The main difference between the present and Turkey’s so-called dirty war in its mainly Kurdish southeast in the 1990s, said the head of the Human Rights Association (IHD) in Turkey’s biggest Kurdish city, is that “there appears to be no rules or principles today … there is no rule or law.” Thousands were killed as […]
I can’t remember the first time I heard the term “New Turkey”. After 2010 the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) began to use it often. During the presidential campaign of 2014, the then-prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, said he would be the president of a New Turkey. At its 2015 party congress, the AKP […]
I was watching a video recorded last year during the Newroz (Kurdish spring festival) celebrations at Dicle University in Diyarbakır. Kurdish university students were whistling a Kurdish song. A group of police came, began to beat them and dragged them across the ground. Last week, we learned what happened to those university students. The Diyarbakir […]
Last weekend, one of my friends from the Italian Women Journalists’ Association called me and invited me to participate in a journalists’ forum to be held in Rome in March. I sadly told them that I am under a judicial control, meaning I have report to the police station once a month and have a […]
As the Turkish military bombarded parts of its own cities in the mainly Kurdish southeast of the country in January 2016, I was moderating a panel in a conference at the European Parliament in Brussels. After welcoming the audience that included parliamentarians, I called Mehmet Tunç, who was sheltering in a basement in the southeastern […]
Last night I received a call from a friend of mine who was a representative in the Turkish parliament for many years and a popular politician. She asked me what she would need in case of detention. Last week I was detained because of my Tweets against the war in Afrin, and now she also […]