*As published on Ahvalnews on 05.12.2017 https://ahvalnews.com/sur/ancient-heart-turkeys-biggest-kurdish-city-ripped The world’s longest 24-hour curfew continues in my hometown. The curfew that began in six districts of Diyarbakır’s ancient Sur neighbourhood has gone on for two years now. These six districts make up 75 hectares of Sur’s total 148 hectares, that is, about half of Sur. The curfews […]
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Why Turkey is posting paramilitary forces to its own cities *As published in Ahvalnews on 12.11.2017 https://ahvalnews.com/pkk/why-turkey-posting-paramilitary-forces-its-own-cities When the Turkish state needed help protecting Kurdish villages in its southeast region in the mid-1980s from insurgents belonging to the Kurdish-separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), then-president Turgut Özal began a “village guard” system. The controversial system, established in 1985, recruited villagers […]
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Some Notes for the Warmongers
Some Notes for the Warmongers In the last couple of weeks, İnsan Hakları Derneği (Human Rights Association) Diyarbakır Branch has published an important report on human rights violations between the dates July 24, 2015 and July 24, 2017, which attests to the atrocities faced by our society in numbers. According to this report, in the […]
Is Şırnak one of the 81 cities of Turkey? I am in Şırnak, one of the Kurdish cities that was under curfew for 8 months, between 14 March-14 November 2016 . 70% of the city has been totally destroyed. 8 of the city’s 12 districts do not exist anymore. The streets that I walked on […]
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Turkey, a modern day soap opera
Turkey, a modern day soap opera Last week, I met with my Canadian friend who lives in Turkey. She told me about a Turkish soap opera that she watched that morning. In the soap-opera, the young women gave a bunch of flowers to her mother-in-law. The mother-in-law threw the flowers to the floor and stomped […]
The Kurdish Region Since The Coup Attempt The July 15th coup attempt was a nightmare. Kurds remember the terrible army coups in Turkey. After the army coups, Kurdish people were imprisoned, sustained, killed and tortured. Kurds are against army coups. The night of 15 July 2016, the pro-Kurdish party, HDP (Peoples’ Democratic Party) immediately condemned […]