Turkey: Zeid concerned by actions of security forces and clampdown on media GENEVA (1 February 2016) – UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein on Monday urged the Turkish authorities to respect the fundamental rights of…
Turkey’s military has been escalating vicious attacks against the Kurdish population under the pretext of fighting ISIS. Last week, a petition of condemnation was circulated by 1,200 Turkish academics calling themselves “Academicians for Peace.” President Erdoğan then issued a tirade against intellectuals, adopting what Noam Chomsky referred to in an email to the undersigned as “the George W. Bush line: you’re with me or you’re with the terrorists.”
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Jülide Yazıcı, a student in the Philosophy Department in Boğaziçi University who was active on social media supporting academics threatened by the Turkish government, was arrested two days ago. According to one source
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| Buildings destroyed in Diyarbakir. |
For many years Turkey’s recipe for combating Kurdish nationalism was to pretend that Kurds did not exist. Even as Turkish troops battled the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), government propaganda maintained that Kurds were a subgroup of Turks and that their language, banned from official use, was a dialect of Turkish. To his credit, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president, has never indulged in such fantasies. His Justice and Development (AK) party pursued peace negotiations with Abdullah Ocalan, the founder of the PKK, and moderate Kurds.
The Rise of ISIS and Other Extremist Groups: the role of the West and Regional Powers
Intifada Palestine
This essay examines the role of Western and regional players (i.e.Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar) in inflaming the conflict and the growth of terrorism in Syria. It examines the attempts to break up Syria’s civilian and military institutions .