2,300 more seriously ill or wounded.
As far as Napoleon was concerned, these wounded were already dead men. Most of them he left behind, knowing that the Turks would cut off their heads as soon as his army left. They did their best to follow his retreat, crying out not to be abandoned.
They straggled along, their throats parched in the debilitating heat, which reduced their cries to a croak. Injured officers were thrown from their litters and left to die in the dunes.
Soldiers were abandoned in the cornfields, which were still smouldering in the devastation of crops and villages ordered by Napoleon. In all, some 5,000 Frenchmen lost their lives.
If Hitler learned any lessons from Napoleon, one must have been that victory required callousness, not just in the leader but in those around him.
‘Like those working in the Nazi system, the French carrying out Napoleon’s killing did so with little thought to morality,’ Claude Ribbe says today. ‘There was no sense of good or evil: it was just a matter of getting a difficult job done. In the end, the killing methods had to be efficient and cheap.’
So is Napoleon to be feted as a great leader or denounced as a dictator? A poll published in Le Figaro in 2005 found that nearly 40 per cent of Frenchmen regarded Napoleon as ‘a dictator who had used all means to satisfy his thirst for power’.
However, considering what was done in Napoleon’s name in Haiti and Guadeloupe, there is one memorial which deserves to be added.
Next to the unknown soldier at the Arc de Triomphe should be erected the Tomb of the Unknown Slave.
• Le Crime de Napoleon, by Claude Ribbe (Editions Priv & Egrave;).
DAMASCUS (AFP)–The head of a banned Kurdish political group has been arrested by the Syrian security services under emergency laws, a human rights group said Monday.
“The military security services in Damascus arrested Mohammed Mussa, secretary general of the Kurdish Left Party on Saturday,” the National Organization of Human Rights in Syria, or NOHRS, said in a statement.
Mussa was arrested and questioned previously by security services in Hassake, northeastern Syria because of “his party’s activities and his comments to the Arab media,” NOHRS said.
The group branded his detention as unconstitutional because he was arrested under “emergency powers which have been in place in Syria for 45 years,” rather than by judicial authorities. Syrian authorities should release Mussa immediately and abandon the emergency powers under which they are making arrests, the group said.
Mussa’s party also called for their leader’s release, saying, “Mohammed Mussa is a nationalist who defends the interests and the legitimate rights of the Kurdish people as well as those of all the Syrian people.”
The majority of Syria’s 1.5 million Kurds live in the north of the country. There are 11 unauthorized Kurdish political parties in Syria, independent observers say.
Syrian Kurdish officials deny claims they aim to establish a separate state and say they only want political rights and recognition of their language and culture.
ANKARA, July 17 (Reuters) – Turkey and Syria’s state owned oil companies will establish a joint firm this year to develop their oilfields, the head of Turkey’s state oil company TPAO told Reuters.
“The completion of the company’s establishment is targeted for 2008. The purpose of the company is to produce oil from fields in Syria, Turkey and third countries,” said TPAO general manager Mehmet Uysal.
He added the company will first look for production opportunities in Syria before Turkey and third countries.
Private sector energy experts say they are still trying to determine the extent of Syria’s oilfields. Existing fields are in need of investment for development.
TPAO plans on exploring extensively in the Black Sea, where it already has operations, as well as in the Mediterranean Sea.
Uysal also said Turkey, during Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s trip to Iraq earlier this month, won approval to form a consortium to bid for oil exploration rights in Iraq.
“We have ongoing talks to make an deal with Royal Dutch Shell (RDSa.L: Quote, Profile, Research) regarding exploration,” said Uysal.
Iraq’s oil ministry has finished negotiations with oil majors on six short-term oil service contracts and hopes to sign the deals in July.
In the absence of a long-delayed national oil law, Baghdad has been negotiating short-term technical service contracts. The deals are worth around $500 million each.
Five of the deals that have been under discussion are with Royal Dutch Shell, Shell in partnership with BHP Billiton (BHP.AX: Quote, Profile, Research), BP (BP.L: Quote, Profile, Research), Exxon Mobil (XOM.N: Quote, Profile, Research) and Chevron (CVX.N: Quote, Profile, Research) in partnership with Total (TOTF.PA: Quote, Profile, Research).
‘Son of Mountains’ is an extraordinary book that charts its course through one of the most poignant and disturbing memoirs of recent years.
Written by Kurdish/American Yasin Aref, ‘Son of Mountains’ was published in 2008 and is already entering its second print run. It is a memoir of Aref’s life from his days as a Kurdish child living in Iraq; fleeing to Syria where he worked as a gardener; to emigrating to the US through UN approved channels. Tragically for Aref and his family, that is not where the story ends.
‘Son of Mountains’ was written by Aref while in custody in a New York State prison. Arrested on charges of ‘terrorism,’ the book took shape in the six months he spent in detention between his conviction in Oct 2006 and his sentencing in 2007.
Born the son of a farmer, Aref recounts vividly his early years working as a labourer in Kirkuk, the influence of the poetry of Omar Khayyam—recalled from memory— on his own idealism and the abject poverty he and his kin experienced. We follow his trials and share in his frustrations: while Kirkuk was “one of the largest centres of the oil industry in the world…we had to wait for hours in line to buy smuggled gasoline.”
After being granted UN refugee status, Aref and his family arrived in the US in 1999. Although life was tough, it was relatively peaceful. Aref struggled to support his young children, working several jobs. Finally he was asked to be the Iman [sic.] of a mosque in Albany and he accepted, feeling that this was a calling for him.
In 2003, it all started to go against him. The alleged discovery of his name and contact details in a notebook in Iraq triggered a protracted FBI ‘sting’ operation which culminated in his arrest, hearing and sentencing on March 8 2007 to fifteen years in jail for: ‘support to a foreign terrorist organization, conspiracy with a weapon of mass destruction, money laundering and lying to the government.’
Aref remains in custody, his future uncertain. For his family too, the future is uncertain and potentially treacherous for all of them. If you ever had doubts that the ‘War on Terror’ did not also signal a war on personal freedoms, a war on common sense and a war on cultures and identities you must read this book.
‘Son of Mountains: My Life as a Kurd and a Terror Suspect‘ by Yassin Aref
The Syria-Turkey Inter-Regional Cooperation Program (STICP) approved 18 services, cultural and economic projects on July 1.
During a STICP meeting in Aleppo, the program’s committee for selecting projects chose the 18 projects out of 54 nominated for implementation on the basis of their priority and contribution to bilateral cooperation, economic development and employment, as well as the likelihood of long term success.
The approved projects include a border safety center, renovating the Gaziantep highway, establishing a tourism police station and renovating the al-Soda border checkpoint. They will be implemented over three years.
Governor of Aleppo Tamer al-Hajjeih said the STICP was an important tool in enhancing Syrian-Turkish ties. “Through such projects, the program is helping to foster the exchange of expertise between Syria and Turkey,” Hajjeih said.
Turkish State Planning Commission representative Farouq Delk said Turkey is presently implementing 42 projects at a value of USD 7.4m.
STICP was launched in 2005 between the Syrian governorate of Aleppo and the Turkish governorates of Killes, Onkobinar Gate and Gaziantep at a budget of USD 20m split equally between the two countries.
