August 31, 2017, 10:11 am
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Exhibit | Armenian and Greek Architects and Their Works
Mavi Boncuk |
Armenian Architects and Their Works
Kevork Aslanyan Surp Pırgiç Hospital Church
Avedisyan Kalfa Sirakyan Homes
Mihran Azaryan Büyükada Pier
Hovsep Aznavur Abbas Hilmi Paşa Kiosk, HeybeliadaSveti Stefan Bulgar Church, FenerTobacco Factory – Kadir Has University, CibaliSanasaryan Han – Eski Emniyet Müdürlüğü, Sirkeci
Garabed Amira Balyan Bezm-i Âlem Valide Mosque, DolmabahçeValide Bendi Belgrad OrmanıSurp Astvadzadzin Church, BeşiktaşÜç Horan Church (wiyh Ohannes Serveryan), GalatasarayII. Mahmut Dam, Belgrad OrmanıII. Mahmut Tomb, Çemberlitaş Harbiye Military School, HarbiyeKuleli Cavalry Barracks Dolmabahçe Palace
Krikor Amira Balyan Nusretiye Mosque, TophaneSelimiye Barracks, ÜsküdarNusretiye Mosque, Tophane
Nigoğos Balyan Küçüksu Palace pavillionDolmabahçe Palace, BeşiktaşIhlamur Palace pavillion, BeşiktaşBeylebeyi Palace
Sarkis Balyan Akaretler Apartments, BeşiktaşSadabad MosqueMaçka Police Station – İTÜ İşletme FakültesiMaçka Armory – İTÜ Yabancı Diller OkuluÇırağan PalaceHarbiye War Ministry
Senekerim Balyan Beyazıt Tower
Garabet Amira Balyan Steel Works, Zeytinburnu
Mıgırdiç Çarkyan Surp Takavor Church, Kadıköy
Garabed Devletyan Surp Asdvadzadzin Church, Kumkapı
Levon Güreğyan Apartment, Osmanbey
Isdepan Hamamcıyan Dilsizzade Han/Office, Sultanhamam
Şabuh HançerŞark Apartment, Osmanbey
Krikor Hürmüzyan Surp Boğos Church, Büyükdere
Isdepan İzmirliyan Armenian Protestant Church, Gedikpaşa
Aram and İsak Karakaş Ferah Apartment, BeyoğluRagıp Paşa Apartment, Beyoğlu
Keğam Kavafyan Süreyya Opera House, Kadıköy
Andon Kazazyan Azaryan Seaside Kiosk – Sadberk Hanım Museum, BüyükdereArtin Macaryan – Taşciyan Kiosk, Kınalıada
Boğos Makasdar Surp Levon Church, Kadıköy
Krikor MelidosyanArmenian Patriarcate, Kumkapı
Mihran KalfaArmenian Cemetary, Şişli
Levon NafilyanHovagimyan Han/Office, Karaköy Agopyan Han, Bahçekapı İş Bank, Bankalar Caddesi
Bedros NemtzeSurp Kevork Church, Kocamustafapaşa
Mikayel NuricanMetro Han/Office, Tünel
Ohannes KalfaOld Darüşşafaka High School, Çarşamba
Avedis PekmezyanApartment, Yüksekkaldırım
Ohannes ServeryanSurp Haç Church / Üsküdar
Harutyun ServeryanSurp Krikor Lusavoriç Church / Kuzguncuk
Ohannes ServeryanSurp Pırgiç Hospital (Garabed Balyan ile) / Yedikule Aram TahtacıyanNaval Hospital, KasımpaşaSurp Agop Foundation Buildings (with Nurican and Nafilyan), ElmadağHıdivyal Palace Apartment, Tünel
Sarkis Taşcıyan Anadolu Han/Office, Eminönü
Yetvart Terziyan Kadıköy Municipal BuildingFatih Municipal Building
Vartan TıngıryanSurp Nigoğayos Church, Topkapı
Andon and Garabed TülbentciyanAnarad Hığutyun Church / SamatyaSurp Hovhan Vosgeperan Church / BeyoğluSurp Asdvadzadzin Church / Büyükada
Greek Architects and Their Works
Petros Adamandidis (Petraki Kalfa)Sait Halim Haşa Yalısı, Yeniköy
Viktor AdamandidisTaksim Palas, Beyoğlu
Aleksandros AlvanopulosApartment, Cihangir
Nikolaos CelepisHamidiye (Yıldız) Mosque, Yıldız
Vasilios ÇilenisPanayia Elpida Church, Kumkapı
Hristos DimadisPeuçak Kiosk, Büyükada
Konstandinos DimadisFener Rum/Greek High School, Fener
Nikolaos DimadisAya Yani Church, Burgazada
Andonis F. Dimitrakopulos Lambridis House, Büyükada
Dimitros VasiliadisSuriye Passage, Tünel
Periklis FotiadisRuhban Okulu/ Religious School, HeybeliadaZoğrafyon High School, Galatasaray
Hacı Stefanos Gaitanakis Aya Triada Manastırı (Ruhban Okulu), Heybeliada
Nikola GırgırcıDemirbaşyan Kiosk, Büyükada
Stravros Sofyanos HirstidisBüyük Sadık Paşa Apartment (Galatis ile), Kuledibi
Vasilakis Bey İonnidisAya Triada Church (after Pottesaros), TaksimZapyon School, Taksim
Lisandros Kaftanoğlu Helenic Philological Society (does not exist today), Galatasaray
Konstandinos KancosAya Konstantin and Eleni Church, Paşabahçe
KaptenakisAya Yorgi Kuduna Monastery and Church, Büyükada
Konstandinos KaracasAya Konstantin and Eleni Church, Tarlabaşı
İoannis/Yannis KarayannisApartment, Sıraselviler
Kosmas KarayannisMustafa Bey Apartment, Gümüşsuyu
Niko KefalaAkasya (old Calypso) Hotel, Büyükada
Konstandinos Kiryakidis Elhamra Han/Office, BeyoğluFrej Apartment (with A.Yenidünya), Şişhane
Kleovulos KlonaridisApartment (with M. Vlasiades), Sıraselviler
Eftimis KocabasulisApartment, Beyoğlu
Yeoryios K. KovvasStavridu Apartment, Arnavutköy
Yeoryios KuluthrosDeniz Apartment, Şişhane
Vasilios Kuremenos Minerva Han, Karaköy
İ. KüpecioğluHrisovergia Apartments, Sıraselviler
E.E. LadopulosYazıcızade Apartment, Tophane
Markos G. LangasHacopulo Passage (with Perpignani), Galatasaray
Kaludis LaskarisSplendid Hotel, Büyükada
Velisarios Makropulos Apartment, Sıraselviler
Ahilleas ManussosBristol Hotel, Tepebaşı
Petros/Petrakis D. Meimaridis Evangelismos Tis Theotoku Church, Dolapdere
Hacinikoli NikitaidisAya Yorgi (Fener Patriarcate) Church
Dimitri(o)s Panayotidisİş Han/Office, Eminönü
Konstandinos ParpasArif Paşa Apartment, Moda
Aristidis PasadeosFener Patriarcate
Apostolos Kosmas PistikasMarmara Apartment, Gümüşsuyu
Ahilleas PoliçisJohn Avramidis (Con Paşa) Kiosk, Büyükada
Yuvanakis TaşçıoğluTaşçıoğlu House, Büyükada
Theognostos KalfaAltımermer Panayia Church, Şehremini
Athanasios YakasYakumopulos Apartment (Vardar Palas), Sıraselviler
Konstandinos YolasığmazisAya Todori Church, Aksaray
Hristo Yovanidis Tripo Kiosk, Büyükada
Kleanthis Zannos/ZinonÇiçek Pasajı/ Cite de Pera passage, Galatasaray
Nikolaos ZikosAya Pandeleimon Church, Kuzguncuk
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August 31, 2017, 10:32 am
Mavi Boncuk |
Preventing a Jihadist Factory in Idlib
Fabrice BalancheAugust 31, 2017The international coalition must take the same comprehensive approach to HTS as it is taking to the Islamic State.
In July 2017, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) seized the entire Syrian-Turkish border in Idlib province and the Syrian provincial capital of Idlib, to the detriment of its former ally Ahrar al-Sham (AS). The move came several months after the rebels fell in December 2016 to regime and allied forces in Aleppo, whereupon HTS committed itself to dominating the entire Syrian rebellion. In so doing, it sought to force its former allies to submit to its jihadist strategy, while basing itself in the Idlib area.
HTS PREEMINENCEOn January 28, 2017, HTS was formed through the merger of several rebel factions associated with Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra). These factions included Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zinki, Jabhat Ansar al-Din, Liwa al-Haqq, and Jaish al-Sunna. In seeking to strengthen its grip on the rebellion, HTS failed, however, to integrate its main former ally, Ahrar al-Sham. As a result, many AS brigades defected to HTS, while others, such as Free Syrian Army remnants, Suqur al-Sham, and al-Jabha al-Shamiya (Levant Front), joined AS in order to gain protection from HTS. Despite absorbing its own new elements, AS did not bolster itself militarily, and the group's cohesion has suffered -- making it unlikely AS will be able prevent further defections to HTS.
Since 2014, the various Syrian incarnations of al-Qaeda have methodically eliminated the Free Syrian Army (FSA) brigades in northwestern Syria by either killing or appropriating their members. The FSA has been reduced to a few thousand combatants today in the Idlib area, a winnowing to which AS contributed -- and noteworthy in light of the later AS-HTS split. In winter 2017, the Syrian affiliate of al-Qaeda even attacked Jund al-Aqsa, an extremist faction alongside which HTS, and Jabhat al-Nusra before it, fought. The small jihadist group was thus forced to dissolve, with some of its members joining the Islamic State and others the Turkestan Islamist Party (TIP; previously known as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement), a strong HTS ally. The TIP includes several thousand Uyghur fighters originally from Xinjiang, China (aka East Turkestan), who are fighting in Syria and living with their families between Jisr al-Shughour and Ariha.
Today, HTS constitutes the largest rebel group in both Syria and Idlib province. Of the 30,000 or so HTS combatants across the country, some two-thirds are situated in the Idlib area. Following military victories, HTS often attracts additional recruits. In particular, in July 2017, new AS brigades to join included Usud al-Islam (Lions of Islam), located in southeastern Idlib province; Usud al-Maarat (Lions of Maarat), based in Maarat al-Numan; and a group under the emir of al-Dana, a small town in northern Idlib. Further reinforcing HTS in Idlib have been fighters booted from previously rebel-held enclaves now controlled by the Syrian army, such as Zabadani, the al-Waar district of Homs, al-Qabun, Daraya, and others. Additionally, some 1,500 HTS fighters and their families might soon arrive from the Arsal area of Lebanon, where Hezbollah and Lebanese forces are conducting a campaign against Sunni jihadists. Only one notable HTS defection can be counted thus far: that of Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zinki, which broke off to become an independent force in late July 2017.
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HTS NODES OF CONTROLIn assessing the strength of HTS, the group's fluid territorial presence can be deceptive. Indeed, HTS relies more on the potency of its network than on the accumulation of territory. This past July, the group chased rival groups from Idlib city as well as from smaller towns such as Maarat al-Numan, Saraqeb, and Atareb, all of which are former FSA strongholds. When occupying such communities, HTS notably practices discretion in order to avoid antagonizing locals.
In the southern and eastern sections of the province, HTS is satisfied with its past conquests of Syrian army military bases such as that in Abu Duhur. Finally, it retains strongholds near Aleppo (in the northwestern suburbs), Hama (Khan Sheikhoun), and Latakia (Jisr al-Shughour), from which it can probe opportunities for expansion against the Syrian regime. Other areas not populated by Sunni Arabs are more difficult to control. In broader terms, HTS does not seek territorial continuity but instead control of strategic points from which it can launch raids, including against villages such as Kafr Nabl, an anti-Islamist stronghold. Having elicited allegiance from local factions throughout the Idlib area, HTS can mobilize thousands of additional combatants, as in the Hama offensive against the Syrian army in spring 2017.
The main HTS stronghold, encompassing the border area with Turkey from Jisr al-Shughour to Bab al-Hawa, allows for unparalleled control of both cities and the countryside. A lone weak point can be found in the Turkmen-inhabited country north of Latakia, a small Turkish protectorate that uses the Yamadi crossing border. Overall control of the Syrian-Turkish border is fundamental to HTS assertion of power over the province and its ability to dominate other factions. Such control provides the jihadist group with a monopoly over the transit of humanitarian aid and any form of trade with Turkey. Indeed, whereas various groups engage in trade with government-held areas, humanitarian aid comes almost exclusively from Turkey, and feeding the area's two million inhabitants, nearly half of whom are internally displaced, is essential. Moreover, should other factions lose access to weapons from Turkey and the Turkish-controlled border area between Azaz and Jarabulus, they may turn to the Syrian government to avoid destruction if the status quo persists.
On August 22, HTS announced its consolidation of control over all local committees -- consisting of civilians who distribute public services and humanitarian aid from abroad -- of the "liberated zone." Curiously, this statement followed one by Turkey demanding the creation of an Idlib civilian body to manage humanitarian aid and border crossings, and threatening otherwise to halt humanitarian aid. HTS knows, however, that Turkey will not risk inviting hundreds of thousands of hungry Syrians to its border, an unmanageable influx. The first such arrivals would be internally displaced persons (IDPs), who would crowd the camps in dramatic fashion, seeking protection from Syrian regime bombardments.
SUICIDE ATTACKS AND POTENTIAL TURKISH ACTIONFor Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, IDP camps constitute ideal recruitment sites where the group can exploit the misery of fragile populations. The jihadists, for example, recruited thousands of teenagers for use as cannon fodder in the August 2016 battle for Ramouseh, which allowed a temporary breach in the siege of Aleppo. Although unnecessary on the military level, the battle was intended to enhance the prestige of HTS, which had been reconstituted from JFS but had parted amicably with al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. The terrorist organization now needs to constantly replenish its supply of suicide bombers, one of its best assets in the war. While drawing the admiration of other jihadist leaders, the suicide attacks also scare them because they know they are not immune. In his deployment of suicide attackers, HTS leader Abu Muhammad al-Julani corresponds perfectly to the portrait of the "old man of the mountain" (al-Shaykh al-Jebel) described by Bernard Lewis in The Assassins. Specifically, HTS can count on the TIP to supply large numbers of suicide bombers indoctrinated in its children's training camps near Jisr al-Shughour. Uyghur suicide bombers have already performed on the frontlines during the battle for Ramouseh.
