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March 31, 2009
Kurdish Nationalists Strike Back
[Originally published in Hürriyet Daily News]
Sunday's local elections opened a whole new chapter in one of Turkey's most acute problem: The Kurdish question. The Democratic Society Party, or DTP, which openly champions Kurdish nationalism and has at times sympathized with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, won a clear victory in the southeastern region of the country.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 3:18 PM | Comments (4)
March 28, 2009
The Fourth Reich That We Barely Avoided
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
In the heydays of Turkey's first "post-modern coup," the "Feb. 28 process" of 1997, the then chief-of-staff Gen. İsmail Hakkı Karadayı uttered a revealing sentence. "If necessary," he proudly said, "this process will go on for a thousand years."
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 1:37 PM | Comments (7)
March 26, 2009
Turkey's Killing Fields
[Originally published in Hürriyet Daily News]
Have you been following the recent "excavations" in southeastern Turkey? They are horrifying.
Things started about 10 days ago, when the police unearthed a curious a piece of skull, burned clothing, a glove and various pieces of bone near BOTAŞ, the state-owned Turkish Pipeline Company. The research continued and soon 20 suspected human bones were discovered close to a village near Cizre.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 1:42 PM | Comments (1)
March 25, 2009
Happy Nevruz To You, Too, Mr. Obama
[Originally published in Hürriyet Daily News]
I just listened to the remarks by U.S. President Barack Obama in celebration of Nevruz, the Middle Eastern holiday of spring. And I really liked what I heard.
Nevruz is celebrated by quite a few people in this part of the world, but it is first and foremost a Persian tradition. The Iranians, whose civilization is truly deep-rooted and well-established, started to celebrate this festival of the "New Day" at least 2,000 years ago and they have defined its meaning and content.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 12:14 AM | Comments (0)
March 19, 2009
The Curious Case of Mustafa Balbay
[Originally published in Hürriyet Daily News]
If you want to get a sense of what has been going on in the Turkish political scene lately, you should take a look at the case of Mustafa Balbay.
Balbay is the Ankara correspondent of daily Cumhuriyet, the beacon of Kemalist (i.e., secularist and nationalist) ideology. He was arrested 10 days ago, as a part of the Ergenekon trial. (Ergenekon, if that sounds like Chinese to you, is a covert network that allegedly organized bombings and shootings in order to provoke a military coup.)
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 12:13 AM | Comments (9)
March 14, 2009
Getting 'Creationism' Right
[Originally published in Hürriyet Daily News]
After my latest piece in these pages, titled "Inherit The Turkish Wind," I received quite a few emails from readers who seemed to passionately disagree with what I said. What I said, in summary, was that evolution can be interpreted in both theistic and atheistic ways, and that Turkey's official science institution, TÜBİTAK, and its publications, should be open to both. "Are you seriously proposing," a reader was asking me in the face of that suggestion, "that Creationism be presented in the pages of a magazine devoted to science?"
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 12:58 PM | Comments (30)
March 12, 2009
Inherit The Turkish Wind
[Originally published in Hürriyet Daily News]
Turkey has just been drawn to yet another controversy with the officially supported science magazine, "Bilim ve Teknik," refraining from publishing a 16-page cover story that highlighted Darwin's ideas. As also reported in these pages yesterday, the story prepared by the magazine's chief editor, Dr. Çiğdem Atakuman, was removed at the last minute by Professor Ömer Cebeci, the vice president of TÜBİTAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council), which sponsors the publication.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 1:00 PM | Comments (6)
March 8, 2009
Darwin Year Is Not The Year of Atheism
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
As you might have already known, the year 2009 is also the "Darwin Year." It is the bicentennial of the birthday of the great British naturalist, and sesquicentennial of publication of his famous book "The Origin of Species." Hence we hear a lot these days about evolution, its history and, most important of all, its meaning.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 8:35 PM | Comments (5)
March 5, 2009
Time For Erdoğan For Self-Criticism
[Originally published in Hürriyet Daily News]
Word has it that Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan did not like the Turkey chapter of the annual Human Rights Report recently launched by the U.S. State Department. The report in fact praises Turkey's advances on several fronts, but also criticizes the government for several issues, including restrictions on "media freedom." "Senior government officials, including Prime Minister Erdoğan," the report notes, "made statements during the year strongly criticizing the press and media business figures, particularly following the publishing of reports on alleged corruption in entities in Germany connected to the ruling party."
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 8:07 PM | Comments (1)
