At a rundown football stadium in Istanbul, Nigerian team members huddled together to say a prayer as they prepared to take on Cameroon. A star-and-crescent Turkish flag fluttered above them in the late afternoon breeze, a couple of hundred African fans were in the stands and, outside, a group of curious Turks looked on as the city’s own version of the Africa Cup of Nations got under way.
Corruption allegations in US diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks have generated some hot rhetoric from Turkey’s leaders. But with no genuine bombshell contained in dispatches released so far, it may simply be business as usual in Turkish politics.
Speaking in his apartment in a suburb of Diyarbakir, in southeastern Turkey, Solin and his colleague Koya are so scared of being identified that they will not allow even an obscured photograph of themselves to be published. Nor do they want their real names to be known.
On the picturesque island of Buyukada in the Marmara Sea about an hour’s ferry ride from Istanbul, tourists climb a steep track through pine trees to peer through locked gates at the decaying remains of an old Greek orphanage.
