The EU, Turkey and the Roma Minority

The EU had criticized Turkey in the latest Progress Report, argued that Ankara violated the human rights of the Roma minority with an urban renewal project in an Istanbul neighborhood.

The EU Commission was absolutely right then. Such gentrification projects as the urban extension of wild neoliberalism are almost always against the public interest, as well as individual rights.

However, the EU was also applying one of its well-known double-standards from its rich set of shameless hypocrisies.

Reading from the Guardian:

"The European Union was today accused of 'turning a blind eye' as countries across Europe carried out a wave of expulsions and introduced new legislation targeting the Roma."

How?

* France announced it would round up and expel illegal Roma immigrants and destroy hundreds of their encampments.

* The city of Copenhagen had requested Danish government assistance to deport up to 400 Roma.

* Swedish police had expelled Roma in breach of its own and EU laws.

* In Belgium, a caravan of 700 Roma has been chased out of Flanders and forced to set up camp in French-speaking Wallonia in the south.

* Italy, which in 2008 declared a state of emergency due to the presence of Roma, and evicted thousands of them, mainly to Romania and Bulgaria, is continuing to implement the policy to this day.

* Germany is in the process of repatriating thousands of Roma children and adolescents to Kosovo, despite warnings that they will face discrimination, because many of them were born in Germany and do not speak Serbian or Albanian.

* In eastern European countries that are EU members, such as the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria, accounts are rife of widespread discrimination against Roma, including physical attacks.

Will France or Germany or others be criticized in the upcoming Progress Reports? Oops, there is no monitoring mechanism for the member states to see if they still apply the EU criteria or not, right?

However, at least they can learn that Turkish proverb:

Prick yourself with a needle before you stick a packing-needle into others.

Another Turkish Spite House

It seems that all Turkish spite houses are in the Blacksea region.

Here is the latest one:

In Rize province, two brothers built a house in 1960s. After one of the brothers died, his sons wanted to build an apartment building there. As their uncle opposed it, they sued him. In the end, they shared the land equally as follows:

Cameroon Scores a Gaulle

British Prime Minister David Cameron visits Turkey. Today in Ankara, he quoted the following words of an important person in the history of the EU:

"Here is a non-European country... A country that points out a totally different direction with her history, her economy, her agriculture and the character of her people.. A country that will never become a full member in spite of all her ambitiousness and confidence..."

Whose words are these?

"Charles de Gaulle," Cameron answered himself. He continued with more interesting remarks:

"These words sound like they were uttered by a European, while speaking of Turkey's EU membership. However, they were said by De Gaulle about Britain's EU membership, before our accession. We know what it's like to be shut out of the club. But we also know that these things can change."

I don't know enough about the domestic policies of Cameron; but when I look at his foreign policy, I see that Europe needs more statesmen like him, not xenophobes like Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel...

...or Charles de Gaulle, who had promised associate membership to Britain just like Sarkozy-Merkel propose privileged partnership to Turkey...

I say this not because Cameron simply pleased me with his pro-Turkey stance in the EU, but because he shows that he has got a vision and a courage in spite of racists. It seems that David Cameron will not appear on the world stage as small-minded as the vanguards of the Old Europe.

Now BBC Adopts PKK's Discourse

It's a dog?.. It's a bear cub?.. No... It's... a freedom fighter!

For me, seeing the Western European and American mainstream media implicitly propagating for PKK is not surprising anymore.

Especially during the times that the governments of these countries are in discord with Ankara, the praises for this terrorist organization in their media outlets become less veiled, as it seems that these gatekeepers are always more keen on defending their national interests rather than the universal journalism standards.

As an instance, I remember the scandalous story of the Washington Post; but I was not expecting such a travesty from BBC, which I find relatively more honest in journalism.

However, BBC News has just conducted an interview with Murat Karayilan, PKK's de facto leader, and published a story, titled "Seeking out the PKK gunmen in Iraq's remote mountains."

This time I'm not going to criticize a news organization for calling PKK militants as rebels and guerrillas; even though it's certainly a double standard if this outlet prefers to call Islamist militants as terrorists so easily.

The most annoying part of the BBC story is how it's set up. The correspondent quotes the first words of Karayilan in the following order:

1) "When one of our comrades is killed, Turkish soldiers cut his body to pieces and cut out his eyes."

2) "We will go on. We will make whatever sacrifice is needed and we will not surrender, no matter what."

These words are the core of the story. In a text with rich descriptive details and some superficial, out-of-context information, this quotation is there to shape up the main perception of the reader. It basically says:

1) Turkish soldiers are not only committing a war crime, but they are also violating a moral principle by desecrating dead bodies of Kurds.

2) Hence, PKK is just the organizational embodiment of the struggle of a self-respecting Kurdish rebel who is -first of all- fighting against an inhuman enemy.

