President’s spokesman calls on authorities to launch transparent inquiry after observers raised doubts about poll result
The EU has called on the civil authorities in Turkey to launch a transparent investigation into the referendum result granting the Turkish president, RecepTayyip Erdoğan, sweeping new powers.
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan speaks to his supporters in Ankara on Monday and criticises international election observers who have cast doubt on Sunday’s referendum result. The vote, which gave Erdoğan sweeping new powers, has been judged by independent observers to have fallen short of international standards
"No and Beyond" a new election monitoring group shares preliminary voting fraud report:
961 boxes had only Yes votes despite opp presence
+ https://t.co/MUfDGOqkJ1— efe kerem sözeri 🫶 (@efekerem) April 18, 2017
The Curious Case of the Vanishing Never-AKPers in Southeastern Turkey
There are a number of striking features of Sunday’s referendum in Turkey, which resulted in a narrow victory (51.4% being the official “YES” vote share at the time of writing this blog post) for the constitutional amendment proposed by the government.
There are, however, numerous challenges to the result, both with regards to the environment in which it was carried out as well as more direct accusations of election-day irregularities. Going through the election data is probably going to keep many people busy for the next couple of days weeks months. For now, I wanted to highlight one particular phenomenon which struck me as interesting.
The Ak Saray Presidential Palace in Ankara. Creative Commons. By author Ex13.
“This country is split down the middle like a watermelon,” political commentator Hasan Celik kept repeating again and again in a live broadcast on Kanal D* as the results of the country’s controversial April 16 constitutional referendum trickled in.
Erdogan says Turkey could hold referendum on EU membership bid
Turkey vote curtailed fundamental freedoms, say European observers
Constitutional referendum took place on unlevel playing field and campaigners did not have equal opportunities, say monitors
The Turkish referendum on presidential powers took place on an “unlevel playing field” and in a political environment where fundamental freedoms were curtailed, European observers have said.
This approach of recognizing and respecting the differences and commonalities between one’s own and others’ knowledge, of listening and thinking through both, has been called ‘border thinking’.
A year after the EU deal with Turkey to stem the flow of migrants into Europe, Hungary is doubling down protection of its border.Syrian refugee family at the Kelebija transit camp, March 23,2017.Krystian Maj/Press Association. All rights reserved. The western gaze needs fresh victims and apparently it sees in me one of those new victims. How do I know this? I read it in the newspaper, in the Wall Street Journal, no less. Here is what the WSJ said about me on August 24, 2016:
In Istanbul, Nil Mutluer grabbed her 3-year-old daughter and raced with a suitcase toward Turkey’s coast. The former sociology-department chair at the city’s Nisantasi University narrowly escaped the nation’s looming dragnet. “Authorities had already begun questioning colleagues at the airports,” said Dr. Mutluer, a Western-leaning liberal who took a ferry to Greece en route to an academic post in Berlin.
A striking beginning for a newspaper story isn’t it? An academic single mother escapes with only one suitcase and her three years old daughter, via Greece to boot! Touching too – exactly the sort of human interest story of victimisation that the western gaze seems to demand from its news outlets.
A couple of months after that story was published, the Turkish correspondent of another major European news outlet, herself a Turkish citizen, contacted me. Having finally discovered what has been happening to Academics for Peace since the beginning of the year, she told me that she had interviewed a number of other academics who had left Turkey and that she would like to include my story in her article as well.
Europe going crazy over proposed executive presidency in Turkey: Erdoğan
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