Category: Regions

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
Obama’s Talks With Turkey: Let Us Preach What We Practice

By James D. Zirin
A supporter of world-renowned Turkish pianist Fazil Say holds a cardboard reading ‘Fazil Say is not alone’ during protest held outside an Istanbul court (Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)
Turkey’s Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan will travel to Washington May 16 to meet with President Obama, largely to discuss his country’s relationship with the US and the European community, and most probably Erdogan’s on-again off-again relationship with Israel. Undoubtedly, a strong US alliance with Turkey, with its vibrant economy and geo-political position, is of tremendous strategic importance to the United States. In the run-up to the meeting, however, Obama might well consider Turkey’s human rights record, particularly how many nations are left on this planet where someone could go to jail over a Twitter post? North Korea, Iran, China? Maybe. But Turkey is the latest to win that dubious distinction.

Fazil Say, 42 years-old, is an internationally recognized Turkish pianist and composer, who has performed with major orchestras throughout the world, including the New York Philharmonic and the Berlin Symphony. His personal style of composition, rooted in the folk music of Turkey, evokes Bartók: a fantasia-like basic structure; and a variable dance-like rhythm.

An Istanbul court convicted Say of inciting hatred, insulting Islam and offending Muslims on Twitter. Although not sentenced to jail, he is on probation for five years on condition that he not re-offend Muslims, even if he is just re-tweeting what someone else said. Say could have been sentenced to 18 months in prison. The case renewed brewing concerns about the influence of religion on Turkish politics.

Say’s “crime” was a series of tweets posted earlier last year. In one message he retweeted a verse from a poem by Omar Khayyám in which the 11th-century Persian poet attacks pious hypocrisy: “You say rivers of wine flow in heaven, is heaven a tavern to you? You say two huris [companions] await each believer there, is heaven a brothel to you?” In other tweets, he made fun of a muezzin (a caller to prayer), implying that the particular muezzin’s call lasted only 22 seconds because he wanted to go out for a drink. Another retweet by Mr. Say posits: “I am not sure if you have also realized it, but if there’s a louse, a non-entity, a lowlife, a thief or a fool, it’s always an Allah-ist.” Bad taste, maybe, in a country where Muslims comprise roughly 98% of the population, but hardly a crime?

Turkey is not a particularly safe place for artists and intellectuals, or women for that matter, who may wish to criticize Erdogan’s government. In 2007, a journalist Hrant Dink, who had written about the Armenian genocide of 1915, was shot dead on an Istanbul street. A judge last year fined Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel laureate writer, $3,700 for saying in a Swiss newspaper that Turks “have killed 30,000 Kurds and 1 million Armenians.”

Pointing to the Say and Pamuk cases, as well as the prosecution of numerous journalists, artists and intellectuals for voicing their views, critics have accused the governing AK Party of undermining the secular values of Turkey’s founder Kemal Ataturk, and pandering to Islamists, who have recently asserted themselves with renewed intensity. Say himself claimed that his prosecution was politically motivated. An atheist, Say had often criticized the Islamist-rooted party, accusing it of having a secret agenda to promote conservative values.

The European Union, which Turkey seeks to join, admonished Erdogan about the Say conviction. A spokeswoman for EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said Brussels was “concerned” by the prosecution, which “underlines the importance for Turkey to fully respect freedom of expression.” Amnesty International said in a report last month that “freedom of expression is under attack in Turkey,” calling for legislative reforms to bring “abuses to an end.”

Dozens of journalists are in detention in Turkey, as well as lawyers, politicians and lawmakers – most of them accused of plotting against the government or having links with the outlawed Kurdish rebel movement the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Meanwhile, Erdogan continues with his sultanic project to build at state expense over the Bosporus the largest mosque in Turkey, as Fazil Say calls his conviction “a sad day for Turkey.”

Madeleine Albright has said that foreign policy is getting other countries to do what you want them to do. Obama should use the occasion of the Erdogan meeting to take heed of the clarion call of another British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, who said in his “Iron Curtain” speech delivered in Fulton, Missouri March 5, 1946, “All this means … that freedom of speech and thought should reign; that courts of justice, independent of the executive, unbiased by any party, should administer laws which have received the broad assent of large majorities or are consecrated by time and custom. Here are the title deeds of freedom which should lie in every cottage home. Here is the message of the British and American peoples to mankind. Let us preach what we practice – let us practice what we preach.”

