Etyen Mahcupian, writing in Taraf, analyzed Kurdish DTP parliamentairan Ahmet Turk’s controversial speech in Kurdish as follows. Mahcupian asks how it could be that speaking an “unknown language” in parliament could come to be understood as a national shame? (The following are two points that caught my eye in a much longer article. Click here [...]
While rules about linguistic diversity are softening in Turkey as a whole — cynics would say as a ploy to get votes in the upcoming elections – allowing a TV station broadcasting in Kurdish, Kurdish taught as a bona fide language at a university, and even cell phones programmed in Kurdish, it appears the Turkish [...]
Photo from Hurriyet
After more than a decade of petitioning, female deputies welcomed Parliament’s regulation amendment that would allow them to wear trousers in the general assembly. The current regulation requires women deputies to wear long skirts. (click for article)
Polls show that the AKP is expected to win between 40 and 50 percent of the vote in the March 29 local elections, through which voters will determine more than 200,000 mayors and hundreds of provincial and local administrators. The party had been weakened by lack of progress on unemployment and loosening the headscarf ban, [...]
Results of a recent national survey in Turkey (click here for article) :
57 percent said the women of their household could not leave the house wearing shirts with short sleeves.
Half believed women need their husbands’ permission to work.
80 percent believed a woman and a man must be married in order to live together.
73 percent said [...]
(From The Economist. For article, click here. Excerpts: ) [The Turkish envoy, Huseyin Avni Botsali's] public appearance before the Kurdish flag [in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan’s capital] marks a shift in Turkey’s approach to Iraq’s Kurds…
Nowadays, even Turkey’s chief of the general staff, Ilker Basbug, admits that military might alone will not fix Turkey’s Kurdish problem. [...]
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has issued a report on Turkey’s health care system (another new report is on the science, technology and industry outlook, click here; for the health report, click on ‘OECD publications’ at the OECD/Turkey site).
The OECD review shows that health status has improved rapidly in Turkey in recent [...]
(From National Public Radio:) Modern Turkey was founded as a secular, Western-oriented state. But these days, Turks say the country is expressing its Muslim identity more than the secular one. While some Turks are alarmed, others argue this is the “real” Turkey. It all depends on who you are, says journalist Yasemin Congar.
“There is a [...]
About 500 Armenians have sent a letter addressed to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan asking him to suspend the screening of a controversial documentary about the Armenian question that the Education Ministry has recently required primary schools to screen…
The documentary, which defends the Turkish thesis against the Armenian genocide allegations, narrates stories of Turkish people [...]