The annual report of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), released this week, contained some fairly bad news for Turkey. The commission, a bipartisan federal watchdog that monitors religious freedom around the world, this year put Turkey on its list of "countries of particular concern" (CPC). That puts the NATO member, European-Union aspirant and stalwart NATO ally in the company of repressive countries such as Burma, Iran, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, and Uzbekistan, a "who's who of dictatorships and closed societies," as one report put it. “It’s no coincidence that many of the nations we recommend to be designated as CPCs are among the most dangerous and destabilizing places on earth,” USCIRF Chair Leonard Leo said in a statement. “Nations that trample upon basic rights, including freedom of religion, provide fertile ground for poverty and insecurity, war and terror, and violent, radical movements and activities.”
Needless to say, Turkish officials were not pleased with the USCIRF's downgrade (Turkey was previously on the commission's less damning "watch list"). Reports the Washington Post:
Turkey’s ambassador in Washington decried the decision.
“Any unbiased eye will immediately realize that that’s not where Turkey belongs in the USCIRF annual report,” said Ambassador Namik Tan.
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.
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.”
Rather than as an investment opportunity, Turkey's currency used to best known for the number of zeros that could be found on lira bills, with the most common denomination note being 1,000,000. Even today, some seven years after the government introduced a "new" lira that did away with all the zeroes, it's not hard to find Turkish shopkeepers who occasionally still give prices in the millions.
Today's lira is a different beast. Turkey, having tamed the hyperinflation that created all those zeros in the first place, now has one of the world's fastest-growing economies and a currency that has earned some respect and, as of today, a new symbol to help it distinguish itself globally. From a report in Today's Zaman:
The Central Bank of Turkey unveiled a currency sign for Turkish lira, reflecting the government's ambitions to further strengthen the lira as a global currency and to boost the country's standing as a major international actor.
The symbol is a double-crossed "L," shaped like an anchor. The anchor shape hopes to convey that the currency is a "safe harbor" while the upward facing lines represent its rising prestige, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said at a ceremony at the Central Bank unveiling the symbol.
Turkey faces numerous domestic challenges, but reforming the country's out-of-date education system is without a doubt one of the most significant ones. No matter how you slice it, Turkey's performance in the field of education leaves much to be desired. Guven Sak, a columnist for the Hurriyet Daily News and head of the Ankara-based Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey (TEPAV), laid out Turkey's education woes in a recent piece:
Let me split the problem into three components. First, Turkey has a young population. The average age is still around 28.5. That is a good thing. With that much potential, Turkey’s European convergence should have been through education and training. Neither the European Union nor our government had the wisdom to design the process accordingly. Secondly, our population has only 6.5 years of schooling on average. Turkey has the youngest population with the poorest education performance among the top 20 economies in the world. That bodes ill for our future. We have a population of middle school dropouts. On top of that, OECD PISA tests show that our students’ academic skills leave much to be desired. Our kids are among the worst around the block, which any decent economist will tell you puts us straight into the middle income trap. Thirdly, Turkey’s female labor force participation ratio is the lowest, even among Muslim majority countries. Only one among four women participates in the workforce. Why? Because of low educational attainment.
Tasoluk, a development on the outskirts of Istanbul
The subject of Istanbul and its booming growth appears to be in the air these days. In a recent report, National Public Radio's Peter Kenyon takes a look at how Istanbul's fast-paced development is leading to a clash between old and new and also forcing residents of older, more run-down neighborhood out of their homes.
Meanwhile, in a report for the Atlantic's website, writer David Lepska asks how Istanbul has managed to become one of Europe's safest cities despite its becoming one of the world's largest cities? From Lepska's piece:
In terms of policing, Turkey's vast cosmopolis offers lessons for the developing megacities of today, places like Dubai and Jakarta, Nairobi and Cairo. Istanbul has in recent decades been undergoing a rapid transformation, as urban expansion and modernization remake previously dilapidated and marginalized neighborhoods into welcoming retail and residential districts, often pushing the less advantaged to outlying areas. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a former Istanbul mayor, envisions the city as a global hub and world financial center.
It's already one of the safer major international cities, for which Zarinebaf cites layers of law enforcement. Policing principles are drawn from the military. Training and education is essential – 85 percent of Turkish police have undergraduate degrees.
The city sets up police checkpoints at night to monitor movement. An integrated surveillance system connects hundreds of CCTV cameras to thousands of squad cars and scores of mobile stations, keeping an eye on most public areas.
