With the current American ambassador to Turkey, James Jeffrey, being tapped to take over the U.S. mission in Iraq, it appears that a Washington battle is brewing over who will be the next ambassador in Ankara. As Foreign Policy reports, some neo-conservatives in Washington are not happy about the choice to replace Jeffery: Francis J. Ricciardone, Jr., a former ambassador to Egypt, among other places. From FP's report:
A behind-the-scenes clash is playing out over President
Obama's nominee to be the next U.S. ambassador to Turkey, a key Middle East
post at a time of tense relations between Washington and an increasingly
independent-minded Ankara. The would-be envoy, Francis J. Ricciardone, Jr., is a
32-year veteran of the Foreign Service who most recently served as the deputy
ambassador in Kabul. He's served in Ankara in the past and speaks fluent
Turkish. Ricciardone also played a role in organizing the Iraqi exile community
before the 2003 U.S. drive to Baghdad.But it's his tenure as George W. Bush's envoy to Egypt that
has provoked the most criticism, particularly among neoconservatives who are
hoping to persuade Republican senators to torpedo his nomination.
In a previous post, I had linked to a CNN report about the revival of Georgia's unique kvevri wine, which is wine that is fermented in large clay vessels that are buried underground. A recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald, meanwhile, has a report from the field with more information about the wine and some of the efforts being made to revive it and create a tourism industry around Georgian wine.From the article:
Historians believe wine has been made in the Kakheti Valley
- a belly of fertile plains enclosed by the snow-capped Greater Caucasus
Mountains - for more than 8000 years. Grapes were fermented in clay amphoras
called qvevris, which were glazed with beeswax and buried up to their necks.Until 2006, nine of every 10 bottles of wine produced in
Georgia went to Russia. Most of that was cheap and grisly, aimed at sustaining
less-than-discriminating palates. But then the Kremlin placed embargoes on both
Georgian wine and the magically curative Borjomi mineral water, claiming they
were riddled with pesticides (although critics claim it was punishment for
Saakashvili's pro-Western policies).Faced with bankruptcy, Georgia's wine industry worked hard
to reinvent itself. A coterie of energetic winemakers came to the fore and the
ancient art of qvevri fermentation was revived.
Singer and actress Jennifer Lopez has now learned -- as numerous politicians and negotiators before her have found out -- that wading into the Cyprus issue leads to nothing but trouble.
Turns out the American star had agreed to perform (most likely for very big bucks) at the opening of a ritzy new casino and resort on the coast of northern Cyprus, otherwise known as the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, a country only recognized by Turkey. Lopez's management probably imagined the difference between north and south Cyprus as being about the same as the difference between North and South Carolina, but they probably didn't imagine the kind of pressure the performer would come under from Greek and Cypriot groups opposed to her performing in the TRNC.
Now Lopez has informed the world that she will, in fact, not be going to Cyprus to perform in the north. As the gossip site TMZ.com reports:
.... a rep for Lopez tells TMZ, "Jennifer Lopez would never knowingly support any state, country, institution or regime that was associated with any form of human rights abuse."
A tomato seller in Istanbul's Tarlabasi Sunday bazaar
The Sunday open-air fruit and vegetable bazaar in Istanbul's scruffy Tarlabasi neighborhood is among the city's best markets, a rollicking, lively affair that seems to roll on endlessly through the area's streets. The neighborhood is currently slated to get Istanbul's notorious "urban transformation" gentrification treatment, and there is concern that the Sunday bazaar could find itself without a home.
EatingAsia's Robyn Eckhardt and David Hegerman recently visited the market and filed a wonderful report for the Daily Zester website. From their piece:
"Bir lira bir lira bir liraaa!"
From behind a table heaped with bunches of tere (a jagged-edged variety of cress) a vendor at the
weekly market in Istanbul's Tarlabasi(Tar-luh-BAH-shuh) neighborhood bids for the attention of passing
shoppers. His guttural bellows are loud enough to set the ears ringing. But
take two steps back and they're lost in the cacophony of those peddling cheese
and olives, nectarines and cherries, lamb and fish, cosmetics and household
goods. It's 4 in the afternoon on a sultry summer Sunday and the Tarlabasi pazari ("market" in Turkish) is in full swing.
A dam near the southeastern Turkish city of Sanliurfa
Depending on which way you look at it, Turkey is either blessed or cursed with great hydroelectric potential. Based on the number of lawsuits local residents in Turkey's water-rich Black Sea area have been filing to stop the construction of dams in their area, it would appear that they don't look too favorably on Turkey's push to increase its hydroelectric capacity.
As the Turkish daily Radikal discovered in an internal government report on dam building, the Black Sea villagers have good cause to worry about the dam building. From an article about Radikal's report in the Hurriyet Daily News:
The ministry that approved hydroelectric power plants in the Black Sea region has admitted in an internal report that their construction damaged the environment in the latest blow to Turkey’s ambitious dam-building plans.
“Excavations … caused destruction in forested areas. Current flow and the quality of the water in streams are negatively affected as a result of filling the streambeds with soil,” said a report prepared by the body overseeing hydroelectric power plants under the Environment and Forestry Ministry and the State Waterworks Authority, or DSİ, daily Radikal reported Wednesday.
The internal report, written in 2009, only recently found its way to the media. It said 15 firms that built power plants in the Black Sea province of Rize had been fined a total of 513,000 Turkish Liras for causing environmental damage....
