Turkey's Assyrians (or Syriacs) are an ancient Christian community that until several decades ago figured prominently in the southeast region, in an area close to the borders of Syria and Iraq. Although their numbers in the region have dwindled, due to a combination of political and economic factors, the community has experienced something of a slow revival in recent years, with Assyrians who had moved to Europe returning to live in historic Assyrian communities in the southeast.
Perhaps another indication of this revival is the launch this week of a new Turkish-Assyrian monthly publication, called "Sabro" (or "hope"). From a report in the Hurriyet Daily News:
“As Syriacs, we also maintain hopes about the future in Turkey, and thus we named our newspaper ‘Sabro,’” the journal’s chief editor, Tuma Çelik, told the Hürriyet Daily News.
Çelik also said he could not learn the Syriac language due to Turkey’s policies toward its minorities. Turkish society is not sufficiently familiar with the Syriac community, and the general discourse in the country makes it seem as if the ongoing problems regarding the Mor Gabriel Monastery in the southeastern province of Mardin constitute the community’s sole problem, he added.
“For that reason, we placed a greater emphasis on [using] Turkish. We are both going to inform our people about their culture while [providing them] with news and inform the people of Turkey about Syriacs and their problems,” he said.
Sabro will be based in Mardin’s Midyat district, the historical homeland of Syriac Christians. The paper will also maintain offices in Istanbul and the southeastern provinces of Hakkari and Şırnak, according to Çelik, who said the 25,000-strong population of Syriacs in Turkey was predominantly concentrated in Istanbul.
In a previous post, the blog reported on a court case brought on by a Turkish government agency, which charged the publisher of the Turkish translation of the classic William S. Burroughs novel, The Soft Machine, with printing obscene material. Turns out the case against Burroughs's book continues, but has almost come to a halt because the court can't find suitable "experts" who can determine if the book (as well as another one, a translation of Chuck Palahniuk's Snuff, which was also deemed obscene by the government) can be considered a work of literature. Full story, from the Bianet website, here.
The Wall Street Journal published a few days ago a lovely ode to chicken tabaka, one of Georgia's most famous dishes. From the WSJ's article:
Like my first kiss, my first taste of chicken tabaka was memorable as much for its context as for its deliciousness.
Tabaka is a classic dish from the Republic of Georgia. But that first taste occurred in Moscow, in the middle of a bleak Russian winter, in 1979. Soviet store shelves were empty; people queued in long lines for food. And yet, behind the doors of the Aragvi restaurant, an alternate reality thrived. The interior of the restaurant was faced in beautiful pale marble that shimmered in light from sconces lining the walls. A balcony above the main dining room held a small orchestra that played stirring music. In private dining rooms, Communist power brokers held clandestine meetings over endless carafes of vodka and Georgian wine. Strongmen at the doors turned most ordinary people away. Only because I was a foreigner with plenty of Marlboros for bribes was I able to gain entry.
The rest of the article, complete with recipe, can be found here.
In an unexpected move, a Turkish judge today released pending trial Nedim Sener and Ahmet Sik, two high-profile journalists who had been detained for over a year on charges that they were part of a plot to topple the government.
The arrest and jailing of the two respected journalists had brought Turkey's record on press freedom under increasing scrutiny. For example, Sener and Sik's surprise release -- along with two other journalists who were in jail -- came only days after the New Yorker took a look at the subject of media freedom (or the lack of it) in Turkey, first in a long article and then in a followup blog post by the story's author, Dexter Filkins. In his post, which notes that Turkey has the highest number of journalists jailed in the world, Filkins writes: "Measuring strictly in terms of imprisonments, Turkey—a longtime American ally, member of NATO, and showcase Muslim democracy—appears to be the most repressive country in the world." Clearly, this is not the way Ankara would like the world to think of Turkey. For the government of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has worked hard to present itself as a force for reform and democratization, the release of Sener and Sik appears to be an important step in rescuing its image.
From being Cold War adversaries, Turkey and Russia have taken significant steps in recent years towards deepening their economic and political ties, to the point that some Turkish pundits started describing their relationship as a "strategic alliance." Trade between the two countries has blossomed (although much of it is in the form of Russian gas flowing into Turkey), while Ankara and Moscow have also agreed to scrap visa requirements for one-month-long stays.
But recent events regional events, which have found Ankara and Moscow taking divergent views, are putting the budding relations between Turkey and Russia to the test. Russia's heavy investment in Greek Cyprus has not gone unnoticed by Ankara. But an even greater challenge is being posed by the uprising in Syria and Moscow's continuing support for the Assad regime. As analyst Ziya Meral writes in a recent piece for Bitterlemons-international.org:
....just as the so-called "Arab spring" has soured the budding romance between Syria and Turkey, there are underlying anxieties over how long Turkey can keep calm about Russian involvement in Syria.
From the Turkish point of view, Russian interests in Syria are thin. A small symbolic naval base, seemingly lucrative yet limited arms sales, and assertion of the usual bravado of "standing against colonial western interventionism" are no compensation for what Russia stands to lose through its dangerous Syria policy.
For beer purists, alcohol-free suds are a joke, if not an insult. But one group in Turkey, where alcohol-free beer has been recently introduced, is taking this strange brew very seriously, warning that there's no way to have your cake and drink it too. From the Hurriyet Daily News:
Alcohol-free beer is a trap set for children by liquor producers, said Muharrem Balcı, the head of Yeşilay (Turkish Green Crescent), a Turkish association combating drug abuse and alcoholism, yesterday.