In observing recent developments, no state actor wants to see Idlib province become a jihadist factory. Turkey, in particular, could be spurred to intervene militarily, based on the terrorist threat and Ankara's geopolitical interests. To be sure, the Turks hold the priority of preventing the creation of an entity favorable to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) operating between Afrin and the Tigris River. Yet the future of Idlib is also part of Ankara's calculus, and developments there could weigh in favor of or against the Kurds. Indeed, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has voiced his desire to create a Turkish protectorate in Idlib similar to the existing Azaz-Jarabulus corridor. Should the Turks act, their military plan might entail a strike into Syria extending about thirty-five kilometers, from Jisr al-Shughour to Bab al-Hawa, including the city of Idlib. Such a campaign would inevitably lead to a major fight with HTS, which occupies precisely the same area.
NO LONG-TERM PLANS FOR AN HTS EMIRATEAbu Muhammad al-Julani understands that once the Islamic State is defeated, the U.S.-led coalition, along with Russia, Turkey, and Iran, will turn its guns on his group. Depending on developments in the anti-IS campaign, and coordination among these external actors, Julani might have a year or two before his group's time comes. He thus understands that his principal goal is not to create a permanent Islamic emirate in the Idlib area but rather to establish a recruitment base for his army of jihadists, in accordance with the principles set out by Zawahiri: "The strategy for jihad in al-Sham [Greater Syria] must focus on a guerrilla war...Do not occupy yourselves with holding territory."
Such language explains why the international community must seek urgently to counter HTS, which grows stronger by the day, without awaiting the complete destruction of the Islamic State. International actors should not rely on moderate rebels, or Ahrar al-Sham, to achieve this goal. Indeed, the international coalition must pursue the same comprehensive approach to HTS in Idlib as it is taking to the Islamic State in Raqqa and elsewhere. Failure to do so now will entail far greater costs later.
Fabrice Balanche, an associate professor and research director at the University of Lyon 2, is a visiting fellow at The Washington Institute.
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September 1, 2017, 7:59 am
Mavi Boncuk |
Word Origin | Turkish terms derived from Sogdian
Acun: world (the earth)Akşam: evening, last nightBey[1]: gentleman, mister, lord, masterKent[2]: cityOtağ[3]: tent, royal tent
[1] From Ottoman Turkish (bey), from Old Turkic beg, “chief, titled man”). There are different theories about the further etymology of the word beg. According to one theory the word may ultimately come from Middle Chinese Middle Chinese [script needed] (baak, pak).[1] Another theory states that the word may have its origins in Sogdian [script needed] (baga, “lord, master”), therefore from Proto-Indo-European *bhag-. Nonetheless German Turkologist Gerhard Doerfer assessed the derivation from Iranian as uncertain and pointed out that the word may be genuinely Turkic.
[2] From Old Turkic kend (“city, settlement”). The word in Turkish used to mean "village", "rural settlement" until the 20th century, during the language reforms the word was thought to be genuinely Turkic and a secondary meaning "city" that of old Turkic was preferred. From Sogdian [script needed] (kand, “city”), possibly cognate with Kurdish gund (“village”).
[3] From Old Turkic otag, from Old Turkic ōta- ("make a fire, to give out smoke, to fume"). Closely related to the shamanistic feature of a shaman (summoning different kinds of spirits or demons). See oda. Or from Sogdian ʾwtʾʾk (ōtāk, “place, region”). Compare Azeri otaq, Turkish otağ, and Turkmen otag.
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September 1, 2017, 10:55 am
Mavi Boncuk |(use the main search box)
Abdal
Abluka Abudaraho
Acun
AdaletAftos
Ahmak
Akşam
Alay Arasta
Arena
ArkadaşArsenal
Arşiv
Asker
Asparagas
Aşifte
Atkı
Atmasyon
Atlıkarınca
Aznavur
Barikat
Bayram Bagaj
Balaklava
Çadır
Çamur
Delik
Devrim
DışkıDiktatör
Derbi
E
Hain
Hak
Hakaret
Hammal
Hamur
HançerHaylaz
Hayta
Hendek
Hergele
Hiciv
Idrar
Ishtar
Izbandut
Izgara
İktidar
İntihar
İmparator
İşporta
Kofre Köfte
Köfteho
Kokoreç
Poissons Poğaça
Pomegranete
Racon
Ramazan
Refik
Refika
Reis
Sahur
Salak
Saloz
Sandık
Sanduka
Saray
Üniter
Üryan
Üstüpü
VZırh
Zibidi
Zil
Zikzak
Zürafa
MISC.
Osman Gazi Köprüsü
Tulips and Lilacs
Turkish terms derived from Sogdian Turkish fish names in Armenian
Gypsy Loan Words in Turkish
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September 6, 2017, 12:16 pm
Prominent Turkish sociologist, political scientist, academic and thinker Şerif Mardin[1] died at the age of 90 on Wednesday.
Referred to as the "doyen of Turkish sociology," Mardin was known for his work on the historical sociology and intellectual history of the Ottoman Empire.
Mavi Boncuk |
[1] Mardin was born in Istanbul in 1927. His father is Şemsettin Mardin[*], a Turkish ambassador. Şemsettin Mardin was a member of very long-established family and was uncle to Arif Mardin and Betul Mardin. Şerif Mardin's mother is Reya Mardin who was the daughter of Ahmet Cevdet, the founder of an Ottoman newspaper called İkdam.
Mardin completed high school education in the US in 1944. He obtained a bachelor of arts degree in political sciences at Stanford University in 1948. Then he received a master of arts degree in international relations from Johns Hopkins University in 1950. He completed PhD studies in political science at Stanford University in 1958. His PhD dissertation was published by Princeton University Press with the title of The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought in 1962.
Academic career
Mardin began his academic career at the Faculty of Political Science, Ankara University in 1954 and his tenure lasted until 1956. Then he worked as a research associate at the Department of Oriental Studies of Princeton University from 1958 to 1961.[7] He worked as a research fellow at the Middle East Institute of Harvard University for one year (1960-1961). He returned to Turkey and joined the Faculty of Political Science of Ankara University in 1961. He became associate professor in 1964 and professor in 1969. His academic studies at Ankara University continued until 1973. Then he worked at the Department of Political Science of Boğaziçi University from 1973 to 1991. Next, Mardin joined the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of Sabanci University in 1999, until his death
In addition to these academic posts, Mardin also worked as a visiting professor at different universities, including Columbia University, Princeton University, University of California, Los Angeles, University of California, Berkeley, Oxford University, Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and Syracuse University.
Views
Focusing on the Ottoman Empire, Mardin develops many hypotheses about the societal structure of Ottomans. For instance, he argues that in the Ottoman Empire, there was no 'civil society' in the Hegelian terms that could operate independently of central government and was based on property rights.Therefore, the lack of civil society led to a difference in the social evolution and political culture in Ottoman society in contrast to Western societies. Mardin applies the terms center and periphery to the Ottoman society, and reaches the conclusion that the society consisted of city dwellers, including the Sultan and his officials and nomads. The center included city dwellers, and the periphery nomads.The integration of center and periphery was not achieved. These two societal characteristics, namely the existence of center and periphery, and the lack of successful integration of them, also existed in the modern Turkish society and remained to be the major duality in Turkey. Mardin also emphasized the importance of Jon Turks' thought, addressing the attention of the English-speaking world.He analysed the thought of Said Nursi, who was part of this movement in the early years of his life.
Instead of following mainstream accounts of modernization process in Turkey, he adopts an alternative approach in this regard. He claims that Turkish modernization is multi-dimensional. Therefore, reductionism in the form of binary accounts that were resulted from Kemalism cannot provide a satisfactory analysis of Turkish modernism. On the other hand, Mardin maintains that the gap between center and periphery continued during the process of Turkish modernization. Mardin also deals with the achievements of Kemalism. For him, Kemalism has been unsuccessful. But, the reason for this underachievement is not related to the fact that it has been insensitive to popularly held beliefs. Instead, Kemalism cannot be sufficiently linked to the heritage of Enlightenment. In short, Kemalism could not develop texts and philosophy of ethics to describe itself and to pass over next generations.
Mardin coined the concept of "Turkish Exceptionalism" to reveal the reasons for the Turks in dealing with Islam and their vision of the state in a different fashion in contrast to other Moslem countries. Mardin objects the idea that the separation between religion and the state in Turkey was a product of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s movement. Instead, he argues that this separation began during the Ottoman period. Concerning secularism, Mardin also posits a view that reflects the exceptional use of the term in Turkey. He states that secularism in Turkey does not refer to a hostile state approach towards religion. Instead, secularism for Turks means that the state comes before religion by just “one millimeter”. Mardin further asserts that religion, Islam in this context, and its representatives, including clerics, function as a mediator between the individual and the state.[16] Islam was also a unifying code for those in the periphery during the late period of the Ottoman Empire.
In 2007, he coined the term “community pressure” ("Mahalle baskısı" in Turkish) to describe a sociological reality that has been experienced in the secular Turkish society as a result of raising of Islamic life-style in the country.
BooksMardin published many books on religion, modernization and society in the context of Turkey, and some of them are given as follows:
Religion and Social Change in Modern Turkey: The Case of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought: A Study in the Modernization of Turkish Political Ideas, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, July 2000Laicism in Turkey, İstanbul: Konrad Adenauer Foundation Press, March 2003Center and periphery in the Ottoman Empire, New York: Syracuse University Press 2005The nature of nation in the late Ottoman Empire, Leiden: ISIM 2005Religion, society, and modernity in Turkey, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, July 2006
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[*] Şemsettin Mardin was one of the Turkish ambassadors. Mardin was born in Egypt. He was a member of very long-established family. He served as the ambassador of Turkey to Lebanon from 1960 to 1962. He married Reya Hanim, daughter of Ahmed Cevdet Pasha who founded the daily Ikdam. After retiring from diplomatic post, Şemsettin Mardin settled in Maadi, a district of Cairo. He died there.
See also: Samir W Raafat's book Maadi 1904-1962; History and Society in a Cairo Suburb (book first appeared in 1994)
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September 7, 2017, 8:54 am
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Mavi Boncuk | Religion, Society, and Modernity in Turkey[1]
By Şerİf Mardin (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006), xvi + 388 pp.
Ibrahim Kalin[2] Journal of Islamic Studies, Volume 19, Issue 2, 1 May 2008, Pages 275–279, This book brings together Serif Mardin's seminal essays over the last forty years on the history of the late Ottoman Empire and modern Turkish Republic. Touching upon the social, political and religious aspects of the last two centuries, the essays have one underlying theme: understanding Turkish social and political history outside the dominant paradigms of ‘Marxisant’, positivistic and secular–modernistic constructions of Turkish culture and society (p. xiii). Like his other pioneering works, Mardin's essays in the present collection provide penetrating analyses of the transformation of the classical Ottoman civilization into the modern Turkish Republic and its far-reaching consequences for contemporary Turkish society, and the relationship between tradition and modernity.
[1] Contents
Social Class and Class Consciousness 1Power Civil Society and Culture in the Ottoman Empire 23Civil Society and Islam 44The Transformation of an Economic Code 60The Modernization of Social Communication 83Some Consideration on the Building of an Ottoman Public Identity in the Nineteenth Century 124Super Westernization in Urban Life in the Ottoman Empire in the Last Quarter of the Nineteenth Century 135Continuity and Change in the Ideas of the Young Turks 164An Attempt at a Partial Explanation of a Revolutionary Conscience 182Ideology and Religion in the Turkish Revolution 192Youth and Violence in Turkey 205Religion in Modern Turkey 225Necip Fazil and the Naksibendi 243Islam in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Turkey 260Center Periphery as a Concept for the Study of Social Transformation 298Playing Games with Names 316Works Cited 331Index 369
[2] İbrahim Kalın(b.1971) is assistant to the Turkish President and the current Press Secretary in the Turkish Presidential Complex. He is also a senior fellow at the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at the Georgetown University.
Kalin received his B. A. from the University of Istanbul and Ph. D. from George Washington University. From 2002 to 2005 he was a faculty member at the Department of Religious Studies at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. From 2005 to 2009 he was the director of the SETA Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research based in Ankara, Turkey.
On December 11, 2014, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced that İbrahim Kalın would be the first official Turkish Presidential Press Secretary.
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September 7, 2017, 10:22 am
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Turkish documentarist Gürcan Keltek makes a political statement with his observation of one of the largest militant actions to take place against the citizens of his own country. Working in documentary format, Turkish filmmaker, Gürcan Keltek has participated in multiple film festivals with his shorts but is better known for Colony (2015), awarded the Best Newcomer Prize at DokuFest in Kosovo. Meteors, his first feature-length film, is commentary that blends together elements of documentary, experimentalism and fiction and takes place in the Kurdish regions of Eastern Anatolia.
Mavi Boncuk | Meteorlar (Meteors)Netherlands, Turkey · 2017 · DCP · Black and White · 84' · o.v. Kurdish/Turkish
Director Gürcan KeltekCast Ebru OjenProducer Gürcan Keltek, Marc Van Goethem, Arda Çiltepe, Burak ÇevikCinematography Mustafa Şen, Fırat GürgenScreenplay adapted by Gürcan KeltekEditing Fazilet OnatProduction 29P FilmsCoproduction 29P Films PV: ardaciltepe@gmail.com29P Films PV | cevikburak@gmail.comWorld Sales | Heretic Outreach: info@heretic.gr
Meteors is a Dutch-Turkish co-production by Marc Van Goethem (29P Films), Gürcan Keltek, Arda Çiltepe, Burak Çevik and is sold internationally by the Greek company Heretic Outreach.
They come at night and everybody steps out. They light torches and remember those who have walked these streets before them. In the coming hours, the city wil be on lockdown: an eclipse appears and meteors start to fall.
Review
After a period of ceasefire and two and a half years of negotiations, the third phase of the Kurdish-Turkish conflict broke out late in the summer of 2015 with the cause put down to the murder of a soldier by alleged members of the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK). Turkey immediately declared the largest military operation in history to take place in the region, against the PKK, initiating a nationwide crackdown on possible targets related to the Kurdish autonomists aimed principally at cities in South-Eastern Turkey. There was no media coverage of these operations and no official reports. The only source of information came from the live streams of almost static videos uploaded anonymously by locals living in the cities under militant curfew. In Meteors, clashes and riots continue for a couple of months, but everything is set to change when a meteor shower targets the same region. A divine intervention, or just a natural coincidence?
