Turkey is in a rather difficult but equally interesting period. This country has always been a very dynamic and sui-generis one, but nowadays it is sailing through even stranger times
Last weekend I was at a rather interesting Cyprus seminar. The meeting itself was a very important one as the Strategic Research Institute (USAK), in cooperation with the Cyprus Academic Dialogue brought together Turkish, Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot academics, journalists, and of course some senior politicians in Ankara
Yaşar Kemal, one of the monumental personalities of Turkey’s recent history, an outstanding journalist and definitely the last grand master of Turkish literature, has walked to oblivion at the age of 91. He passed on a day when news reached news rooms around the country that the imprisoned leader of the separatist Kurdish terrorists had called his gang to convene a congress to decide to lay down arms
The Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) is boasting around that it will enter the upcoming June elections as a political party and produce over 60 deputies, thereby becoming the “king-maker” in the Turkish parliament.
Are there any Turks aware of what Süleyman Şah’s tomb on the bank of Euphrates, the sole Turkish territory cut off from the mainland, who could say right away that s/he was pleased with the “relocation” of the tomb? Or, are there any Turks who, Machiavellian political considerations apart, would right away accuse the government of undertaking an operation to save Turkish soldiers caught in between the warring sides in Syria’s civil war?
There appears to be a consensus both in northern and southern Cyprus, as well as among the international power brokers, that Cyprus talks might resume at the earliest in May, after the Turkish Cypriot presidential elections.
A young E.Y. praying for more snowfall wrote in Twitter: “Be colder my Turkey, so that daughters of the nation of Islam learn how to dress” (to cover themselves from top to toe). What and how a woman dresses up should be something that she decides for herself
A 20-year-old Arif Buğra, a university student, was detained in Kocaeli on the grounds that he participated in a rally organized by the labor union of teachers and education personnel (Eğitim-Sen).
With news that moments after the Ukraine cease-fire went into effect, there were some serious violations, fingers were crossed with wishes that the “glimmer of hope” as described by Angela Merkel – who together with President François Hollande of France brokered the deal in talks in Minsk, Belarus with Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine – will hold