Turkey’s human rights record is execrable. When Obama meets Erdogan next month, he should preach a little of what we try to practice.

via Obama’s Talks With Turkey: Let Us Preach What We Practice – Forbes.

April 17, 2013
Jackson Diehl: Iraqi Kurdistan in bloom

In Iraq, an Kurdish renaissance

By Jackson Diehl, Published: April 15

By now it’s obvious that “spring” is the wrong description of the political turmoil and civil war that have followed the Arab revolutions of 2011. But for one nation in the Middle East, it’s beginning to look like freedom and prosperity just might be blooming. “People are beginning to talk about the Kurdish Spring, not the Arab Spring,” says a grinning Fuad Hussein, a senior official in the government of Iraqi Kurdistan.

Hussein and a delegation from the Kurdistan Region Government, which controls a strip of northern Iraq slightly larger than Maryland, were in Washington last week to talk about where their country stands a decade after the U.S. invasion. From Irbil, Kurdistan’s capital, the war looks like an extraordinary success.

Jackson Diehl

The Post’s deputy editorial page editor, Diehl also writes a biweekly foreign affairs column and contributes to the PostPartisan blog.

Kurdistan is a democracy, though an imperfect one; the territory is peaceful and the economy is booming at the rate of 11 percent a year. Foreign investors are pouring though gleaming new airports to invest, especially in Kurdish-controlled oil fields. Exxon, Chevron, Gazprom and Total are among the multinationals to sign deals with the regional government. A new pipeline from Kurdistan to Turkey could allow exports to soar to 1 million barrels a day within a couple of years.

There was one university for the region’s 5.2 million people a decade ago; now there are 30. “Our people,” says Hussein, the chief of staff to President Massoud Barzani, “did quite good.”

The bigger story is that Kurds, a non-Arab nation of some 30 million deprived of a state and divided among Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria, are on the verge of transcending their long, benighted history as the region’s perpetual victims and pawns. Twenty-five years ago, Kurds were being slaughtered with chemical weapons by Saddam Hussein and persecuted by Turkey, where nearly half live. A vicious guerrilla war raged between Kurdish insurgents and the Turkish army.

Now Turkey is emerging as the Kurds’ closest ally and the potential enabler of a string of adjacent, self-governing Kurdish communities stretching from Syria to the Iraq-Iran border. Having built close ties with the Iraqi Kurdish government, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is now negotiating a peace deal with the insurgent Kurdish Worker’s Party (PKK) — a pact that could mean new language and cultural rights, as well as elected local governments, for the Kurdish-populated areas of southeastern Turkey.

Meanwhile, Barzani and the Iraqi Kurds have been trying to foster a Kurdish self-government for northern Syria, where some 2.5 million Kurds live. Syrian government forces withdrew from the area last year, giving the Kurds the chance to set up their own administration. Until recently, the principal Syrian Kurdish party, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), was supporting the PKK’s fight against Turkey and leaning toward the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Now, thanks to the nascent peace deal, it may be switching sides: Earlier this month its fighters joined with Syrian rebels to drive government forces out of a Kurdish-populated district of Aleppo.

Middle Eastern geo-politics, which for so long worked against the Kurds, is now working for them. The sectarian fragmentation of Syria and Iraq has created new space for a nation that is mostly Sunni Muslim, but moderate and secular. Suddenly the Kurds are being courted by all sides. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki this month sent a delegation to Irbil to propose that the Kurds return the parliament deputies and ministers they withdrew from the national government last year. Barzani’s government declined but agreed to send a delegation to Baghdad for negotiations.

As Hussein portrays it, the talks may be a last chance to avert a breakup of Iraq into separate Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish areas — a split he blames on Maliki’s attempt to concentrate Shiite power. “Either we are going to have a real partnership, or we are going to go back to our own people,” he said, adding that the result could be a referendum on Kurdistan’s future.