Keltek was entirely inspired by the footage he happened upon and thus watched during the operations in Eastern Anatolia. Most importantly, he intended to capture and preserve the valuable material he was watching. Meteors is divided into six chapters, with each chapter dealing with a different period of conflict. The story begins with the hunters and invaders who arrive secretly in the middle of the night and ends in total disintegration and meteors. Using footage that is fragmented but incredibly unique and original, the director observes a country that is on the verge of civil war. Focusing mainly on the natural sounds of clashes, riots, firearms and even nature itself, the monochromatic granulated image expands all elements of the drama. However, this film is not solely based on montages of archived footage, as the director uses both original content and the actress-cum-writer Ebru Ojen, who narrates extracts from her book The Vaccine and conducts one-on-one interviews with people who were affected by and lived through the curfew.
There are moments in the film in which reality is distorted and surpassed by events that could only belong to fiction. This is what films such as Meteors hope to emphasise. As there was no official record of the operations conducted, due to a persecution against any attempts made by journalists, the content of this film could easily belong to any common fantasy film. The elements of war are only presented as phone pictures, and witness testimonies sound like stories from the past. Keltek hopes to preserve and integrate the memories of so many before they are forgotten, a clear political statement. He further observes the absurdity of such an imposed permanence as nature, acting as deus ex machina, accentuates the futility of controlling people or regions. Meteors goes beyond the boundaries of the documentary genre, intensifying the political commentary and concluding with a philosophical and almost supernatural questioning of existence judged by “the eyes and ears of forgotten gods”. An unconventional but quite impactful process by a director that seems ready to push boundaries even further.
Gürcan Keltek
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Born in İzmir, Turkey, in 1973, Gürcan Keltek studied film at Dokuz Eylül University before directing several shorts including Overtime (2012), selected at Visions Du Réel and DOK Leipzig. His medium-format film, Colony (2015), was screened at FIDMarseille. Meteorlar (2017) is his first feature film.2015 Colony2012 Overtime
InterviewCineuropa: Is Meteors a purely political film, and how difficult was it to create?Gürcan Keltek: It’s always difficult, especially when everyone has a different take on what has happened and you must reconsider everything while the events are still unfolding. Meteors was a reaction to what was going on, and there was a certain urgency to it, something that helped me to finish it. As a filmmaker, my intention is to go beyond current political situations. There were places I wanted to explore, where I don’t belong and which I want to observe differently. So it’s true that the film has political dimensions, but it starts to build itself up from something very personal, and then it becomes something else. I was originally fascinated by the history, the region, the people and the beautiful creatures in it, and Meteors is about them. The most difficult thing was to keep all of these elements intact while everything was fundamentally shifting or literally disappearing.Why did you divide the storyline into chapters?The fragmented structure of the separate narratives led me to divide the story into numbered chapters. I edited a series of sequences with my editor, Fazilet Onat, and we tried to make them speak to one another. There were geographical time jumps and different events happening simultaneously, so they were necessary for the narrative, which was sometimes intentionally sloppy. I like chapters; I pay attention when they appear on screen. I was doing some research on old pagan texts and anonymous Kurdish folk songs while making the film, so all I was seeing was chapters.
How did you manage to preserve the found footage?I collected found material from many sources: from Russian news channels that captured the meteorites to independent reporters and CCTV footage. The most important footage came from Güliz Sağlam, a great filmmaker from Istanbul. What she shot for the Women’s Initiative for Peace in the south-east of Turkey was amazing, and we also used other recordings from them. When we felt that there was a gap to fill, we also went to the spot itself to do our own shooting. Apart from our handful of scenes, we preserved and edited everything else at once.
Is this an experimental film or a documentary?Initially, I was joking that Meteors would be a documentary with psychedelic undertones, but now it looks more like a fiction to me, as there is written dialogue and a rough timeline or script. Even if everything shown is real, the idea of natural or supernatural forces intervening while some huge political turmoil is going on is completely fictional. There are no limits in documentary filmmaking, and when you try to describe them, it just expands. There were some images that still haunt me, so I never thought of particular criteria. I believe that experimental fiction and documentary co-exist.
Why did you use grainy, monochromatic cinematography?I shot the opening scene at Mount Nemrut in grainy black and white many years ago; I used celluloid, and I really like the texture, which paired well with the low-quality videos with high-resolution grains. This is also directly linked to the elements of the film. At that time, there was such scarce information and limited news coverage on south-eastern cities. I believe the visual style resonates with our distorted collective memory, like one of those anonymous, web-streamed videos from the region, with glitches, monologues and the like. I was fascinated by those images. What happened back then is a faded memory now, and Meteors is my re-imagining of how we remember everything.
What was your experience of co-producing Meteors?It started off as a self-financed film, and for a long time, I was alone with very few people. We won a work-in-progress award at Meetings on the Bridge at the International Istanbul Film Festival, which was a great help. Afterwards, with 29P Films and Marc Van Goethem, we managed to wrap the post-production. Then, two brilliant filmmaker friends of mine, Burak Çevik and Arda Çiltepe, joined me as producers, and we literally finished everything together – with a very tiny budget, of course. There is no conventional way to finance a film like this in Turkey right now.
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September 7, 2017, 12:41 pm
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Header image: Abdülcanbaz – The Istanbul Gentleman © Turhan Selçuk
Mavi Boncuk |SOURCE
A Short History Of Comics In Turkeyby Levent Cantek[1]
Comics and comic strips have been published in Turkey for the last one hundred odd years with some interruptions, and for eighty years on a continuous basis. There have been some remarkable local productions published during this period. Yet, when comics are brought up in Turkey, the first creations that come to mind are those of foreign origin. The foremost reason for this is that comics production in Turkey has never developed into a full-fledged industry branch. Local comics that were financed and supported by newspaper publishers could not rival foreign publications, neither on a quantitative nor on a qualitative basis. Therefore it is of no surprise that even during the years 1955-1975, generally known as the golden age of comics in Turkey, no locally produced children’s comics attained widespread popularity.
Still, the country saw the creation of many significant comics, such as Karaoğlan by Suat Yalaz, Abdülcanbaz by Turhan Selçuk, and Sezgin Burak‘s Tarkan. In this period, comics were published daily in the form of comic strips in newspapers, which would mostly be compiled in full-length comic books after their daily publication. At a time when magazines for children could survive even on small sales figures, cartoonists turned first and foremost to periodicals, thus reinforcing the presence of comics across their pages. With growing income and influence, the artists were then able to develop their work more deeply, allowing their creations from then on to incorporate narrative forms according to the needs of the publication and readers’ profiles.
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Cover of 'Tarkan,' a popular series by artist Sezgin Burak started in 1967 (© Burak).
Turkish authors’ focus on historical themes, extravagant prose about heroic figures, and eroticism seem to have met readers’ expectations as well as publishers’, as these elements have firmly established themselves over the years. Traditionally, almost every newspaper (Hürriyet, Milliyet, Akşam, etc.) has reserved a space for comic strips, especially historical ones. The benefits to newspapers have not come solely from the growing interest in this genre—comic strips have contributed to newspaper design on the visual level, too. Due to insufficient printing technology before the 1970s, photographs were only scarcely used. Thus, artists who worked both with the newspapers and in the comic strip genre were able to shape the visual aspect of the Turkish press. Caricatures, vignettes, portraits, illustrations and various decorations were all used in place of photographs. Comics artists (such as Suat Yalaz, Bedri Koraman, and Turhan Selçuk) generally received good salaries and the comic strips they produced returned high royalties.With the introduction of modern printers to Turkey, however, photographs soon took over on the visual level. This transformation would reduce both the standing of comic strips within the newspaper industry as well as the royalties paid for their creation. Due to subsiding royalties, newspaper illustrators and graphic artists gradually turned their attention away from the production of comic strips, and despite the continued importance of comic strips since then, they would never again match the high level of popularity they enjoyed leading up to the 1970s.
Cover of the legendary satirical magazine 'Girgir,' which over the years has featured the work of many of the greatest Turkish comics artists.
The evolution of comics in the highly popular magazine Gırgır is once again due to favorable economic conditions and the financial support from newspaper owners. It all began with the development of offset web printing facilities by famous media owner Haldun Simavi, which represented a great step forward in the evolution of print media. Up until then, it had been virtually impossible to produce hundreds of thousands of newspapers and distribute them across the entire country in a single day. But with his new, fast-printing facilities, Simavi revolutionized the press and printing industry by producing massive amounts of newspapers and magazines rich in photographs and illustrations. At the onset of the 1970s he also experimented with an erotic, comical, and to some extent political humour magazine—Gırgır. Along with its strong cultural and political identity, Gırgır’s commercial success cannot be disregarded. The emergence of many comics creators on the national level and their existence up until today is directly attributable to Gırgır’s strong sales and economic success. The magazine opened up a new path for artists who had previously been working mainly for newspapers. Many young people were able to make a good living in this way through their art, and under such favorable conditions, other magazines with the same format as Gırgır, sporting caricatures and humorous comic strips, have also become popular.
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An illustration by renowned artist Ergün Gündüz, who was invited to the Angouleme Comics Festival in 2012 (© Gündüz).
Nearly all the comics from the last forty years that have secured a place in the hearts and minds of the Turkish belong to the humor genre. The vast majority (Oğuz Aral‘s Utanmaz Adam, or “Shameless Man,” En Kahraman Rıdvan by Bulent Arabacioglu, Gaddar Davut by Nuri Kurtcebe, etc.) are based on irony, drawing heavily on exaggeratedly heroic characters and adventure-filled episodes by utilizing satirical language. Gırgır and other humour magazines (Çarşaf, Limon, Fırt) that emerged at the same time reached total sales figures of one million copies. Such a windfall of sales, as well as the magazines’ variety, had a great impact on comics, such that the richness of visual styles and narrative forms rose to an unforeseen level. Galip Tekin, Suat Gönülay, Kemal Aratan and Ergün Gündüz were among the most productive comics artists of those years and the ones that most strongly influenced the following generations of artists.
However, such burgeoning quality and quantity was abruptly reversed by the heavy erosion of sales caused by the negative impact of television, so that by the first half of the 1990s, sales of print media had fallen by 80 percent compared with figures from just a decade before. Confronted with the growth of commercial TV channels, many magazines (Leman, Deli, etc.) turned against mainstream taste and put a new emphasis on stories that could not be aired on TV. This evolution not only marginalized magazines in general but also affected comics, investing them with a rather grotesque touch.
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Panels excerpted from 'Vakur Barut,' a series by the popular comics artist Suat Gönülay (© Gönülay).
The most important magazine of that period was L-Manyak. The main aim of the magazine is humor and all that relates to buffoonery. Openly obscene and scatological in character, it scorns the “sensitivities” of urban society. Typical targets of the magazine are predators, braggarts, the rich, gluttons, ambitious businessmen, and those who use their sexual attraction to climb up the social ladder. As opposed to its predecessors, however, one topic is not touched upon: politics. The cover focuses on grotesque characters and comical representations of violence and various sexual practices. Decidely vulgar in nature, the magazine’s humor does however serve as constructive criticism. Mainstays of the stories in L-Manyak include the use of violence against oppression and the oppressors, the wish to escape the masses, mistrust towards certain political agendas, strong and insatiable sexual desire, hedonism, general mistrust towards others, and indifference to money.
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Work from artist Ersin Karabulut, who got his start in comics in Istanbul at age 16 with the magazine 'Pişmiş Kelle' (© Karabulut).
Nowadays comics in Turkey are styled on the narrative model of L-Manyak. It is thus important to understand the common aesthetic preferences at the base of the L-Manyak trend: as opposed to the very minimalistic approach cultivated by legendary editor Oğuz Aral, most editors now prefer drawings against a detail-loaded, photorealistic background and tiled page designs. Kötü Kedi Şerafettin (Şerafettin the Bad Cat) by Bülent Üstün showcases the punky past of the author and his aesthetic rebellion. In the L-Manyak “Martyrs” series by Memo Tembelçizer, the author recounts stories about his artist friends who find death in many different ways. Another subcultural story by influential artist Oky (Oktay Gençer), Cihangir’de Bi Ev (“A House in Cihangir”), revolves around a quarter of Istanbul, where Cihangir is shown as a bohemian space of the city, with a focus on adolescents’ sexual and emotional relations. Other typical examples of this period are Cengiz Üstün’s grotesque works that invert the logic of horror movies, like Kunteper Canavarı (The Kunteper Monster), and Gürcan Yurt’s Turkish take on Robinson Crusoe (Robinson Crusoe ve Cuma, or Robinson Crusoe and Friday). Other comics artists whose various works have recently made a splash are Bahadır Baruter, Kenan Yarar and Ersin Karabulut.
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An image from Turhan Selçuk’s 'Abdülcanbaz' (© Selçuk, 1957).
Finally it is of interest to expand on a few artists who have become prominent in the course of eighty years of local comics production. Suat Yalaz’s swashbuckling serial Karaoğlan (1962) and Turhan Selçuk’s formidable Turk in the last days of the Ottoman Empire, Abdülcanbaz (1957), were able to establish themselves on various platforms and keep up with the times, thus becoming classics in the Turkish comics scene. Sezgin Burak’s Tarkan is interesting because of its masterful originality and creative settings. Although Ratip Tahir Burak is considered by many to be a great painter who stands out for his artful drawing rather than his stories, he has become a model for the entire Gırgır generation. Oğuz Aral’s Utanmaz Adam has become a model as well for its successful scripts and well-conceived storylines. Engin Ergönültaş, born in 1951, deeply influenced the generations to come by creatively employing the original character of hınzır (originally meaning “swine,” “pork”; here in the sense of a boorish and unfeeling person) and through his literary visuality. Much of the production of today’s Turkish comics artists is deeply rooted in Ergönültaş’s influential artwork. With perhaps much more still to come.
[1] Text by Levent Cantek, author of the book Türkiye’de Çizgi Roman, on the history and evolution of Turkish comics. Studied international relations at Bilkent University, and received his masters in journalism from Gazi University. He finished his PhD at Ankara University, and is one of the editors-in-chief of the Toplum ve Bilim (Society and Science) journal. He is the author of books Comic Books in Turkey (Iletisim, 1996), Markopasa, A Legend of Humor and Opposition (Iletisim, 2001), Karaoglan, An Erotic Nationalist Icon (Oglak, 2003), Republican Adolescence (Iletisim, 2008), Anatolian Tales (Dipnot, 2009), Donkey Immigrating to the City (Iletisim, 2011), Black Smoke (Iletisim, 2013) and Entrusted City (Iletisim, 2014).