Since last year's controversial elections in Iran, a large number of Iranian refugees -- many of them political activists -- have made their way across the border to Turkey. Although their lives are no longer in danger, these refugees are now finding themselves forced to deal with different hardships in Turkey. As The Times' Martin Fletcher reports:
Since the election in June last year more than 2300 Iranians have applied to the UN High Commission for Refugees for asylum in Turkey. Some are homosexuals or members of persecuted faiths but most are political and human rights activists, journalists, students, artists and ordinary Iranians goaded into action by the regime's denial of democracy.
The majority are young and single, some of the brightest and bravest of their generation, forced to flee secretly to avoid arrest at airports or border posts.
Turkey, which has diplomatic and economic relations with Iran, tolerates but hardly welcomes these dissidents. It denies them permanent refugee status and disperses them to 32 small cities around the country for the three years that it can take the UNHCR's overstretched officials to assess their asylum claims and find countries that will accept them.
The exiles, delivered from the terror of Iran, find themselves caught in another kind of prison - unable to speak Turkish, forbidden from leaving their assigned cities, in effect barred from working or engaging in political activity, and with no means of support beyond the little money they brought with them.
They must pay a $US200 resident fee that few can afford and report to the police twice weekly. They live in the worst housing, sometimes sleeping several to a room. A few work illegally but earn less than $US10 a day.
Buuz, the Mongolian national dumpling, from start to finish
Tbilisi-based Uta Beyer, a previous source of great culinary information and images for this blog, recently returned from a trip to Mongolia with the lowdown on buuz, the Mongolian national dumpling. Here's what she had to say:
Here's the story of buuz, the Mongolian steamed dumpling, one of the national meals of the Mongolians.
The philosophy of buuz starts with the meat, mutton or beef. Real buuz meat is not available at your local supermarket, ready packed and industrially minced; no. In 30 degrees Celsius and an orchestra of smells and flies, this meat has to be purchased at the local market – in the case of the photos here, the one in Mongolia's former capital Kharkhorin.
The minced meat then is salted and flavored with onion and/or garlic, and maybe other seasonal herbs. Cabbage or rice may be added. The meat is placed inside some dough (flour and water) and folded. Then, the buuz is steamed for about 20 minutes, on a stove in the middle of the kitchen yurt.
Buuz is eaten with pickled cabbage salad or pickled cucumbers. It is the traditional meal of the Mongolians during White Moon (Tsagaan Sar), the Mongolian lunisolar New Year festival (February 14 in 2010). During White Moon, thousands of buuz are prepared in advance in family homes and are deep-frozen. Buuz are eaten by hand. They are closely related to mandu in Korean cuisine (brought to Korea by the Mongols), they are similar to pelmeni and pierogi in some Slavic cultures and the name is a cognate to the names of similar types of meat-filled dumplings such as Kazakh, Uzbek and Turkish manti.
"The Wine Economist" is a wonderful blog written by a Canadian political economist who is currently working on a book that looks at how globalization will impact the future of wine. In a recent post, the blog featured a report on the fairly dismal (surprise, surprise) wine drinking scene in Kabul. From the report:
In Kabul, if you know the right people you can have them use their security clearance to get wine, beer and spirits from one of the military bases or the UN. Unfortunately, I have not been able to utilize such resources. My wine supply comes through slightly less direct channels and is only available at night when the streets of Kabul are sufficiently dark.
Afghanistan is an Islamic country but is also home to thousands of foreign workers who very much enjoy winding down the evening with some type of alcoholic beverage. The legal technicalities with respect to alcohol are consequently rather vague. At times, the Afghan National Police Force sweeps through the restaurants frequented by foreigners in Kabul and seizes their supply of alcohol. These “raids” only happen every once in a while and it is largely assumed that they are simply a way of maintaining a supply for their own consumption. At other times, it seems to be legal for alcohol to be consumed by foreigners but not by Afghans. For this reason, my Afghan coworkers from my day job at an NGO are hesitant to join me at the bar I manage at night.
I missed the RFE/RL article when it first came out last month, but it's topic -- Turkey's growing influence in the Balkans -- makes it worth revisiting. As the article makes clear, while a lot of attention is being paid to Turkey's moves in the Middle East, it has been no less active in the Balkans, where Ankara is working to increase its influence by capitalizing on its Ottoman roots in the region. From the piece by Anes Alic:
Over the past two years, Turkey has launched a massive
political, social, and economic offensive across the Balkans, focusing
primarily on Bosnia-Herzegovina. More than two decades after Turkey first formally applied to
join the European Union, it now appears to be developing a two-pronged
strategy: turning its attentions to its eastern neighbors (notably Syria, Iran
and Russia), while at the same time seeking to enhance its prospects for EU
membership by intensifying its influence in the Balkan countries, which are
growing closer to Europe. Turkey's ambitions in the Balkans have forced the EU to pay
more attention to political processes in the region, where Russia and the
United States are also vying for influence. After Romania and Bulgaria joined
the EU in 2007, Brussels slowed down the membership process for the countries
of the western Balkans on the assumption that doing so would have no real
effects as those countries, surrounded by other NATO and EU member states, had
no alternative but to move toward Europe.
Clashes between Turkish security forces and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) are up and Turkey again seems to be confronting the question of how to solve the decades-old Kurdish problem.