It would make sense for the United States to join Turkey in backing this Kurdish renaissance; the Kurds are a moderate and pro-Western force in an increasingly volatile region. Yet the Obama administration has consistently been at odds with the Iraqi Kurdish government. It has lobbied Turkey not to allow the new oil pipeline that would give Kurdistan economic independence from Baghdad, and, in the Kurds’ view, repeatedly backed Maliki’s attempts to impose his authority on the region.

“The administration sees us not as a stabilizing force, but as an irritant, as an alien presence in the region that complicates matters, another Israel,” one of the visiting Kurds told me. That, like so much of the administration’s policy in the Middle East these days, is wrongheaded.

via Jackson Diehl: Iraqi Kurdistan in bloom – The Washington Post.

April 16, 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
Jihad in Boston?

Amerikan Sağcılarının Beklenen Başlığı!

By Robert Spencer

The Boston terror bombings may be jihad. It is also possible that they may not be. As of this writing on Monday evening, those who know – the perpetrators and their accomplices, and possibly law enforcement officials — aren’t saying anything. Whatever the truth may be, the reactions to the initial reports from various quarters were telling.

An early report from the New York Post stated that “investigators have a suspect — a Saudi Arabian national — in the horrific Boston Marathon bombings.” However, Boston police denied that they had a suspect in custody, and Leftists and Islamic supremacists rushed to spread that news: Talking Points Memo ran a fairly straightforward piece, but at Salon, Alex Seitz-Wald headlined his report “Pamela Geller blames a ‘Jihadi,’” excoriating Geller for “seizing on a thinly sourced New York Post report.” Islamic supremacist writer Reza Aslan tweeted: “Boston Police: No Arrests Have Been Made In Marathon Bombing so Enough with the Saudi National BS.”

The implication was that if there was no Saudi national in custody, then the bombings were not jihad. The egg was on their faces, however, when it turned out that the New York Post had been right, and that authorities really did have a Saudi national in custody. According to CBS News, “Law enforcement sources told Miller a witness saw a person acting suspiciously when the explosions happened along the marathon route.” Miller explained:

They see him running away from the device. Now, a reasonable person would be running away. But this person had noticed him before. This is a civilian — chases him down, tackles him, turns him over to the Boston police. The individual is being looked at [and] was suffering from burn injury. That means this person was pretty close to wherever this blast went off, but not so close as to suffer the serious injuries that other people did.

There are other indications that this was a jihad attack: the timed and coordinated bombings were of a kind we have seen previously in the Mumbai jihad attacks, as well as in numerous jihad bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan. Also like Mumbai, the bombs seem to have been set off remotely by cell phone. Yet characteristically, some in the mainstream media rushed to blame “right-wingers”: according to Victor Medina in the Examiner, “Esquire Magazine’s Charles P. Pierce attempted to link the bombings to right wing extremists similar to Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. In another, CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen speculated that the type of bomb device could link it to right wing extremist groups.”

Such reactions were illustrative of the general mainstream media avidity to downplay and even deny outright that there really is a jihad threat at all. Ultimately, however, whether or not this Saudi (who has been identified as being in the U.S. on a student visa) was involved in the attack or not, and whether or not this Boston Marathon bombing was a jihad attack at all, the jihad against the U.S. still rages. ‪Jihadists worldwide have made their hatred for Americans, and determination to murder them in the name of Allah, abundantly clear on numerous occasions. If the Boston terror bombings turn out to have been perpetrated by someone else, this doesn’t mean that violent jihadists have disappeared. Jihad is already here in the United States, as we saw not only on 9/11, but in the Fort Hood jihad murders, the attempted Times Square bombing, the Portland Christmas tree bomb plot, and so many others. There have been over 20,000 jihad attacks worldwide since 9/11; the denial that dominates the media and government response to those attacks only ensures that such jihad attacks will become ever more common stateside.

And so as the new coverage continued on Monday night, commentators speculated about whether the terror attack was “domestic” or “foreign.” While leftist analysts freely speculated about “right-wing” involvement, those who declared the attack jihad on the basis of the questioning of the Saudi national were excoriated as “Islamophobes.” The media marches in lockstep, aided and abetted by a Greek chorus of activists and fellow travelers on Twitter and other social media. And the direction in which they are marching is rendering us all more unsafe.

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