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September 13, 2017, 2:06 pm
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This totem statue was found at the Gobekli Tepe site near Sanliurfa, Turkey. The Gobekli Tepe site is the oldest man-made place of worship yet discovered, dating back to 10,000 BCE. Found in the cradle of civilization, Gobekli Tepe has reshaped archeologist's understanding of religion and culture in the neolithic and pre-historic ages.
Mavi Boncuk | SOURCE
Schmidt and his team have so far found no evidence of settlement at Göbekli Tepe - houses, cooking hearths, and refuse pits are all absent. The archaeologists did, however, find over 100,000 animal bone fragments, many of which exhibited cut marks and splintered edges which indicate that animals were being butchered and cooked somewhere in the area. The bones came from wild game such as gazelle (which accounted for over 60% of the bones), boar, sheep and red deer, and different species of birds such as vultures, cranes, ducks and geese. All of the bones were from wild species; evidence that that the people who inhabited Göbekli Tepe were hunter-gatherers rather than early farmers who kept domesticated animals.
The depictions of vultures at Göbekli Tepe have parallels at other Anatolian and Near Eastern sites. The walls of many of the shrines at the large Neolithic settlement of Çatal Höyük (in existence from approximately 7500 BCE to 5700 BCE) in south-central Turkey were adorned with large skeletal representations of vultures.
One theory put forward to explain the prominence of vultures in the early Anatolian Neolithic is in the context of possible excarnation[1] practices suggesting a funerary cult. After death, bodies would have been deliberately left outside and exposed, perhaps on some kind of wooden frame, where their skeletons were stripped of flesh by vultures and other birds of prey. The skeletons would then be interred somewhere else. Perhaps the ritual of excarnation was the focus of a cult of the dead practiced by the inhabitants of Göbekli Tepe, as it certainly seems to have been elsewhere in Anatolia and the Near East in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic.
Other researchers believe that the Eden narrative in the Bible could be better interpreted as an allegory for the transition from a hunter-gather lifestyle to agriculture; though biblical accounts were recorded millennia after this transition took place. Interestingly, it is Klaus Schmidt’s opinion that the shift from hunting to farming in the area brought about the decline of Göbekli Tepe. With the intense work required for agricultural societies to succeed there was no longer the time or perhaps the need for the monuments of Göbekli Tepe. In the surrounding area, trees were chopped down, soils became exhausted and the landscape was gradually transformed into the arid wilderness we see today.
[1] In archaeology and anthropology, the term excarnation (also known as defleshing) refers to the practice of removing the flesh and organs of the dead before burial, leaving only the bones.
Excarnation may be precipitated through natural means, involving leaving a body exposed for animals to scavenge, or it may be purposefully undertaken by butchering the corpse by hand. Practices making use of natural processes for excarnation are the Tibetan sky burial, Comanche platform burials, and traditional Zoroastrian funerals (see Tower of Silence).
Archaeologists believe that in this practice, people typically left the body exposed on a woven litter or altar. When the excarnation was complete, the litter with its remains would be removed from the site. Since metatarsals, finger bones and toe bones are very small, they would easily fall through gaps in the woven structure or roll off the side during this removal. Thus, a site in which only small bones are found is suggestive of ritual excarnation.
Some Native American groups in the southeastern portion of North America practised deliberate excarnation in protohistoric times.
Archaeologists seeking to study the practice of ritual excarnation in the archeological record must differentiate between the removal of flesh as a burial practice, and as a precursor to cannibalism. When human bones exhibiting signs of flesh removal are discovered in the fossil record, a variety of criteria can be used to distinguish between the two. One common approach is to compare the tool marks and other cuts on the bones with butchered animal bones from the same site, with the assumption that cannibalized humans would have been prepared like any other meat, whereas excarnated bodies would be prepared differently. Cannibalized bones, in contrast to excarnated bones, may also exhibit telltale signs such as human tooth marks, broken long bones (to facilitate marrow extraction), and signs of cooking, such as "pot polishing".
During the Middle Ages in Europe, defleshing was a mortuary procedure used mainly to prepare human remains for transport over long distances. The practice was used only for nobility. It involved removing skin, muscles, and organs from a body, leaving only the bones. In this procedure, the head, arms, and legs were detached from the body. The process left telltale cuts on the bones.
King Saint Louis IX of France is said to have been defleshed by boiling his corpse until the flesh separated from the bones. This was intended to preserve his bones, to avoid decaying of the remains during their return to France from the Eighth Crusade, and to provide relics. The process is known as mos Teutonicus.
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September 14, 2017, 6:29 am
Object: Pazarola Hasan Bey sits on a footstool
Description: Pazarola Hasan Bey is sitting on a footstool. In his left hand, he is holding a cup of coffee, in his right a cigarette. He is dressed in traditional and used clothes. The photograph was taken outside, probably in front of a closed shop. Next to Pazarola Hasan Bey stands a secondman. His head is outside the frame of the picture.
Comment: The photograph was used in the context of an article by Osman Cemal (Kaygılı)with the title, ‘Istanbul’s most well-known man: Pazarola Hasan Bey’, in the weekly journal Resimli Ay. Pazarola Hasan bey (approx. 1880–1922) was a famous ‘crazy’ personality in Istanbul at the turn of the century. He was a factotum of the bazaar district around Beyazıt meydanı. Themerchants and retailers of the time valued him as a good luck charm who would bless their shops and goods.
Bibliograpy: (Kaygılı), Osman Cemal: İstanbul'un En Ma'ruf Adamı: Pazarola Hasan Bey.Resimli Ay 2-12, March 1341 (1925), 10-13. – Karaklışa, Yavuz Selim (2006):Eski İstanbul'un Delileri. Pazarola Hasan Bey. İstanbul: Tarih Vakfı.Copyright: Cengiz KahramanArchive: Cengiz Kahraman, Istanbul (Collection Private collection) , Inv. No.: PAZAROLAHASAN BEY - KAHVE SIGARA - 01 Editors: Joël László, Cengiz Kahraman
Mavi Boncuk |SIBA – A Visual Approach to Explore Everyday Life in Turkish and Yugoslav Cities, 1920s and 1930s
Beginning in summer 2013, SNSF research professor Nataša Mišković and her team explored everyday life in four former Ottoman cities in the 1920s and 1930s. They focused on press photographs from the archives of the largest daily newspapers in Turkey and Yugoslavia. From the mid-1920s, 'Cumhuriyet' and 'Akşam' in Istanbul and 'Politika' and 'Vreme' in Belgrade employed their own photo reporters on a fixed basis. These men probed the potential of the new field with great enthusiasm, producing dynamic pictures of a dynamic age, informing about local features and the overall character of these cities.Photographs enable direct access to the past. An interesting image catches the eye and draws the observer into a different place and time. Nevertheless, working with photographs is a big challenge for historians. What exactly does an image show? When was it taken? Why and for whom? And who pressed the shutter release? Finding out more about the historical origin of photographs is a difficult and time-consuming task that requires much research and expert knowledge. However, detailed, informed answers to the above questions are a prerequisite for such historical work to begin.
The SIBA team went to great lengths to establish a precise context for the photographs gathered from numerous archives, museums and private collections in Turkey, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Close cooperation with local experts was especially important. Cengiz Kahraman, Director of the Istanbul Photography Museum, and Prof. Dr. Mehmed A. Akšamija, Professor of Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo, enthusiastically welcomed our initiative, opened their wonderful collections for us and continue to support us with their expert advice. In their own work, both struggle with a lack of financial and institutional support and low appreciation for the visual heritage of their countries.
As expected, the photographs from the four cities under investigation, Sarajevo, Istanbul, Belgrade and Ankara (SIBA), testify to half a millennium of joint Ottoman history, yet they tell us more about the Zeitgeist of the early 20th century. Next to stately mosques, we see modern sewage pipes being laid, cars and electric trams driving along newly paved streets, peasants in traditional costume selling their products in a recently opened market complex that meets the era's new standards of hygiene. The Kingdom of Yugoslavia celebrates the young nation with sport, music and dance at the big Pan-Slav 'Soko' meeting in Belgrade in 1930, while Turkey honours the nation on Republic Day with military parades, school processions and sports events. All this was documented by 'roving reporters' such as Selahattin Giz, Svetozar Grdijan, Namık Görgüç, Raka Ruben and Aca Simić — the latter on the move on his preferred mode of transport, a motorcycle with sidecar, a sensation in Belgrade at that time.
A selection of these pictures will be published on 3 June, 2016, as a scientific edition on the 'Visual Archive Southeastern Europe' digital database (VASE)[1]. On this occasion, VASE will be relaunched as a joint project by the Universities of Basel and Graz. Find more information here.
PDF of the international scientific conference for 2017.
Nataša Mišković
Yugoslavia and Turkey are two nation states which emerged at the end of World War I on the remains of the Ottoman (and in case of Yugoslavia, partly of the Habsburg) Empire. One was a monarchy formed at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1918, with the former King of Serbia becoming the King of a 'three-named nation' of South-Slavs. The other, under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, was forged under the conviction that the Ottomanist policy of the last Sultans had failed and that the Anatolian 'heart' of the former empire was therefore to become exclusively Turk. The founding of the two new states triggered a dynamic development especially in the large cities, where the new regimes first implemented their nation building projects.
The Third Balkan Visual Meeting will look at these developments from a visual approach and explore how urban landscapes and everyday life in these cities changed under the new national order, addressing the following issues:
1. The city centre as a showcase of progress and modernity2. The old çarşı/čaršija between neglect, nostalgia, and reform 3. Nationalist 'Zeitgeist': Nation and Body in the city4. From subject to citizen: Gender, body and dress5. Leisure and holidays6. Workers and poverty relief7. Art and Urban Planning8. The ruler in the city: Progress, Repression, Neglect?
The main focus is on the cities which are under investigation in the ongoing Basel SIBA project: Sarajevo, Istanbul, Belgrade, Ankara, but also other cases are welcome. The SIBA project explores the cities named above through the photographic lens of local press reporters and press reports in large daily newspapers such as 'Politika', 'Vreme', 'Cumhuriyet' and 'Akşam' (see https://nahoststudien.unibas.ch/en/research/siba/). Please submit your paper proposal, including name and affiliation, paper title, an abstract of up to 300 words and a short academic bio, to Yorick Tanner (yorick.tanner@unibas.ch) by 20 February 2017. Successful applicants will be notified by 12 March 2017. We plan to publish a selection of papers in an edited volume on the visual history of the Balkans and Anatolia.
Kontakt
Yorick Tanner| Maiengasse 51, CH-4056 Basel |yorick.tanner(at)unibas(dot)ch
[1] Visual Archive Southeastern Europe
The Visual Archive Southeastern Europe collects historical photographic material from this part of Europe and has made it accessible online as a scientific edition. VASE was initiated by SIBA’s partners at the University of Graz: the Department of Southeast European History and Anthropology, and the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities. It has now been significantly extended through cooperation between the SIBA project based in Basel and these two partner institutions. The redesigned website, now launched as a joint project, will be presented at the University of Basel on 3rd June, 2016, at 4pm. Find the programme here [PDF (1.5 MB)].
Users can expect a carefully composed and edited scientific database comprising several thousand photographs. It holds photographs, postcards, posters and film stills from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Austria, Romania, Serbia and Turkey. The largest collection stems from the research project, ‘Visualizing Family, Gender Relations and the Body. The Balkans approx. 1860-1950’, conducted in Graz between 2010 and 2014 under the direction of Karl Kaser by Barbara Derler, Ana Djordjević and Anelia Kasabova. Its focus is on early Bosnian, Bulgarian and Serbian studio photography, as well as postcards. With its relaunch as a joint project between Graz and Basel, the database has gained exciting and hitherto scarcely known photographic material from the SIBA project in Basel. This collection edited by Nataša Mišković, Joël László, Milanka Matić, Mehmed A. Akšamija, Cengiz Kahraman, Kristina Ilić and Yorick Tanner gives an insight into press photography in interwar Yugoslavia and Turkey. The work of Bosnian photographer Alija M Akšamija, who took pictures of random pedestrians in and around Sarajevo at the end of the 1930s, is a special gem.The database is being extended continually. By the end of 2016, images, posters and film stills collected by Karl Kaser as part of his research on Balkan cinema will be uploaded. In addition, a selection of photographs from the archive of Josip Broz Tito is being prepared in cooperation with the Museum of Yugoslav History in Belgrade.
Next to precise image descriptions and comments, the edition, published in English, comprises a glossary allowing cross-references between the featured cities and languages. It also includes subject indexing based on the international Outline of Cultural Materials (OCM), short biographies of the photographers and a full-text search function.
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September 15, 2017, 5:56 am
Mavi Boncuk |
Yuh: boo, jeer, hoot [1]EN (interjection) Tatar TR: [ Aşık Paşa, Garib-name, 1330]ādem iken ḥayvān olduŋ yū saŋa: ünl takbih ünlemiSimilar: yuf, yuha, yuhalamak
Çüş: whoa! [2]EN (interjection) Tatar TR:[ Evliya Çelebi, Seyahatname, c.1683]eşekçi Ermenīler çüş bre andıra halası çüş deyüp Ermenice türkīler yırlayup: ünl eşeği durdurma ünlemi
Oha: oha, çüş!; whoa[3], nellie! EN (interjection) used to stop cattle. Similarly used as a slang expression for rude people.Büyükbaş hayvanları durdurmak için kullanılan bir seslenme sözü. Argo: Kaba ve yakışıksız bir davranışta bulunan kişilere karşı kullanılan söz.
[1] boo (interj.) early 15c., boh, "A combination of consonant and vowel especially fitted to produce a loud and startling sound" [OED, which compares Latin boare, Greek boaein "to cry aloud, roar, shout"]; as an expression of disapproval, 1884 (n.); hence, the verb meaning "shower (someone) with boos" (1885).
Booing was common late 19c. among London theater audiences and at British political events; in Italy, Parma opera-goers were notorious boo-birds. But the custom seems to have been little-known in America before c. 1910. To say boo "open one's mouth, speak," originally was to say boo to a goose.To be able to say Bo! to a goose is to be not quite destitute of courage, to have an inkling of spirit, and was probably in the first instance used of children. A little boy who comes across some geese suddenly will find himself hissed at immediately, and a great demonstration of defiance made by them, but if he can pluck up heart to cry 'bo!' loudly and advance upon them, they will retire defeated. The word 'bo' is clearly selected for the sake of the explosiveness of its first letter and the openness and loudness of its vowel. [Walter W. Skeat, "Cry Bo to a Goose,""Notes and Queries," 4th series, vi, Sept. 10, 1870]
jeer (n.) "a scoff, a taunt," 1620s, from jeer (v.).jeer (v.) 1550s, gyr, "deride, to mock," of uncertain origin; perhaps from Dutch gieren "to cry or roar," or Middle Dutch scheeren or German scheren "to plague, vex," literally "to shear" (as a mark of contempt or disgrace). OED finds the suggestion that it is an ironical use of cheer "plausible and phonetically feasible, ... but ... beyond existing evidence." Related: Jeered; jeering.
hoot (n.) mid-15c., "cry of dissatisfaction or contempt," from hoot (v.). Meaning "a laugh, something funny" is first recorded 1942. Slang sense of "smallest amount or particle" (the hoot you don't give when you don't care) is from 1891.