“Liquor producers target the youth to increase their market share and alcohol consumption and therefore come up with various tactics to lower the age to start drinking alcohol. One of them is the ‘alcohol-free beer’ hoax,” he said....
....“Although [the rate of alcohol in alcohol-free beer] is under the legal limit, [the amount] is very significant,” Balcı said, adding that the Institution of Forensic Medicine put forth that a 0.20 percent alcohol rise in human blood raises the fatal traffic accident risk by twofold.
As the HDN article points out, the alcohol level in Turkey's near beer is actually lower than that found in traditional fermented drinks, such as the grain-based boza or the dairy-based Kefir, that have been sold and consumed in Turkey for centuries, with little evidence showing that they have played a role in increasing traffic accidents.
Ahead of tomorrow's International Women's Day, a Turkish NGO is shining a light on Turkey's persistent gender gap problem. The group, the Association for Education and Supporting Women Candidates (KADER), conducts an annual survey that looks at the number of women in high places in Turkey, with the results usually fairly dismal. This year's study is no different, as Today's Zaman reports:
“For five years the situation has not changed. We are tired of reporting the same statistics each year. We are concerned,” said Çiğdem Aydın, representing KA.DER. The reason for their outrage was explained in the statistics they have compiled. In a nationwide campaign prior to the June 12 elections last year, they asked for 50 percent representation in Parliament, but the percentage of women who entered Parliament remained at only 14.2 percent. This is a small increase from 9.1 percent female lawmakers in Parliament in 2007. Moreover, out of 26 ministers in Turkey's cabinet there is only one woman, Family and Social Policy Minister Fatma Şahin.
In other administrative public offices, the situation is also bleak: Only 26 female mayors out of 2,924; 65 village heads out of 34,210; one female governor out of 81; five female rectors out of 103 and 21 female ambassadors out of 185. There are no female undersecretaries and no female members at the Supreme Court of Appeals, Court of Accounts or the Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency.
“What do we have in Turkey?” KA.DER representatives asked again. “Violence against women, exploitation of female labor and bodies, female poverty, female unemployment, child brides and girls who are not sent to school.”
Azeris looking for Nestle chocolate bars or Nescafe on their supermarket shelves may soon be in for a rude surprise. As the Swiss company has recently confirmed, it is indefinitely suspending the supply of its entire range of products in Azerbaijan, which means Azeri warehouses are now left with perhaps a two month stock of chocolate and other Nestle goodies.
While Nestle officials have blamed the suspension on "some supply problems," Azeri outlets have said it is due to the company uncovering evidence of extensive corruption in dealings between its local supplier and customs officials. More here.
On the bright side, since the dispute only involves Nestle products, the brilliant Azeri tradition of serving tea along with a sliced Snickers bar, truly one of the world's great culinary combos, remains untouched.
Among the most recent additions to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault -- a repository located deep inside a Norwegian mountain some 600 miles from the Arctic Circle that's designed to safeguard the world's botanical gene pool -- is wheat from Tajikistan, where the harsh environment has created a particularly hardy strain of the plant. From a story that first appeared on the Salt, NPR's food blog:
Every seed that arrived this week has its own story. The shipment included seeds from a barley variety that came to the U.S. from Poland in 1938, and from a kind of amaranth collected from a small farm in Ecuador in 1979.
It also included the first seeds from Tajikistan — a small mountainous slice of the former Soviet Union, just north of Afghanistan.
To find out more about those seeds, I called Alexey Morgounov. He's a Russian who now lives in Turkey,and works for the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center.
When you go to Tajikistan, Morgounov says, you'll see something you can't find most other places: farmers still planting and harvesting the same kinds of wheat that their ancestors have grown for thousands of years.
"People don't want to give up growing them," he says, because they know that those traditional varieties of wheat are the key to making bread with exactly the taste and texture that they want.
Homemade bread, from homegrown wheat, is the centerpiece of life in Tajikistan, Morgounov says. People there get half of all their calories from it.
And when they leave home, they like to take some along with them.
"They always bring this homemade bread to me," he says. "They take a plane from Duchanbe to Istanbul, with Turkish Airlines, and they know that there is breakfast, and drinks, and bread. They still take some flat breads, just in case."
When they were signed in late 2009, the protocols between Turkey and Armenia -- designed to restore diplomatic relations between the two countries and create a vehicle for discussing their painful shared history -- were hailed as a major breakthrough and as an important victory for Ankara's new "zero problems with neighbors" policy.
Still, despite the applause, it was fairly clear already at the signing -- which was delayed by three hours because of a dispute between Ankara and Yerevan over their respective statements -- that the protocols had a rough road ahead of them. Indeed, not much longer after they were signed, the agreement was as good as dead, killed off by a combination of Turkish buyer's remorse, Azeri bullying and Armenian naivete.
Just how did things fall apart so quickly? In a new report issued by Columbia University's Institute for the Study of Human Rights, David Phillips, who has been involved in previous Turkish-Armenian reconciliation efforts, goes a long way towards answering that question by providing an extremely detailed diplomatic history of the protocols.
As Phillips writes, "The Protocols represented an unprecedented advancement in relations between Turkey and Armenia. However, failure to ratify them was a significant bilateral, regional, and international setback." As he sees it, the protocols are dead in their current form and cannot be revived, while Ankara, busy with other, more pressing regional concerns, is not likely to return to the Armenia file for now.