For the people living in the predominately-Kurdish southeast region of Turkey, the fact that their region is dotted with the mass graves of victims of the political violence that haunted the area in the 1980's and 90's has long been an open secret, although one that few talked about in public. That changed several years ago, especially because of the high-profile Ergenekon case -- an investigation into an alleged ultara-nationalist plot to topple the government -- which, despite its flaws, has managed to land some formerly untouchable military and political figures in jail and shed some light on dirty deeds committed by the Turkish state.
Emboldened by the Ergenekon case and other efforts to root out Turkey's "Deep State," Kurdish activists in the southeast have started to make more forceful demands for these suspected mass grave sites to be excavated, part of an effort to determine the fate of the several thousand Kurds who went missing during the 80's and 90's during the fight between the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and security forces.The Diyarbakir branch of the Turkish Human Rights Association, for example, has published on its website an interactive map of suspected mass grave sites. Also in Diyarbakir, a recent petition made by relatives of several missing person has led to a court-ordered excavation that so far has revealed the remains of some 23 people. From a report on the Bianet website:
Despite threats to punish France for its parliament's recent passing of a bill that would make it a crime to deny that the mass killing of Armenians by the Ottoman state in 1915 was a genocide, Ankara for now is holding back on hitting the French with any sanctions. But things appear to be a bit different in the culinary realm. As the Financial Times reports, while the Turkish government might be taking a more patient approach, some Turks are talking about boycotting Sodexo, a French company that is responsible for managing a large program that allows Turkish companies to provide their employees with lunch, either in-house or by going out using chits. From the FT:
Turkey is talking of boycotts in its increasingly bitter dispute with France.
At the centre of attention: Sodexo, the French food company now the target of Istanbul restaurateurs who say revenue from $2bn’s worth of Turkish meals is at stake....
....“We will carry out a boycott against the people who are trying to blacken the name of Turkey for political reasons in France,” declared Sait Karabagli, the [Chamber of Istanbul Restaurant Owners] chairman, announcing steps he said would hit not just Sodexo but also Ticket and Multinet, two other French-owned food groups. “We and our 13,500 members have decided to say enough to the French companies,” he added.
Karabagli reckons $150m is at stake in the boycott he is proposing – part of the reason for his action in the first place. He claimed the French companies were exploiting Turkish restaurants by imposing an eight per cent commission on $2bn or so or receipts – and also asked for help for the Turkish state to get the commission come down.
With a decision today to give life in prison for one of the several suspects in the 2007 murder of Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink, an Istanbul court brought the drawn-out and controversial case to a close, but offered little closure to Dink's family and supporters and found itself facing strong criticism over its verdict.
Dink, the outspoken editor of the Armenian-Turkish weekly Agos newspaper, was gunned down in front of the paper's Istanbul offices on Jan. 20, 2007. His assassin, a 17-year-old named Ogun Samast, was sentenced (as a minor) to 22 years in jail in July. But the sentencing of Samast still left open the question of what role did the 19 other people arrested in the case play in the murder and, more importantly, what was the involvement of certain elements of the police and other state bodies in the killing?
Today's verdict did little to answer those questions. Despite fairly strong evidence indicating there was an organized plot with links to the police, all 19 were acquitted of being part of a conspiracy (or a "terrorist organization," as the indictment put it) to kill Dink and only one of them convicted for instigating the murder. As the New York Times reports, the verdict was swiftly criticized by Dink's lawyers and other observers:
Gokceada (also known as Imroz) is a large Turkish island in the northern Aegean that, until recent decades, was predominantly Greek. Although it was not part of the 1923 population exchange between Turkey and Greece, Gokceada's Greek population has dwindled to almost nothing as its original residents left due to a combination of political, economic and social factors.
In recent years, Greek life on the island -- the birthplace of Bartholomew I, the current Orthodox Patriarch -- has seen something of a small revival, thanks mostly to the presence of former residents who have returned to the island to retire or spend their summers. But the island's Greek community has now received an interesting boost from the Turkish government, which has given permission for a Greek primary to be reopened on the island. From a Cihan news service report:
The Ministry of Education has given permission to the Greek community to open a primary school on Gökçeada (Imbros), an island in the Aegean Sea off the coast of Çanakkale province.
Laki Vingas, elected representative of non-Muslim foundations at the Council of the General Assembly of the Directorate General for Foundations (VGM), was quoted in the Milliyet daily on Thursday as saying that the ministry gave permission verbally and that the Greeks of Gökçeada can start the process of opening a Greek school on the island.
Turkey's Greek schools are on the verge of closure because the Greek community's population is close to the point of extinction. There are estimated to be only 180-200 Turkish citizens of Greek origin on Gökçeada, and the number of Greek students expected to attend a Greek school on the island is expected to be low. But Vingas said that even if there are 10 students, the initiative would be important because it gives hopes for the future of the Greek community in Turkey.