"A dod blasted ole fool!" answered the captain, who, till now, had been merely an amused on-looker. "Ye know all this rumpus wont do nobuddy a hoot o' good--not a hoot." ["Along Traverse Shores," Traverse City, Michigan, 1891]Hooter in the same sense is from 1839.
Hooter. Probably a corruption of iota. Common in New York in such phrases as "I don't care a hooter for him.""This note ain't worth a hooter." [John Russell Bartlett, "Dictionary of Americanisms," 1877]
hoot (v.) "to call or shout in disapproval or scorn," c. 1600, probably related to or a variant of Middle English houten, huten "to shout, call out" (c. 1200), which is more or less imitative of the sound of the thing. First used of bird cries, especially that of the owl, mid-15c. Meaning "to laugh" is from 1926. Related: Hooted; hooting. A hoot owl (1826) is distinguished from a screech owl.
[2] whoa (interj.) 1620s, a cry to call attention from a distance, a variant of who. As a command to stop a horse, it is attested from 1843, a variant of ho. As an expression of delight or surprise (1980s) it has gradually superseded wow, which was very popular 1960s.
[3] Whoa (c. 1843) is a variant of woa (c. 1840), itself a variant of wo (c. 1787), from who (c. 1450), ultimately from Middle English ho, hoo (interjection), probably from Old Norse hó! (interjection, also, a shepherd's call). Compare German ho, Old French ho ! (“hold!, halt!”).
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September 20, 2017, 6:27 am
Mavi Boncuk |
The Trump administration has withdrawn a proposal to let Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s security guards buy $1.2 million in U.S.-made weapons, a congressional official said Monday.
Earlier this year, the administration told Congress that it planned to allow New Hampshire gunmaker Sig Sauer to sell the weapons, which include hundreds of semi-automatic handguns and ammunition. The notification triggered a period in which Congress could review the deal before final approval is granted. The weapons would have gone to an intermediary in Turkey for use by Erdogan’s presidential security forces.
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September 20, 2017, 6:58 am
Beşiktaş's Vodafone Park to host UEFA Super Cup match in 2019
Mavi Boncuk |
The 2019 UEFA Super Cup will be the 44th edition of the UEFA Super Cup, an annual football match organised by UEFA and contested by the reigning champions of the two main European club competitions, the UEFA Champions League and the UEFA Europa League. The match will feature the winners of the 2018–19 UEFA Champions League and the 2018–19 UEFA Europa League.
The 2017 Super Cup game is scheduled for August 8 in Skopje, Macedonia. In 2018 the Super Cup moves for the first time to Estonia and the A. Le Coq Arena.
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September 20, 2017, 8:30 am
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Mavi Boncuk |
THE IDIOT By Elif Batuman[1]
Hardcover: 432 pagesPublisher: Penguin Press; First Edition edition (March 14, 2017)Language: EnglishISBN-10: 1594205612ISBN-13: 978-1594205613
The US publicist for The Idiot is Liz Calamari: ecalamari@penguinrandomhouse.com.The UK publicist for The Idiot is Aidan O’Neill: AONeill@penguinrandomhouse.co.uk.The publicist for The Possessed is Brian Gittis: Brian.Gittis@fsgbooks.com.
For lectures and public appearances, please contact Trinity Ray at the Tuesday Agency: trinity@tuesdayagency.com | (319) 338-7080
For other inquiries, please contact the Wylie Agency: mail@wylieagency.com.
Review: Elif Batuman’s ‘The Idiot’ Sets a Romantic Crush on Simmer
Books of The TimesBy DWIGHT GARNER FEB. 28, 2017
THE IDIOTBy Elif Batuman[1] Love, as Thomas Pynchon wrote, reviewing Gabriel García Márquez’s novel “Love in the Time of Cholera” in The New York Times Book Review in 1988 and quoting Mickey and Sylvia’s 1956 hit single, love is strange.Elif Batuman’s first novel, “The Idiot,” is in part about the unlikely and consuming crush that Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, develops on an older mathematics student from Hungary during her freshman year at Harvard.It is unclear, for hundreds of pages, whether this crush is requited. Meanwhile the reader, palm crushed into forehead, thinks, “Poor Selin, what are you doing to yourself?”
“The Idiot” is set in 1995. Blues Traveler plays on Discmans. Mixtapes are still units of emotional currency. Students type with green cursors on black screens.
Email is new, and Selin intuits its power. “Each message contained the one that had come before, and so your own words came back to you — all the words you threw out, they came back,” Batuman writes. “It was like the story of your relations with others, the story of the intersection of your life with other lives, was constantly being recorded and updated and you could check it at any time.”
Anyone who has followed Batuman’s work will not be surprised to learn that Selin first falls for Ivan, the Hungarian student, because she adores his email messages. Batuman is a language freak and geek. You can imagine one of her characters becoming attracted to someone, as did a woman in Norman Rush’s last novel, “Subtle Bodies,” because he was “verbal looking.”
Herself the daughter of Turkish immigrants and a graduate of Harvard, Batuman is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of “The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them” (2010). That book was a witty and melancholy tour de force about reading and love and the pleasures of travel as against tourism.PhotoThat same voice is poured into “The Idiot.” It’s memorable to witness Selin, via Batuman, absorb the world around her. Each paragraph is a small anthology of well-made observations.Only Batuman would send a character in search of new clothes and have her think, “what was ‘Cinderella,’ if not an allegory for the fundamental unhappiness of shoe shopping?”Selin notes the “death roar” of an institutional toilet. She observes how, lighting a cigarette, “when the flame came into contact with the paper, it made a sound like the needle coming down on a record player.”Small pleasures will have to sustain you over the long haul of this novel. “The Idiot” builds little narrative or emotional force. It is like a beautiful neon sign made without a plug. No glow is cast.
We’re told why Selin falls for Ivan. He gives good email. He is also, as one of her friends puts it, “a seven-foot-tall Hungarian guy who stares at everyone like he’s trying to see through their souls.” He’s Ivan the enfant terrible.Selin tells us about the force of her longing. “Every sound, every syllable that reached me,” she says, “I wanted to filter through his consciousness.” But we never feel this longing in our bones.
I’m reminded of the acting coach’s dictum that it’s not important that the actor cry; it’s important that the audience does. After 100 pages, I was done with Ivan and wanted Selin to be done, too. I wished, as if she were an avatar in a video game, to point her in a different direction.
Selin is not done with him. The summer after her freshman year, she travels to the Hungarian countryside to teach English and perhaps to see him on weekends. She consumes a lot of food with sour cream in it. She judges a contest to see which students have the best legs. She frets.
Sexual heat is at a minimum. This is too bad, because Batuman has a rich sense of the details of human attachment and lust. Watching Ivan dig into his pockets for coins, for example, Selin thinks: “An amazing sight, someone you’re infatuated with trying to fish something out of a jeans pocket.” That line beamed me back to my own freshman year at college.
“The Idiot” — at the rate Batuman is burning through the titles of Dostoyevsky novels, her next one will be called “Netochka Nezvanova” — reminded me of Martin Amis’s complaint about “Pride and Prejudice.” That novel’s only flaw, he said, “is the absence of a 30-page sex scene between Elizabeth and Darcy.”There are two things I admire about this novel. One is the touching sense, here as in everything Batuman writes, that books are life. Selin is, convincingly and only slightly pretentiously, the sort of person who buys an overcoat because it reminds her of Gogol’s.
She likes learning Spanish because “the donkey had a place in the national literature.” She delivers this writing advice, after hearing a story about a host placing an unsettling stuffed weasel in a guest room to keep someone company: “If you really wanted to be a writer, you didn’t send away the weasel.”
I also liked Selin’s determination to be “someone trying to live a life unmarred by laziness, cowardice, and conformity.” She’s an interesting human who, very much like this wry but distant novel, never becomes an enveloping one. Fiction, like love, is strange.
See also: REVIEWS Elif Batuman Has Learned Nothing at All: On ‘The Idiot’By VIRGINIA MARSHALL
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I have a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University. That’s one of the hilarious things you can read about in The Possessed. I also wrote about PhDs here, in the kind of essay I don’t write anymore, now that I have grown gentle with age. I have taught at Stanford University and have been the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence at Baruch College, as well as a writer in residence at Koç University in Istanbul, and a fellow at the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library.
[1] Elif Batuman was born in New York City(1977) to Turkish parents, and grew up in New Jersey. She graduated from Harvard College, and received her doctorate in comparative literature from Stanford University. While in graduate school, Batuman studied the Uzbek language in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. Her dissertation, The Windmill and the Giant: Double-Entry Bookkeeping in the Novel, is about the process of social research and solitary construction undertaken by novelists.
In February 2010, Batuman published her first book, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, based on material she previously published in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine and n+1,which details her experiences as a graduate student. Her writing has been described as "almost helplessly epigrammatical."
Batuman was writer-in-residence at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey[8] from 2010 to 2013. Now she lives in New York.
SEE ALSO: The PossessedAdventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
“The American girl will judge the leg contest!” they announced. I was still hoping that I had misunderstood them, even as German techno music was turned on and all the boys in the camp, ages eight to fourteen, were paraded out behind a screen that hid their bodies from the waist up; identifying numbers had been pinned to their shorts. I was given a clipboard with a form on which to rate their legs on a scale from one to ten. Gripped by panic, I stared at the clipboard. Nothing in either my life experience or my studies had prepared me to judge an adolescent boys’ leg contest. Finally the English teacher, who appeared to understand my predicament, whispered to me some scores of her own devising, and I wrote them on the form as if I had thought of them myself.
Audiobooks are now available for both The Idiot and The Possessed! I narrated them both myself in a tiny room over the course of several days.
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September 22, 2017, 9:13 am
Tightrope walking by Turkey and Turkey alone.
Mavi Boncuk |
Turkey's application to accede to the European Economic Community, the predecessor of the European Union (EU), was made on 14 April 1987. After the ten founding members, Turkey was one of the first countries to become a member of the Council of Europe in 1949. The country has also been an associate member of the Western European Union from 1992 to its end in 2011. Turkey signed a Customs Union agreement with the EU in 1995 and was officially recognized as a candidate for full membership on 12 December 1999, at the Helsinki summit of the European Council.
Negotiations for full membership were started on 3 October 2005. Progress was slow, and out of the 35 Chapters necessary to complete the accession process only 16 had been opened and one had been closed by May 2016. The early 2016 refugee deal between Turkey and the European Union was intended to accelerate negotiations after previous stagnation and as allow visa-free travel through Europe for Turks.
Turkish accession talks came to a halt as a result of the 2016–17 Turkish purges. On 24 November 2016 the European Parliament voted to suspend accession negotiations with Turkey over human rights and rule of law concerns, though this decision was not binding. On 13 December, the Council of the European Union (comprising the ministers of the member states) resolved that it would open no new areas in Turkey's membership talks in the "prevailing circumstances", as Turkey’s path toward autocratic rule made progress on EU accession impossible. As of 2017, and especially following the passage of the constitutional referendum, Turkish accession talks have effectively stopped.
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September 22, 2017, 12:05 pm
Location of Kurdistan in Iraq
Official borders of the Region of Iraqi Kurdistan Territory controlled by Iraqi Kurdistan Territory claimed by Iraqi Kurdistan Rest of Iraq
An independence referendum for Iraqi Kurdistan has been scheduled to be held on 25 September 2017. The result will be binding for the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), but its legality has been rejected by the federal government of Iraq.
It was originally planned to be held in 2014 amidst controversy and dispute between the regional and federal governments. Longstanding calls for Kurdish independence gained impetus following the Northern Iraq offensive by Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant in which Baghdad-controlled forces abandoned some areas, which were then taken by the Peshmerga and controlled de facto by the Kurds.
The referendum was announced and delayed on several occasions as Kurdish forces co-operated with the Iraqi central government for the liberation of Mosul,but by April 2017 it was being seen as happening some time in 2017.
On 7 June 2017, President Masoud Barzani held a meeting with the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), the Kurdistan Islamic Union (KIU), the Kurdistan Islamic Movement (KIM), the Kurdistan Communist Party, the Kurdistan Toilers Party, the Kurdistan Toilers and Workers Party, the Kurdistan Development and Reform Party, the Erbil Turkmen List, the Iraqi Turkmen Front, the Turkmen Development Party, the Armenian List in the Kurdistan Parliament, the Assyrian Democratic Movement and the Assyrian Chaldean Syriac Popular Council, where the independence referendum was confirmed to be held on 25 September 2017. The Iraqi government declared victory over the Islamic State in Mosul on 10 July 2017.
Mavi Boncuk |
Is the Kurdish Referendum 'Mission Accomplished' for Barzani? SOURCE
Bilal WahabSeptember 22, 2017
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Bilal Wahab is a Soref Fellow at The Washington Institute.
Bilal Wahab is a 2016-2017 Soref fellow at The Washington Institute, where he will focus on governance in the Iraqi Kurdish region and in Iraq as a whole. He has taught at the American University of Iraq in Sulaimani, where he established the Center for Development and Natural Resources, a research program on oil and development. He earned his Ph.D. from George Mason University; his M.A. from American University, where he was among the first Iraqis awarded a Fulbright scholarship; and his B.A. from Salahaddin University in Erbil. Along with numerous scholarly articles, he has written extensively in the Arabic and Kurdish media.
EDUCATION Ph.D., George Mason University; M.A., American University; B.A., Salahaddin University
International pressure has raised the stakes of the planned referendum, but the Kurds have made their case even if the vote is canceled.
Nearly every major regional and international player stands against the independence referendum that the Kurdistan Regional Government has planned for September 25. In Washington, the White House issued a statement on September 15 asking the KRG to call it off, while the State Department hardened this position five days later, declaring that the United States "strongly opposes" the vote and urging the Kurds to instead pursue "a serious and sustained dialogue with the central government, facilitated by the United States and United Nations, and other partners, on all matters of concern." The statement warned that this alternative would be off the table if the Kurds proceed with the referendum. The UN, Britain, and several EU members have reinforced the U.S. position, while the KRG's neighbors have gone further by threatening to isolate it.
