The West Must Stop Giving Turkey a Free Pass
Last month, more than 1,200 Turkish and foreign academics signed a petition calling attention to the continuing humanitarian crisis in many Kurdish-majority towns in southeastern Turkey, which are the site of fighting between the Turkish Army and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K. The petition decried the Army’s shelling of urban areas and the imposition of weekslong, 24-hour curfews, which have left many civilians unable to bury their dead or even obtain food. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan publicly denounced the signers as “so-called intellectuals” and “traitors.” Within days, antiterror police had detained and harassed dozens of the signatories…….
First They Came for Turkey’s Journalists, Then Their Academics
The university professors who protested the Turkish government’s repressive military activity in the country’s Kurdish southeast now face the same precarious and intimidating future as journalists who dare defy President Erdogan.
read more: http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.701155
Until 2002, when the AKP (Justice and Development Party) came to power, Turkey was doing pretty well in following Kemal Atatürk’s dictum: “peace at home, peace abroad”. Admittedly, there were three military coups between 1960 and
By the end of January 2016, the results of two public opinion surveys had been announced, one right after the other. The first was the annual survey on Social and Political Trends in Turkey conducted by Kadir Has University (KHAS); the other was
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