First of all, I must reiterate that I'm not against the idea of an interview with a PKK leader, but I'm just asking:

Why did BBC conduct this interview now?

Was it BBC's idea to go to northern Iraq or was it the PKK leader who invited them?

And anyway, why does BBC adopt the essential discourse of PKK (Turkey's human rights abuses-->Rightful revenge of Kurds) while making this information the central argument of the story?

By the way, did the BBC correspondent verify Karayilan's claim? If he didn't, then why didn't he -at least- note that he couldn't verify this claim anyway?

These are important questions, especially if you also know how the militants of PKK are being humanized by these media outlets, while Turks as their enemy are being dehumanized. Remember the PKK militant of the infamous Washington Post story, who was mercifully feeding a bear cub -in BBC's terms, a refugee-victim of a forgotten war.

For more than a hundred years, the Turk has been stereotyped as the Terrible, as the villain. Even when it's compared to another Near Eastern ethnicity, Kurds, it seems that his image as the Other in relation to the Western European subconscious will never improve with such media organizations in charge.

To finish, I'd like to say that I forgive BBC as a reader; because they are one of the rare Western European media outlets to stay away from double standards and fallacies as much as possible. For instance, they had also made an interview with a Taliban spokesman in the past and faced reactions from the Tories. So I accept the latest story as an accident.

Unfortunately, BBC is an exception. Most of the Western European and American newspapers are like the Washington Post, which can easily label any Muslim criminal in the United States as a terrorist while never attempting to show the humane side of an Al Qaida militant.

And the saddest part is the fact that the WP is still one of the best mainstream newspapers in the United States in terms of complying to professional and ethical standards...

Neoliberalizing Vampires

Concerning the global hype that has been triggered by Twilight series, Neil Gaiman, who is one of my favorite fantasy writers, has said that "authors and publishers are guilty of 'over-farming' vampires."

I partly agree with Gaiman. Vampires have been a part of the popular literature since the early 19th century. Even though we're currently on one of the peak points of the production volume of the vampire-themed literature, it is surely not the historical climax. We've been watching more vampire movies in the 1970s and 1980s, for instance.

On the other hand, if there is a problem with the current "over-farming" of vampires, then this problem is not quantitative, but it is qualitative. What do I mean?

In the past, vampires have been a potentially emancipating subject as personas who look and act like us, but are not one of us. In the prehistory of the vampire fiction in Europe, you can see such a potential in the character of Carmilla, for instance.

Or as Werner Herzog had observed, in the aristocratic image of Dracula, you can read a symbolism about the parasitic counts of Ancien Regime who abused their peasantry with a nocturnal terror which is actually a shadow of the ways of capitalist bourgeois. Here, we can remember that Dracula was based upon Vlad III, an Eastern European prince of the 15th century, who resisted the centralist Ottoman expansion as a feudal lord in Wallachia.

However, with the fascinating fiction of Ann Rice, the vampire has been totally Americanized. Rice didn't really commodify vampires then, but she paved the way of their absolute articulation into the consumer society. We can argue that vampires have lost their emancipating potential as a challenger of the social establishment, right after Rice.

What we see in today's vampire fiction, based mainly on Twilight-esque pieces, is the decontextualization of vampires. In Twilight, Edward Cullen as the main vampire character is an idealized capitalist, who is liberated from all physical needs as an undead, absolutely potent and immortal, but still shackled to some earthly weaknesses like carnal desire and commodity fetishism in the shape of being an ardent collector.

In this framework, Bella Swan the female protagonist -who can easily anger the average reader with her utter superficiality and even stupidity- seems like she is in love with Edward, not just because of her romantic engagement to him, but because she is the symbol of the modern teenage girl, who craves to be with an idealized capitalist. If Edward is Justin Bieber, Bella is one of his millions of teenage fans who would even kill to appear on MTV with him or his likes. There is certainly a parasitic relationship between these characters in the form of mutualism.

To finish, I would like to add that I find it quite normal when vampires as a theme get adapted to contemporary literature. What is despicable is the fact that their original meaning is being undermined systematically, resulting with the corruption of their emancipating symbolism. It is how neoliberal capitalism works, though. It just absorbs anything as it had even managed to franchise Che Guevara...

The solution for today's vampire problem? I believe that sexually straight vampires like Edward Cullen suck. The emancipating potential of vampires has always been accompanying to their perversion . Take one of my favorite vampire movies, Vampyros Lesbos (1971). Many people hate this West German movie which portrays lesbian vampires in Istanbul and Princes' Islands. However, as a "psycho-sexadelic horror freakout", Vampyros Lesbos is still regarded as a cult movie. I like it, because it shows that you can modernize vampires without neoliberalizing them... Shortly, Countess Nadine Carody (which was played by Soledad Miranda) beats Edward Cullen, at least in my somewhat sexist view.