The decision to proceed with the referendum lies solely with KRG president Masoud Barzani, who has essentially cornered himself. The rising pressure may spur him to delay the vote or limit its scope.
THE BEST NEXT MOVEFor now, Barzani remains adamant about carrying out the referendum and has declined the proposed alternatives. His campaign for independence has been grounded in frustration with Baghdad, which he sees as dominated by anti-Kurdish Shia parties under Iran's sway. The KRG is also in a strong position after fighting the Islamic State in coordination with the international coalition. The resultant Kurdish nationalist fervor has paid local dividends by galvanizing the public, creating greater unity and drawing attention away from the KRG's domestic political and economic woes.
Nevertheless, the referendum remains a gamble. It could pave the way to the Kurds' dream of statehood, but it could also cost them the relative stability and prosperity they have carved out of an otherwise chaotic Iraq. Because Barzani has exerted unprecedented zeal and leadership in rallying popular and legislative support for independence, he is now the only KRG actor capable of defining a viable alternative to the referendum. In his eyes, the U.S.-UN alternative lacks a crucial element: a pathway to independence.
Barzani also believes that further negotiations with Baghdad would have little chance of success. This is an understandable view; he has repeatedly pointed out the central government's failure to abide by Iraq's constitution and federalist system. In the end, however, some of the blame for the breakdown in negotiations falls on his lap. Many referendum supporters are adamant that KRG relations with Baghdad are broken beyond repair, at least within the framework of a unified Iraq. Yet the alternatives offered to Barzani promise to do just that -- fix the protracted conflicts over money, oil, and borders. Even the Kurds admit that past U.S. mediation has had some success, particularly on oil and gas issues. At the same time, though, they lament the lack of progress on disputed territories and the federal budget, and they no doubt realize that outside pressure has essentially internationalized these grievances -- which is itself a victory of sorts.
BARZANI'S CALCULUSDomestically, Barzani has amassed more than enough popular and political support to continue with the referendum. Opposing it has become costly for his rivals, and a feeble "No" campaign has only bolstered the "Yes" camp. A parliamentary vote to postpone the referendum would have been a face-saving exit for him, but the legislature endorsed it despite two of the five major political parties boycotting the meeting. As for international opposition, Barzani seems to believe that the West will not take punitive measures against the KRG simply for holding a nonbinding, unilateral poll. Yet Turkey and Iran could cause the Kurds significant harm.
The KRG economy depends on oil exports piped through Turkey. At the UN General Assembly earlier this week, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan criticized the referendum at the same time that his military was conducting exercises on the KRG's northern border.
For its part, Iran has threatened to cease economic and security cooperation with the KRG, and to escalate violence against Iranian Kurdish opposition groups based inside Iraqi Kurdistan. Tehran also exercises leverage over the Iraqi government and the Popular Mobilization Units; this influence may have played a role in the Iraqi parliament's decision to denounce the referendum and authorize the prime minister to spare no effort in curtailing it. Shia militia leaders have voiced their own threats against the Kurdish move, though prominent Shia figure Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has remained silent.
As expected, however, such criticism has only cemented Kurdish resolve, and Barzani has downplayed the external threats. He is apparently counting on the KRG's positive bilateral relations with Turkey and Iran. The Kurdish region has been an attractive market for goods and services from both countries, so sanctions or other anti-referendum moves would hurt them as well. Barzani is also playing a balancing act, seemingly doubting that Turkey, Iran, and the United States would ever countenance a unified stance on punishing the KRG. If one country unilaterally penalizes the Kurds, he is confident that another will come to their aid; for example, amid the escalating international pressure, Russia recently announced that it would increase its investment in the KRG energy sector. Yet such balancing acts could backfire -- for instance, after Israel's prime minister voiced support for the referendum, Turkey and Iran hardened their opposition.
Another reason for the Kurds' confident posturing could be their proven ability to create facts on the ground and impose the status quo on rivals. This is partly how the KRG became an oil-exporting region despite Baghdad's opposition. The referendum could embolden the KRG to solidify its grip on the disputed territories it currently controls, and Barzani seems confident that the world would adapt to the redrawn map.
Yet Erbil should not blind itself to the potential risks of such action. Even a temporary shutdown of the KRG's export pipeline or borders would cripple its economy, and its food security is heavily dependent on imports. Moreover, Baghdad still controls all of Iraq's airspace and could halt overflights and traffic at the KRG's two international airports. In this sense, Barzani has invested his entire political capital on a pathway toward independence. By seemingly dismissing the risk of dire consequences, he has put the onus of finding a way out on those who oppose the referendum.
WHAT TO EXPECT ON SEPTEMBER 25Between now and referendum day, one of several scenarios may unfold. First, the vote could be cancelled if Barzani accepts one of the proposed alternatives. Kurdish leaders are taking the international backlash seriously, and Barzani still hopes that ongoing negotiations with various governments will result in an offer he can sell to the people. He recently noted that the massive pro-independence rallies across Kurdistan served as an informal referendum of sorts, perhaps signaling his willingness to cancel the formal vote.
Turkey may have the ultimate influence in this scenario; its National Security Council will convene on September 22 to determine its official response to the referendum, and any threatening announcements emerging from that meeting could affect Barzani's calculus. The fate of this scenario also hinges on Washington's leverage in Baghdad. At least in public, U.S. pressure has been squarely on the KRG to postpone the referendum, and Baghdad has made no effort to appease Erbil, instead repeating its unwillingness to compromise. This apparent inflexibility could undermine the U.S. counterproposal.
Second, Barzani might take his chances and proceed with the referendum, risking the eruption of armed conflict with Baghdad. This scenario would indicate that U.S. leverage in Iraq has fully waned, including over the KRG. Washington has made its opposition to the referendum clear ever since Barzani announced it in June, but the administration did not buttress its stance with adequate carrots and sticks. If the vote takes place, the United States may find itself compelled to take a tougher stance against the KRG, which would not be constructive in a previously positive relationship.
Third, Barzani may decide to save face and mitigate risks by limiting the referendum to the three recognized KRG provinces while canceling it in the disputed territories. Erbil could plausibly claim that it is unable to secure these territories adequately to hold the vote there, since the areas in question have witnessed sporadic violence and threats by Shia militias in recent weeks. But this scenario would hold uncertain political consequences for Barzani, since the disputed oil-rich territory of Kirkuk remains at the heart of the KRG's disagreements with Baghdad.
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September 27, 2017, 7:41 am
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Festival web site
International Adana Film Festival, known as ‘Adana Golden Cocoon Film Festival‘, which is normally held in June, is a film festival held in September in recent years. International Adna Film Festival, which is a festial held every year in Turkey’s Adana province, was organized in September, 2017. The official name was changed to International Adana Film Festival.
Mavi Boncuk |
NATIONAL COMPETITION JURYErden Kıral (Director)-PRESIDENTAlgı Eke (Actor)Fırat Yücel (Film Critic)Hüseyin Karabey (Director)Murat Hasarı (Composer-Producer)Uğur İçbak (Cinematographer)Selma Güneri (Actor)
SİYAD JURY (ASSOCIATION OF FILM CRITICS)Ali Ulvi Uyanık; Banu Bozdemir; Murat Erşahin
FİLM-YÖN JURY (ASSOCIATION OF DIRECTORS)Engin Ayça; Mehmet Güleryüz; Mustafa Kara
NATIONAL COMPETITIONAşkın Gören Gözlere İhtiyacı Yok/Directed by: Onur Ünlü[*]Buğday/Directed by: Semih KaplanoğluDaha/Directed by: Onur Saylak[*]Eksi Bir/Directed by: Orhan Oğuzİşe Yarar Bir Şey/Yönetmen Pelin EsmerKar/Directed by: Emre Erdoğdu Körfez/Directed by: Emre YeksanMurtaza/Directed by: Özgür SevimliSofra Sırları/Directed by: Ümit ÜnalTaş/Directed by: Orhan Eskiköy
[*]also included in the International Competition
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September 27, 2017, 8:32 am
Mavi Boncuk | EU Watch | MAM Likes German Unification
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October 4, 2017, 10:38 am
Gulen is a wealthy businessman whose money comes mostly from charter schools he's founded around the world, including the United States. He's a self-styled moderate Islamist of the Sufi variety who preaches tolerance and acceptance of all faiths. In a 2010 interview with the Wall Street Journal, Gulen spoke out against the Turkish flotilla dispatched to break the naval blockade of Gaza, which culminated in a confrontation that left nine Turkish citizens and one Turkish-American dead, and others injured, along with seven Israeli sailors wounded, some seriously. Gulen's critical posture burnished his moderate credentials. And yet as Claire Berlinski reported, some of Gulen's one-time media outlets, like Zaman, have regularly indulged in characteristically Middle East conspiracy theories, including those of the anti-Semitic variety. SOURCE
See also THE GEZI DIARIES "..Turkey is Turkey—a massive, complex country, formerly an empire, formerly many empires, in fact; its history not only as unique, complex and difficult to understand as American history but a thousand times more so. They can’t even build a functional metro system here, because every time they dig, they find priceless Neolithic ruins and the archeologists go berserk. Here’s what you need to know, bare-bones: The supposedly secular Turkish Republic was an authoritarian state, although not a totalitarian one, and yes, Jeanne Kirkpatrick was right, there is a difference. I went behind the Iron Curtain when the Wall was still standing. The USSR was indeed—immediately, visibly, on first sight—an evil empire. Turkey wasn’t remotely like that, nor is it now, and God willing it never will be. But it is, still, an authoritarian state. ..."
Mavi Boncuk |
HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE | Guilty MenSOURCECLAIRE BERLINSKI[1]
Claire Berlinski is a freelance journalist who lives in Paris. She is crowd-funding a book about European politics, Brave Old Word: Europe in the Age of Trump.
Turkish democracy didn’t die all at once in last week’s referendum; it’s been languishing for years. Why did so many in the West fail to notice?
On April 16, Turkish voters narrowly approved a referendum that replaced their country’s parliamentary democracy with an “executive presidency.” Steven Cook, of the Council on Foreign Relations, was quick to pronounce modern Turkey dead. “RIP Turkey, 1921–2017,” read the headline of the article in which he explained that the Turkish public “gave Erdoğan and the AKP license to reorganize the Turkish state and in the process raze the values on which it was built.”
He rightly noted that the powers afforded the new presidency are vast. The office of Prime Minister has been eliminated; the President, once titular, now has sole and unsupervised authority to appoint and dismiss most judges, all ministers and other high officials, as well as issue decrees with the force of law, dissolve parliament on any grounds, and command the armed forces. Cook wrote that the passage of the Teşkilât-ı Esasîye Kanunu—the Law on Fundamental Organization—marked Turkey’s transition in 1921 “from dynastic rule to the modern era,” and this referendum, he added, brings the era to an end:
With massive imbalances and virtually no checks on the head of state, who will now also be the head of government, the constitutional amendments render the Law on Fundamental Organization and all subsequent efforts to emulate the organizational principles of a modern state moot. It turns out that Erdoğan, who would wield power not vested in Turkish leaders since the sultans, is actually a neo-Ottoman.
Cook noted with disappointment that “Erdoğan is an authoritarian, like those found throughout the world.”
Yet this is the same Cook who five years ago claimed,
I think if you were you to trace back, over the course of the previous decade…you would see that the Justice and Development Party had done everything that it can—while it has at times been under siege from other political forces in the country—trying to forge within the contours of Turkish secularism, a more democratic, open country in a predominantly Muslim country…. I think you had, especially in the early years, in 2003 and 2004, the Justice and Development Party, a party of Islamist patrimony, pursuing more democratic and open politics. They’re an interesting twist on their predecessors, who railed against the West. Justice and Development under Recep Erdoğan and Abdullah Gül, who’s now the president, sought to join the West.
Cook offered this optimistic assessment in 2012, following a massive wave of purges that targeted not only the military, but such figures as the physician Türkan Saylan, founder of the Turkish Leprosy Relief Association and steward of a charity devoted to the provision of education for girls in rural areas. She died in 2009 of cancer at the age of 73.* She had been accused of planning a military coup. As Cook spoke, many more innocents were languishing in jail. The Great Terror in Turkey had for years been underway.
I don’t single out Cook for special opprobrium. His name is just first, in alphabetical order, on a long list of experts who pronounced respectful ex cathedra encomiums to the AKP’s democratic instincts, often in near-identical language, throughout this period. This kind of praise, coupled with intimations that the AKP detractors were nothing but a bunch of rotten elitists who hated democracy, issued from a series of prominent think tanks, human rights organizations, university departments, and newspapers in the West. It poured forth, too, from the State Department, the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs, the IMF, the World Bank, the Council of Europe, and a long list of advisers on promising emerging-market investments. No English-speaking, literate Turk could regard these folk with anything but contempt. It is something of a mystery why this happened, and a torment; it is a story that we should try honestly to understand.
Perhaps the myth was connected to Turkey’s acceptance as a full candidate for EU membership, in 2004. “Turkey is changing in surprising and encouraging ways,” wrote the New York Times that year,
setting a constructive example for the entire Muslim Middle East. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an Islamic politician who favors democratic pluralism, it has enacted far-reaching reforms that are intended to meet the exacting admissions criteria of the European Union.
Contra collective belief, though, the AKP did not enact these far-reaching reforms. The AKP collected the fruits of a process that had begun in 1999 in Helsinki and continued with previous parliaments’ passage of so-called harmonization processes. Those determined to defend the notion that the AKP in its early years did “everything it could” to bring to this long-suffering nation more democratic and open politics and to join it to the West must reckon with the EU’s progress reports during the years in question. In 2007, to choose a (typical) year at random, there are 62 instances of the words “no progress.” There were only 11 instances of “good progress” and these had nothing to do with democracy, openness, or other displays of democratic pluralism; rather, progress had been made in banking, insurance supervision, a transport infrastructure needs assessment study, a national innovation strategy and accompanying action plan, and a working group on the Credit Transfer System for Vocational Education and Training.
