When I was young, the eldest son of our next door neighbour would go out in their yard to do some mysterious thing every night. I had no idea what he was doing at first. Then I found out. Apparently, he would bury tapes filled with Kurdish music in the yard every night, and dig […]
Evrensel newspaper columnist Yusuf Karataş was sentenced to 10 years and six months in prison last month for being an active member of the Democratic Society Congress (DTK), a now-banned platform of Kurdish associations and movements in Turkey. Since he is not part of the non-government organisation, why was Yusuf punished so severely? To answer […]
On Sept. 13, 16-year-old Syrian refugee Eymen Hammami who was working in a bakery in the northern province of Samsun was stabbed to death in an apparently racially motivated attack. “We are brothers, don’t do this,” the boy’s brother Ibrahim told the assailants, to no avail. Ibrahim told daily Evrensel that they had been standing […]
For a while now I have no desire to write. Whenever I sit at my computer, I come to notice a distinct non-enthusiasm for writing. With every passing day, the feeling that I am writing on the sand takes me over further. I spent last week watching over and over the news and videos of […]
Dear Mr Spano, Your visit to Turkey last week deeply disappointed those fighting for human rights, democracy, equality, and the rule of law. Your visit to my country, where the rule of law has been disregarded and hundreds of thousands of people are unlawfully in prison, could have been quite different. With your visit, you […]
An attack on Kurdish seasonal workers in the northwestern Sakarya province has occupied Turkey’s agenda this weekend. The incident arrives as the latest in a string of racist attacks targeting the country’s largest ethnic minority in the Black Sea province in recent years. On Friday, pro-Kurdish Mezopotamya news agency reported, with video footage, an attack on 16 […]