TURKEY’S president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, spent the early part of this year repeatedly insulting his NATO allies, partly with the aim of stimulating nationalist sentiment at home in order to win a constitutional referendum giving him nearly
Tigerswan, a secretive private mercenary company, was hired by Energy Transfer Partners to run campaigns against Dakota Access Pipeline protesters in five states, including states in which they were not licensed to operate — the measures they deployed were developed as counterterrorism tactics.
$25 Million Oil Tanker Gifted to Erdogan’s Family Is Just One of Many Revelations in the Malta Files
What’s the perfect gift for a world leader who has everything? How about secretly buying a $25 million oil tanker for his family? That’s what Azeri billionaire Mübariz Mansimov did for Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the increasingly authoritarian Turkish president, back in 2008. The discovery, published Friday by the Black Sea,El Mundo and other outlets, is the result of a monthslong project by the European Investigative Collaboration network.
Mansimov became a Turkish citizen two years earlier and adopted a Turkish name, Mübariz Gurbanoglu, allegedly at Erdogan’s suggestion. After the deal was struck, his business dealings in Turkey took off, including lucrative contracts with state firms.
On Friday, a variety of news outlets around the world published the Malta Files, a cache of 150,000 documents leaked “from a Malta-based provider of legal, financial and corporate services,” revealing, among other things, that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was secretly given a $25M oil tanker (!) by Azeri billionaire Mübariz Mansimov, a “friend” of Trump’s who was present at the inauguration.
Despite the state’s attempts to know and manage, there remain illegible elements, as exemplified by the people who support the No campaign or the women who join the Women’s Rally.
Turkish politician and former Minister of Interior Meral Akşener.Wikicommons/Haber Medya Grubu (Haberaks TV).Some rights reserved.“It is not the voice that commands the story, it is the ear.” Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities.
“…language is the best model: a structure of meaning and continuity that is never still and ever open to the improvisations of all its speakers” James Scott, Seeing Like a State.
“Our principles remind us that not justice, but oppression will inevitably result from an unrestrained one-man rule that is unaccountable, unchecked and unstoppable…”.
Portrait of the Kheireddine Pacha on his horse, pre-1890, from the national military museum of Tunisia. Wikicommons/ Ahmed Osman. Some rights reserved.Khayruddin Pasha al-Tunisi (d. 1890) was in many ways a typical nineteenth century Ottoman statesman and reformist thinker, but indisputably unique in many other ways. Serving in the remote principality of Tunisia, he was an adamant advocate for a constitutional regime like his Young Ottoman counterparts in Istanbul. But he stood out in his quest to ground his views on a quite firm Islamic foundation.
This obsession with personalities can fuel the very passions and tensions that such individuals feed on, and obscure the underlying factors that explain their rise in the first place.
President Inönü of Turkey, confers with President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill at Cairo, December 1943. Wikicommons/United States Library of Congress. Some rights reserved.At a time when loud, angry and divisive men (and a few women) dominate politics and defy established norms of public discourse and diplomacy, it is no surprise that popular attention becomes fixated on the character traits, appearances and speeches (or tweets) of these individuals.
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