Yet still the Western party line remained unchanged over many years:
“Turkey is now a vibrant, competitive democracy….” —New York Times, June 8, 2010
“A vibrant democracy…an example of reform in the region….” —Foreign Policy, May 26, 2011
“Regionally, a vibrant, democratic Turkey no longer under the military’s thumb, can offer the Arab world a true model…. The Turkish model could also provide a model of how Islamic factions can coexist alongside liberal and secular groups, despite their clashing worldviews….”—Haaretz, August 15, 201
“A vibrant democracy…led by Islam’s equivalent to the Christian Democrats….” —Financial Times, September 15, 2011
“A template that effectively integrates Islam, democracy and vibrant economics….” — New York Times, February 5, 2011
“Turkey is poised to become one of the most successful countries of the 21st century, a model of Muslim democracy and a powerful force for regional peace… —Boston Globe, June 14, 2011
“One of the most remarkable success stories of the past decade…a vibrant democracy and dynamic economy under the Muslim equivalent of Christian Democrats”…—Financial Times, April 19, 20121
The Justice and Development Party, known as the AKP and widely (if meaninglessly) described as a “moderately Islamist” party, came to power in 2002, at which point the rubicund encomiums from the press and foreign spokesmen began. I began visiting Istanbul in 2003, moved there a year or so later, stayed until 2013, and left after the so-called Gezi protests, when, only then, the cheery music in the media fairly abruptly stopped.
The West’s collective assessment of Turkey throughout that time, displayed in official diplomatic statements, the mainstream press, and just as often in the specialized media, was notably weird and notably wrong. It was either the cause or the consequence of an exceptionally poor understanding of Turkey by Western publics and their policymakers. It resulted in the crafting of policies toward Turkey that were neither in Turkey’s interests nor the West’s, and helped, at least to some extent, to usher in the disaster before us today.
There were distinguished exceptions: Joe Parkinson of the Wall Street Journal deserves every prize he gets. Gareth Jenkins, above all, is an outstandingly informed and meticulous reporter. It seemed, though, that only specialists read his work, and if it had an impact on American or European policy, I couldn’t discern it. Mostly, the foreign media sounded to me—as it did to most Turks who could understand it—kind of insane. And on the diplomatic side, I observed, to put it bluntly, that if my intention were to ensure that my country be held in contempt by the better angels in the Turkish public, I would have behaved precisely as our diplomats did—of which more below.
A large part of the reason Western observers got Turkey under the AKP so wrong is probably that they were fixated on the wrong things. Those things had to do first with a war gone haywire in Iraq and then the Syrian civil war, both of which, seriatim, turned Turkey in American eyes into a subsidiary consideration of more central geopolitical concerns. It seemed unwise to many to reprove what we hoped would be a useful ally in a pinch.
Probably even more important is that after 9/11 a lot of people in the West got Islam, Islamists, and the like on the brain to the exclusion of nearly everything else. So it followed, sort of, that many came to see that the most significant thing about the AKP was its “moderately Islamist” character. Many were perhaps so thrilled that they didn’t begin hanging homosexuals from cranes that they uncritically accepted the rest of the AKP’s story about itself: It was opening up an ossified system that was, in its words, “radically secularist.”
There is much truth in the criticism that the system was ossified, and it was also true that it was unfair to the visibly pious. It was even true that developments deep within Turkish society, well described by Ernst Gellner’s term “neo-fundamentalism,” explained the AKP movement’s rise and legitimacy. But this was the wrong focus. The same tunnel vision caused others to dwell hysterically on the impending prospect of sharia, which never arrived, even as they failed to notice the bog-standard authoritarianism that did. They had sweated exotic dictionary bullets to learn words like taqqiya, and they were going to use them, damn it. The concept they really needed—kleptocracy—eluded them.
The AKP early on grasped the jargon of structural reform and the hypnotic power it had over the international finance community. Within a month of the AKP’s inauguration, the IMF declared Turkey a success story and the senior managers of the World Bank welcomed it as model for other Islamic countries. “While other Muslim societies are wrestling with radicals,” reported the New York Times, “Turkey’s religious merchant class is struggling instead with riches.” The government claimed that it had trebled the size of the Turkish economy in a decade. Everyone began repeating this, including the Economist, even though it was not only untrue, but absurd.
The government boasted at some point that Turkey had become the 17th-largest economy in the world. This too was repeated by everyone. Remembered by few was the fact that Turkey’s economy had become the world’s 17th-largest in 1990. Nor was it, as the government kept saying, the world’s fastest-growing economy. Turkey’s GDP growth during this period was a very average 4.7 percent a year, below the 6.2 percent average for middle-income countries. The period of AKP rule was just like the preceding 52 years as far as GDP growth was concerned; in both periods, the annual average growth rate was 4.7 percent.2 What made people feel so good, by contrast (so long as they weren’t in jail), was consumption—fueled by vastly more expansive credit.
The phrase “privatization,” too, so beloved by authors of investment-advice newsletters, really meant the sale of state assets to Erdoğan’s relatives and sycophants. Anyone who agreed in exchange to lend their political and financial support to the party could buy stuff up; anyone who didn’t, couldn’t. “Improving the investment climate” meant improving it for AKP loyalists. For everyone else, there were punitive tax fines and exclusion from public procurement and tenders.
Beginning in 2008, the government promoted policies to stimulate the consumption of durables. This created the appearance of an energetic population with rising purchasing power. Credit card and consumer debt stood at three percent of GDP in 2003; ten years later it was 21 percent. In short, the AKP ran the economy on construction, credit, and surging capital inflows, mixed with a dash of crime. It worked well enough, but was nothing like a miracle. Now the capital is taking flight again. Years were wasted, with nothing really to show for it but a bubble of unsold housing and a balding, furious Sultan in a thousand-room palace, busily scheming to kill his enemies.
Now, no doubt, the AKP’s Sunni majoritarian politics are a real part of the problem. But this element of the party’s nature has been for a very long time now overstated compared to its far more significant problem; to wit, Erdoğan’s drive to bring the entire Turkish state apparatus under his personal control. While Turkey under the AKP became dangerously different, it was not, mainly, because it became more Islamic. Islamist politics were not the end, but the means. Power was the end.
As Cook was right to observe, there was no golden period of liberal democracy prior to the AKP’s ascent; that too is a myth. But the AKP did change Turkey’s internal balance of power—arrogating it all to itself—with consequences the West now, at last, sees clearly. These consequences should not have been hard to predict. All the warnings were there. Yet the West accepted, for at least a decade, that Turkey was not only liberalizing, but doing so vibrantly, to such an extent that it deserved promotion as a model for the rest of the so-called Islamic world.
In promoting this line, Europe and the United States made a substantial contribution to the inflation of Turkey’s reputational bubble, with baleful consequences. To extend the economic metaphor, Turkey’s political stock traded at prices considerably at variance with its intrinsic value; much of this discrepancy was owed to our eagerness to purchase large volumes of that stock. Turkey failed to benefit from honest and deserved criticism, both in the form of pressure from the United States and Europe to genuinely liberalize—to which it might even have responded, given that we held many cards we never used. Likewise, foreign investors firehosed cash into the country in part because we insisted so ardently that it was liberalizing—the phrase “EU candidate country,” in particular, soothed anxieties—and this deprived the country of the stern but constructive criticism that properly informed markets might have offered.
“Everything seemed to be going so well in Turkey,” wrote Howard Eissenstat, Amnesty International’s Country Specialist on Turkey, in September 2013, “until this past summer when popular protests broke out and were met by a violent government crackdown.” 2013? Really? By 2011, wives and daughters of the military officers arrested in the Balyoz trials had been begging Amnesty International to take up the plight of their fathers and husbands. They had presented the organization with hundreds of pages of evidence of the trial’s legal flaws and improper procedures. Amnesty didn’t want to know. Perhaps coruscating condemnation from human rights groups would have shamed or deterred the government; that’s the raison d’être of such groups, after all, and it’s been known to work.
Nothing can be said to be “going so well” when a government is holding massive show trials. These trials could have been sound; the sinister events to which they were said to be a response really happened; a credible investigation that unearthed the truth about those years would have served the country. But the trials held instead were notable for their contemptuous—and obvious—mockery of the principles of sound jurisprudence. The international media—prompted or echoed by timid, blind, or corrupt Western politicians—found this unworthy of remark.
That the United States failed to express displeasure about this was particularly bizarre given that many of those arrested were senior figures in the Army and Navy. Turkey’s NATO allies had every right, if not an obligation, to ask what effect this would have on the alliance’s military preparedness. Clearly, it couldn’t have been enhanced with some 10 percent of the land and air force officers and as many as 80 percent of the naval officers charged with defending NATO’s southern flank in prison. Perhaps this question was posed in private, but journalists from NATO countries neither asked the question nor speculated about the answer. Our Ambassador, Frank Ricciardone, offered only that he was “confused” by the trials. I am sure he wasn’t confused when a senior AKP official retorted that he shouldn’t “piss on a mosque wall”—an idiom meaning, roughly, that his demise was coming and that he had hastened it.
In the wake of this past summer’s failed putsch, the government undertook a fresh set of purges, targeting a different group of military officers, bureaucrats, judges, and civilians. You’ve read all about these purges. But why, actually? That our media put these purges on the front pages when it was blasé to the point of stone silence about the earlier ones leaves many Turks with an odd taste. It doesn’t suggest to them that we’ve suddenly developed an abiding interest in the integrity of their justice system and the quality of their democracy. The conclusion they draw from this is wrong, but it is natural. They figure our boys lost. They reckon we’re infuriated by it.
When Westerners were suddenly appraised, in 2013, of Turkey’s alarming “democratic drift” and “democratic backsliding,” they were shocked, even though there was no backsliding to speak of. What in fact happened was this: The rift between Erdoğan and the Poconos-based cleric Fethullah Gülen, who had worked together for years to attack their shared enemies, deprived the Prime Minister of the more sophisticated strategists in his external relations arm. Only then did Westerners learn that Erdoğan believed in something called “the interest-rate lobby,” or hear that a senior adviser subscribed to the theory that enemies of Turkey were attempting to kill the Prime Minister by means of telekinesis. The gist of these stories was that the formerly balanced and reformist Erdoğan had taken a sudden plunge off the precipice of lucidity. But tales of Erdoğan’s keen interest in a so-called interest-rate lobby and his intimates’ penchant for bizarre conspiracy theories could have been reported in tones of equally extravagant horror ages before. Why weren’t they?
Does it matter? Well, consider that 2013’s massive protests against the government, and the crackdown that ensued, came as a surprise to senior figures in the U.S. policymaking establishment. If we’d had in mind a realistic portrait of Turkey, we would have known this kind of explosion was possible and known how harshly it would be repressed. Turkish police had been behaving like this for a decade. The crackdown was bigger only because the crowds were bigger, but, said Senator John McCain, “None of us expected this in Turkey.” To be so misinformed is dangerous. Still, why would he have thought otherwise? He reads the same papers we all do. Thus Reuters from June 10, 2011:
A rising power with a vibrant, free economy and a U.S. ally that aspires to join the European Union, Turkey is held up as an example of marrying Islam and democracy and has been an oasis of stability in a region convulsed by ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings. AK has also overseen the most stable and prosperous period of Turkey’s history with market-friendly reforms….
These news outlets were literally parroting the language the AKP used about itself. Here is the Turkish President at the College of Europe at Natolin, Poland, on June 7, 2011: “Turkey is also becoming a source of inspiration of a vibrant democracy…”
It wasn’t Turkey that changed during the Gezi protests, nor was it Erdoğan. What changed were the victims of the crackdown: This time they included foreign journalists, diplomats, and politicians. Previously, the police had confined themselves to brutalizing Turkish citizens. This time, too, the media began directing its bile toward foreigners in novel way, provoking Erdoğan’s base to insist that something be done about them. So suddenly it was reported that Erdoğan, the great liberalizer, had gone mad, even if the exuberant violence of the police crackdown was so predictable to people who lived in Turkey that they in fact predicted it.
The vibrant democracy lie was especially galling to Turks who were struggling against the strangling of democracy because it was so resistant to contact with reality. Perhaps it would have helped if everyone who applauded Turkey’s vibrant democracy instead complained with the same regularity that Turkish politicians enjoyed virtually unlimited immunities that made them untouchable and unaccountable, or lamented that the corruption and cronyism with which Turkey had long been plagued had become worse under the AKP. Turkish journalists were afraid to report on this corruption for fear of losing their jobs or their liberty, and many did. But foreign journalists could have stepped up to the plate, and they mainly didn’t. Only in 2013 did the Committee for the Protection of Journalists at last usefully declare Turkey one of the world’s largest jailers of journalists.
Ordinary citizens were muzzled every bit as much as professional journalists. Some were arrested and subjected to years of legal harassment for drawing cartoons, waving a banner, or recycling a thought crime on Twitter. These things happened before Erdoğan came to power, and he expanded the tradition on his ascent. What was galling, though, is that without repealing or changing in substance the laws upon which these arrests were predicated, Turkey ceased to be a country of concern:
“Turkey’s vibrant democracy is an inspiration to Arab countries throwing off their autocratic yoke and their Western patrons…. the openness of the Turkish press cannot be denied.” —Middle East Online, June 16, 2011
Turkish citizens took to the internet with great enthusiasm as soon as it became possible for them to access it affordably. Their government took to restricting their access to it just as enthusiastically, becoming one world’s most comprehensive (and clumsy) internet censors. Throughout the vibrant-democracy years, the state indulged in extensive illegal wire-tapping. Personal information obtained from this surveillance was leaked to government-friendly newspapers to end rivals’ political careers or shape the public mood prior to their arrest. The AKP’s enemies, and Gülen’s, languished for years in pre-trial detention or trial under remand; the trials themselves became the punishments. The list of unsolved murders connected in some fashion with the state grew longer. Yet, thus sayeth the Economist on October 21, 2010: “Turkey is heading in a good direction. It remains a shining (and rare) example in the Muslim world of a vibrant democracy with the rule of law and a thriving free-market economy….”
During the vibrant-democracy decade, Turkey actually became a police state, in the simplest sense of the term: As the army’s visibility receded, the police replaced them in form and function. Foreign pundits and politicians heralded the military’s return to the barracks, but to those who confronted the Turkish state this was a distinction without a difference. Yes, political protesters were sometimes left in peace. But often, and increasingly, they were drenched by water cannon or choked in clouds of tear gas. During the Gezi protests, clouds of gas were visible from space, but long before, Turks had taken to publishing the #dailyteargasreport on Twitter. It was wise to consult it before heading out to buy groceries or take your cat to the vet.
