Ankara may be right to be alarmed by the northern Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) call for referendum, as it could herald a radical change along Turkey’s southern border.
What has been happening in Turkey recently is no longer a matter of political criticism and disagreement, it is now simply a matter of despair and sorrow.
I am among those who think that being a French - or any other country’s – president is not “cool” at all. It can only be the dream of extremely ambitious men and women who dare to waste their whole lives on power; and that is not cool at all.
I just spent a week in the Austrian town Alpbach, participating in a panel discussion and then as co-chair of the seminar on Turkey. My co-chair was Dr. Cengiz Gunay, whose contribution and cooperation was a gift.
The so-called Arab Spring came to an end wherever it assumed to take place. It ended in Egypt with a military coup and drove Libya into a bloody chaos
Opposition circles, or the “other half of Turkey,” are suffering from post-system change trauma. It is not just the end of the parliamentary system and the authoritarian sway that has been sealed after the July 2016 coup attempt and the April 2017 referendum, everybody feels a deeper transformation of the political regime underway.
The growing tension between Germany and Turkey is culminating to alarming levels
It is the first anniversary of the terrible July 15, 2016, coup attempt, which deserves to be celebrated as the victory of civil politics over such a dark plot and to be considered as a national day.
The New York Times story of a Syrian political opponent, Radwan Ziadeh, who was denied political asylum in the U.S. (June 24-25), says a lot about the evolution of the Syrian affair. Ziadeh was told that “he could not get political asylum in the United States because he organized a conference with Syrian opposition groups – even though the American government has supported members of the same groups in the Syrian civil war,” the NYT reported.