Don't Be A Total Turk!

The image of the Turk as the villain of Europe persists.

I can understand that with the governments like of Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, you can't introduce measures to erase racism in the fabric of these societies.

However, it is still sad to see that centuries-old racist stereotypes about Turks are entrenched in the subconscious of many European nations so deep that they remain normal even in our age.

Recently, a Greek pensioner sued a Swedish dairy to stop them using his image to brand a Turkish yogurt carton.

Surprisingly, he defended that being portrayed as a Turk is "the biggest insult" and he managed to get a significant amount of compensation with such a racist argument.

Neither the Swedish company nor a Swedish authorty told the Greek pensioner that being a Turk is not an insult.

Ironically, the surname of the Greek pensioner (Karatsoglu) is originally Turkish.

In these circumstances, how can you democratize and humanize the EU and its peoples by decisively leaving the Muslim-majority states in the cold while preparing to accept countries like Serbia, which committed a genocide against Muslims recently, as a new member?

Let's finish with a passage from a fresh article of The Economist:

"Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military commander at Srebrenica, remains at large, wanted by the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague on charges of genocide. When he led his troops into Srebrenica in 1995 he exulted that he had liberated the town from the 'Turks', a derogatory term for Bosniaks."

If you ask me, the biggest insult against Turks is the fact that the European Union keeps them in suspense for decades by applying really racist double-standards.

Did Turkey Leave Iran?

From the very beginning, I've been arguing that the AKP government has been doing in its foreign policy whatever the United States demanded.

Even the controversial policies concerning the Iranian crisis or the relations with Israel are not exceptions.

And finally...

A senior U.S. official has said that Turkey has agreed to stay out of international efforts to pressure Iran on its nuclear program, several international news agencies reported last night.

I believe that Ankara has accepted to retreat, not because it was resisting the pressure from the West and had to surrender now. It retreated, because its role as the carrot-holder, which was designed by Washington, is obsolete now.

And if you see in the near future that Turkey and Israel are suddenly close friends again, don't look at Ankara or Tel Aviv.

Look at Washington.

A Surreal Istanbul Under Clouds

This is the wettest summer that I've ever seen in Istanbul.

I don't complain, though.

Check out the amazing AFP photo that shows the city as a surrealist landscape:

Stoning Lindsay Lohan to Death

I am against the death penalty, but it's also another issue that double-standards turn my stomach.

Take the case of Sakineh Mohammedie Ashtiani, an Iranian woman who faces execution after being convicted in 2006.

Especially the Republican media in the United States cover this story in a very nauseating way.

First of all, they try to give an impression to the reader that Ashtiani has been convicted solely because she committed adultry. Then they describe what a medieval punishment stoning is by relating it to Islam; even though it is actually a traditional practice in the Middle East, not a religious one.

In reality, Ashtiani had been convicted because it was decided that she was an accomplice of her lover who killed her husband while they were all in the same house.

With such a murder verdict, Ashtiani would be executed in Texas, too. And believe me, according to many experts, death chair or lethal injection can be as much painful as stoning. After all, they are equally primitive as they are just similar methods for the state to exercise its morally illegitimate right to kill its citizens.

As Doris Leuthard, the President of Switzerland, has admitted today, the national practice of the legal punishment is just a way, a choice. Critizing another nation because of its choice (let's say, caning as a physical punishment) can indeed be culturally racist, if you fail to stay on a morally higher ground, which is the full abolishment of all kinds of physical punishments.

Hence, the regime of United States is as far from representing the will of its people as the regime of Iran is. The Iranian system produces and punishes people like Ashtiani, while the American system produces and punishes people like Lindsay Lohan, who has ironically compared her situation with Ashtiani's.

Which crime and which punishment is more despicable then?

The Iranian way or the American way?

The Turkish Grenade

A 100-year-old Turkish hand grenade was found recently during conservation measures near the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem's Old City wall.

Don't get surprised if Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman announces that this is another proof that the Turkish government supports terrorism. It would be as convincing as when they claimed that the slain activists in the Gaza flotilla were armed.

Berlusconi as an Ergenekon Suspect

The Ergenekon case, AKP's McCarthy-style witch hunt against the political opposition, goes on.

Years pass by and many suspects are still behind bars without being formally charged as there are not enough evidences yet. The prosecutors hope to find them soon.

Yes, it's a tragedy for democracy and human rights, but the case is still partly funny. Firstly, let's remember:

Taraf, a newspaper that I personally find highly untrustworthy, had published allegations about a military document last year. According to the newspaper -which is close to Islamist police sources, the military was planning to disrepute the AKP government and the Gulen movement. Initially, the newspaper didn't provide any document but a photocopy. Strangely, they found the original document with a wet signature only after weeks passed.

