My grandmother Ayşe lived a long life. Sometimes she used to talk about the past, she used to tell about the soldiers coming to their village and when the soldiers had come, how they fled to the mountains. As some soldiers were spending the whole winter in their villages, she told us how they were […]
The date is October 29, in the Duranlar (Awyan) village in the southeast’s Yüksekova, Hakkari. It’s around six in the afternoon. Şerali Dereli leaves his house to tend to his horses like he does every day. His health has not been good, so he barely goes outside for anything else. The mare and its young […]
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said on Oct. 18 that the Kurdish-majority southeastern province of Şırnak has the same benefits as the country’s 80 other provinces. “What exists in Turkey’s 80 other provinces in the name of democracy, rights and freedoms exists here,” Erdoğan said during a congress of his ruling Justice and Development Party […]
A few days ago, a young woman was shot dead in Art Street in Turkey’s southeastern province of Diyarbakır. Melek Aslan, 24 years old, was murdered as she sat on a bench in the street by her brother Mustafa Aslan, who she had met to talk with, on the pretext of “honour”. We learned Melek’s story from the […]
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 […]