So the real story throughout was that Turkey, a mildly authoritarian state as such states went, remained an authoritarian state. The flavor of this authoritarianism changed, it is true: Whereas before Turkey’s state-worship centered around Atatürk’s cult of personality, now it centers around Erdoğan’s. Turkey enjoyed a steady period of economic growth under the AKP—normal growth, but by no means the oft-reported “miraculous” growth. This, in tandem with the incompetence of Turkey’s opposition parties, enabled Erdoğan to stay in power long enough to transform the internal power balance of the country. And as the AKP managed to arrogate to itself powers that few parties had amassed in the history of the Republic, the swallowing by the executive of all rival power centers—the military, in particular—was hailed by the West as a democratic miracle.
Why would we have encouraged Turkey’s flawed but real parliamentary democracy to become a one-man regime that shares none of our values, one whose behavior is so erratic as to undermine our alliance? The cynical answer—believed by many Turks who can’t be judged insane for believing it—is that Turkish parliamentary democracy didn’t work for the United States either. Had Erdoğan been running a one-man show back in 2003, for example, he would have pushed through the resolution enabling the United States to invade Iraq through Turkey. Gülenist propagandists, and Americans on their payroll, made this point ceaselessly: Those secularists might look like Westerners, but trust us, we’re your real friends.
But surely someone, somewhere in the U.S. policymaking apparatus had to have been clear-sighted enough to see that if what we needed was a son-of-a-bitch of our own—to recall FDR’s famous (but maybe apocryphal) description of Anastasio Somozo—Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was not the son-of-a-bitch we were looking for. Erdoğan? How could we have told ourselves, in all seeming sincerity, that this was a vibrant democrat and a model for the Muslim world to boot?
The luminous Natalie Portman is the meme of the moment on Turkish social media. “So this is how democracy dies,” laments Senator Amidala in one of the Star Wars prequels. “With thunderous applause.” But that is not right. There is thunderous applause among Erdoğan’s supporters, of course. But even officially, only 51.3 percent of the voters approved the referendum. Its opponents took 48.7 percent of the vote. The poll took place under a state of emergency. A third of the judiciary has been fired; some are still in jail. Three members of the Supreme Election Board are in prison, too. It’s possible that they’re mostly Gülenist coup-plotters as charged, and possible that jail is exactly where they ought to be, but this doesn’t obviate the point: Nothing like an independent judiciary buttressed this referendum. In some cases, authorities prevented “no” campaigners from holding rallies and events; those opposing the motion were tear-gassed (of course), and prohibited from carrying signs or assembling, or even beaten or shot at. The “yes” campaign received vastly more publicity; its supporters were given hundreds of hours on television stations. Opponents, almost none. The government stripped the election board’s power to sanction stations that failed to devote equal time to both sides. The leaders of the leftist HDP, the third-largest party in the parliament, are now in jail, as are many other members of the HDP. Countless Kurds displaced by war in southeastern Turkey may have been unable to vote.
Hundreds of election observers were barred from doing their jobs, and at the last minute, the election board changed the standards required to prove accusations of ballot-box stuffing. Many instances of voter fraud appear to have been captured clearly on camera. Istanbul, Ankara, and the rest of Turkey’s largest cities voted “no,” which doesn’t necessarily imply fraud, since Erdoğan failed to carry many of these areas in the most recent presidential elections, too. But it does suggest this referendum would have lost under normal circumstances. Thunderous applause this is not.
At least this time there’s hand-wringing in the West. The EU issued a statement devoid of the word “congratulations.” The constitutional amendments, it said, “and especially their practical implementation, will be assessed in light of Turkey’s obligations as a European Union candidate country and as a member of the Council of Europe.” It would of course have been much more helpful had the EU murmured a word or two of disapprobation eight years ago, when these proposals were first mooted. The OSCE issued a withering report on the handling of the referendum, blasting the campaign, the media environment, and the government’s handling of voter registration and election observers. Too little, too late. Donald Trump became the first leader of consequence to call Erdoğan to congratulate him, but Lord only knows what that means; he’s probably playing Banach-space chess.
There was thunderous applause in Turkey, however—juxtaposed by almost total indifference in the West—when Turkey’s constitution, designed to maintain a balance among the parties, was dynamited by a constitutional amendment in 2007 permitting the direct election of the President. And thunderous applause, again—or well-mannered applause, at least—in both Turkey and the West for Turkey’s 2010 constitutional referendum, which was when Turkish democracy, what there was of it, really did die. This latest referendum was more like a burial than a murder, really. Why did the West—the media, the Turkey specialists, and a wide cohort of policymakers—pay so little attention to those earlier referenda? And yes, again, why did they herald them as democratic advances? In 2010 the European Union welcomed the approval of constitutional changes by Turkish voters, calling them “a step in the right direction.” The Spanish Foreign Minister said the referendum results sent a “clear signal of Turkey’s European vocation.” The Swedish Foreign Minister said, “This opens the European door.” The Council of Europe called it “an important step forward towards bringing the country closer to European standards and practices.”
The United States? We ritually praised the “vibrancy of Turkish democracy.” And here, really, we cannot absolve ourselves. No one appreciates more avidly than an American that the separation of powers and the independence of the judiciary are essential to democracy. Any bright high school student should have been able instantly to see the problem with bringing so much of the judiciary under the control of the executive, abolishing the critical check on Erdoğan’s power, which is exactly what that 2010 referendum did.
That referendum, too, flagrantly violated the Venice Commission’s code of good practice for referendums by bundling the poison pill into a package of otherwise salutary or neutral amendments. Voters couldn’t choose the amendments they favored: It was all or nothing. It should never have been submitted to the public in that form. And it would have been easy for the EU to object to it on these grounds alone, just as it would have been easy for Washington to pressure the EU to object to it on those grounds alone, or to do the pressuring ourselves. Instead, the Obama Administration publicly applauded it. Said State Department Spokesman Philip Crowley on September 13, 2010: “The referendum was an opportunity for the people of Turkey to have a strong voice in the future direction of their vibrant democracy.”
Why? Carelessness? Did Obama think he couldn’t afford to irritate Erdoğan, given Turkey’s strategic importance? If so, why not ask the question that naturally follows: Given Turkey’s strategic importance, was it wise to praise a move toward tyranny in a NATO ally as a democratic advance?
Polls show that Turkey is one of the most anti-American countries in the world. This is a recent development; it wasn’t true in the 20th century. A roughly accurate explanation for this is that some 30-40 percent of Turks hate us because they are Islamists or communists and truly do hate our values. But a considerable number—perhaps just as many—hate us because they embraced our values but feel we betrayed them. They are correct.
At times like these there is an unmistakable tendency for faces to get long as memories get short. On Monday, April 17, the Guardian published a lament by Turkish journalist Yavuz Baydar echoing the lachrymose verdict of Senator Amidala. “Turkey as we know it is over; it is history.”
The collapse of the rule of law that took place in slow motion after the Gezi Park protests has been followed by the erosion of the separation of powers and the annihilation of the independent media.
Baydar’s repetition of the fiction that the rule of law, the separation of powers, and the independent media were robust until the Gezi Park protests is unsurprising. It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
Of course it’s gone down Baydar’s memory hole that he used to favor annihilating the independent media. But why has it also gone down the Guardian’s? The evidence, after all, is only a Google search away. Also just a Google search away: the dates on which the governing party took control of the police, the higher education board, the directorate of religious affairs, the Turkish statistics institute, Turkey’s science funding agency, and Turkish Academy of Sciences. That is how democracy dies—not with thunderous applause, but piece by piece, with widespread international indifference, or “mild concern” followed by grudging acceptance. This includes the indifference of many Turks who registered their objection to their democracy’s death by posting the Amidala meme. I know who some of them are and what else they did: nothing. They should have been fighting when they still could. Instead they rolled over. But I can’t really blame them. It was a juggernaut; they were just kids. Besides, who wants to wind up in a Turkish prison?
It was disgraceful, though, that those outside of Turkey, who were at no risk at all of winding up in a Turkish prison, didn’t notice, didn’t care, or applauded democracy’s death. The George Marshall Fund’s expert commentator on Turkey, Joshua Walker, after offering the obligatory paeans to Turkey’s vibrant democracy, surveyed the situation in 2011 and decided that “one-party rule does not necessarily equate to weakening democracy and can often be a welcome formula for consensus-building, economic success, and political stability.” That Cuba, China, and North Korea were the most notable examples of this welcome formula did not trouble him.
For once, Erdoğan was perfectly correct when he said the recent referendum merely legally formalized the longstanding de facto state of affairs. His new palace, with its 1,100 rooms and toilets that are not made of gold (he’ll threaten to sue you for saying they are), had long since replaced the Turkish parliament. This referendum was actually more unusual for being widely noticed as a travesty than it was for actually being one.
Make no mistake: Turkey did this to itself. It’s an inexcusable conceit to imagine that everything that goes wrong in the world is somehow under American control and thus our fault. But we sure didn’t help. At every turn we misunderstood events, deliberately or through laziness; at every opportunity to speak when it might have made a difference, we were silent or said precisely what was least useful; we rewarded every step toward despotism with praise, indifference, or investment.
Had all the experts, politicians, human-rights monitors, and democracy-promoters spoken up before this and all the previous democracy-eviscerating lies and purges and referenda, who knows whether they might have made a difference? At least the West would have appeared to stand for something, to have principles. We were so quiet that you could be forgiven for thinking that this—one referendum, one day—is how democracies die. No: they die bit by bit, lie by lie. It’s hard to kill even a democracy of the imperfect sort Turkey’s was. It takes years.
The story of what really happened in Turkey still matters, even if it’s too late to help Turks. We all need to have a good think about how democracies die, because they’re dying like flies. It’s not too late to learn how it really happened. If we don’t, we can’t hope to draw the right lessons. These might apply to democracies still alive. They might even apply to our own.
*Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that Turkan Saylan died in prison. She died in the hospital.
1 I am indebted to Okan Altıparmak for compiling this list.
2 Tanju Yurukoglu, “Turkey: Taking Stock of a Decade and the Prospects for the Economy,” Eurasia Policy Associates (April 2015).
----------------------------------------------------------------------------[1] Claire Berlinski (born 1968) is an American journalist and author. Born and raised in California and other parts of the United States, including New York City and Seattle, she read Modern History at Balliol College, Oxford where she earned a doctorate in International Relations.[1] She has lived in Bangkok, where she worked for Asia Times; Laos, where she worked briefly for the United Nations Development Program; and Istanbul, where she worked as a freelance journalist. She now lives in Paris, France.
Berlinski has written two spy novels, a work on Europe's importance to American interests,[3] and an admiring but critical biography of Margaret Thatcher. Her journalism has been published in The New York Times and The Washington Post and many other publications.
She is the daughter of writer David Berlinski[*] and Toby Saks, a cellist. She had been living in Istanbul until the height of Gezi Park protests when she decided to move to Paris to be closer to her father after the death of her mother in 2013.
BooksNonfictionMenace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's, Too (2006)There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters (2008)FictionAlias Selena Keller, co-authored with Steven Barris (2001)Loose Lips (2003)Lion Eyes (2007)
[*] Berlinski(b. 1942) is a secular Jew. Berlinski's views towards criticism of religious belief can be found in his book The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (2008). In summary, he asserts that some skeptical arguments against religious belief based on scientific evidence misrepresent what the science is actually saying, that an objective morality requires a religious foundation, that mathematical theories attempting to bring together quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity amount to pseudoscience because of their lack of empirical verifiability, and he expresses doubt towards the Darwinian variation of evolutionary theory. His daughter Claire Berlinski is a journalist and his son Mischa Berlinski is also a writer.
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October 4, 2017, 12:32 pm
TURKEY
Mavi Boncuk |
GRAIN
Dir Semih KaplanoğluProd Semih Kaplanoğlu, Nadir OperliScr Semih Kaplanoğlu, Leyla ÌpekçiWith Jean-Marc Barr, Ermin Bravo, Grigoriy DobryginTurkey-Germany-France-Sweden-Qatar2017127minSales The Match Factory
Climate change has caused the near-extinction of human life in this spellbinding dystopian sci-fi from Semih Kaplanoğlu (Honey, Milk). People are herded into detention centres, all hoping they can enter the protected city. Outside its walls, a sparse nomadic economy exists. But a total disaster is imminent. Genetically engineered seeds, which have all but wiped out real grain, are mysteriously failing to work. While the establishment struggles for answers, scientist Erol (Jean-Marc Barr) goes in search of famed geneticist Cemil (Ermin Bravo) who disappeared some years ago, but not before he predicted this doomsday scenario. Giles Nuttgens’ (Hell or High Water) stunning widescreen monochrome cinematography plots Erol’s journey, from a city of very ordered straight lines to the mysterious and unpredictable desert wilderness. In Grain, the twin forces of science and mysticism wage war and with the illusion of its mastery over the planet long since receded, humanity struggles to comprehend what lies in store.
Tricia Tuttle
FESTIVAL GUESTS
These members of the filmmaking team are expected to attend the festival:
Semih Kaplanoğlu, Director; Nike Maria Vassil, Cast
DISTANT CONSTELLATION
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Dir Shevaun MizrahiProd Shelly Grizim, Deniz BugaUSA-Turkey-Netherlands201780min
In an Istanbul retirement home, residents reminisce over the past as relentless construction work and constant change takes place outside. In her striking documentary debut, photographer Shevaun Mizrahi sketches a series of charming and idiosyncratic portraits of the residential home’s inhabitants. They include a woman who escaped the Armenian Genocide, a libidinous pianist, a blind photographer who carries his camera everywhere and two men who travel endlessly up and down an elevator. The stories they tell are intensely personal. With an arresting visual style that employs long, beautifully framed takes, Mizrahi’s camera lingers in and around the building, a place where time seems to have stopped. It’s a contrast to life outside, where young men are busy building a new high rise and worrying about the present. Juxtaposing these two distinct worlds, Mizrahi playfully ponders on existential themes, including the unavoidable passage of age and time.
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ELENE16-year-old Elene is a Georgian illegal immigrant who works at a tea plantation. Feeling threatened by various encounters, she tries to be invisible in this foreign land.
Dir Sezen Kayhan. Turkey-Georgia 2016. 12minPart of HEADING FOR THAT ADULT CRASHThe journey from childhood to adulthood is a headlong dive into the unknown. Whatever country or culture, it’s fraught and stressful for all involved, negotiating family, love and relationships as you try to find your place in the world.
Programmed by Philip Ilson | Total running time 101min
SULUKULE MON AMOURIn Istanbul’s Sulukule district, two young women use dance to express their freedom.
Dir Azra Deniz Okyay. Turkey 2016. 6min
Part of HOPING. FEARING. DREAMING.Hopes, fears and dreams form a narrative resulting in explorations of lives yet to be lived and turns of poetic self-expression.
Programmed by Elaine Wong | Total running time 98min
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