Dursun Cicek, the colonel who had seemingly signed the document, is being tried now. He pleaded not guilty, as he defends that he didn't sign such a paper. The document really seems fake. Anyone who is familiar with the military jargon can tell that easily (i.e the members of the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) never refer to the army with its initials. This is the typical style of anti-militarist liberals or some other groups like the Kurdish nationalists) . So I'm convinced, as I also know about real military documents.

But what about the wet signature? The colonel argues that there are CNC-based automated machines to produce any signature realistically. His attorneys suggest that the time between the publishing date of Taraf's story and the revelation of the original document was actually used to fabricate Cicek's signature with such a machine.

In the latest court hearing yesterday, Cicek's attorneys have showcased such a machine and automatically faking the signature of a court official in fifteen minutes. I don't know if the judges are convinced now or not, but I know something: Anyone can be indefinitely imprisoned by the AKP government one day, thanks to such machines and such Kafkaesque prosecutors. And I mean not only AKP's political rivals, but also the closest friends of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan...

Why?

One of the signatures that were automatically faked by Cicek's attorneys who were trying to convince the judges about the CNC machines was the Italian Prime Minister's:

Silvio Berlusconi!

AKP's Double Trouble

Fourteen workers died in Istanbul shipyards last year, because of the negligence of their employers.

The AKP government didn't do anything about those accidents. The Labor Minister even defended the interests of the shipyard bosses, instead of the workers who died in vain.

No investigation and no official inspection in Istanbul's shipyards...

* * *

More than a hundred coal miners died while working underground during the AKP rule, because of the persistent negligence of their employers.

The AKP government didn't do anything. The Prime Minister even defended the interests of the mine owners, stating that "the fate of the coal miner is dying."

No investigation and no official inspection in the Turkish mines...

Bosch, the famous German brand, has got a big factory in Bursa (above). An anonymous person has filed an official complaint, arguing that the factory doesn't allow its workers to pray during working hours.

The provincial president of AKP took the vice governor with him and organized a surprise inspection in the Bosch factory yesterday.

They found out that there are four praying rooms in the factory and Bosch is doing everything, concerning the freedom of belief, according to the book.

Anyhow I'd like to warn the German firm to check its accounting books over and over again. If they accidentally made the Turkish government lose one cent, they may be forced to pay it in billions as a tax penalty.

Because the AKP government is extremely sensitive when guaranteeing the rights of the people, especially in the cases of such accidents.

You know, this is the neo-liberal Islamism.

The double trouble.

The Right of Return

Isabella the Green Sea Turtle has returned to her homeland after spending forty years in exile.

Jacques Cousteau, the famous French oceanographer, had found her in the Mediterranean in 1970.

Isabella, a five-year-old baby turtle then, was taken away by Cousteau, who stated that this kind of sea turtle species were endangered.

Consequently, Isabella spent thirty years in an aquarium in Stuttgart. Then she spent another ten years in Napoli Zoology Station.

Recently, the Italian hosts noticed that Isabella was about to lay eggs. So they returned her to Iztuzu, the renowned loggerhead sea turtle egg-laying beach near Dalyan, western Turkey.

Now Isabella is free, even though we can still follow her in the depths of the eastern Mediterranean, thanks to the GPS technology. A tracking interface will be available here for her soon.

The return of Isabella reminds me of the plundered treasures of Anatolia, which were taken away from Turkey decades ago and are still being exhibited in the museums of western Europe and Russia. The Pergamon Museum in Berlin, for instance, was exclusively build to house the antiquity which were originally discovered during excavations in Turkey.

Captain Cousteau was one of the heroes of my childhood. I wanted to be an astronaut thanks to Yuri Gagarin and Neil Armstrong, but I also wanted to be a scuba-diver thanks to the adventures of Cousteau, which I was watching on the Turkish television then.

When I had learned about the story of Isabella years ago, I had felt bitter. Cousteau loved animals probably more than he loved people, so I'm sure he had got a better justification to condemn Isabella to a forty years long sentence in aquariums. However, loggerhead sea turtles are also an endangered species nowadays; but can you take them away off the southern US coasts today and put them into an aquarium -say- in Japan?

Cousteau was a human and it seems to me that he made a big mistake with Isabella. Like Theodor Wiegand and many other people did with the cultural artifacts of Turkey.

...because everything which constitutes a meaning in history, whether it is a biological or cultural life-form, should have the right to return to its origin...

Both Cousteau and Wiegand had a reasonable justification on their behalf, but it doesn't change the fact that their justification is based on a counter-argument which is orientalist, if not colonialist.