Moreover, the Kurdish leadership must understand the power of Dr. Martin Luther King’s non-violent direct action. He eloquently expressed the logic in his letter from a Birmingham jail, “…Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.”

Read the full article here.

Reading from a prepared statement, group leader Mark Campbell pointed to Kurdish politicians “being arrested every single day”, imprisoned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Öcalan “held in isolation now for 60 days”, and spoke of a “full scale war being perpretrated against the Kurds in Turkey with over 450 bombing raids against Kurdish villages in the Kandil Mountains”. In closing, the group criticised international media for remaining silent on current events, calling their “silence the greatest enemy of the Kurds”.

A Guardian employee was on hand to film events, while editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger “respectfully” listened to their demands:

While Mahmoud Abbas and Benyamin Netanyahu traded speeches about Palestinian statehood on Friday, a diplomatic incident occurred on the fourth floor of the General Assembly Hall.

Sources tell Inner City Press that the Turkish delegation literally had a run-in with security in the UN, in which the Turkish prime minister Erdogan was touched. Then, a male security official was injured and taken to the hospital, another officer also assaulted and injured.

And while Matthew Lee, a.k.a. Inner City Press, was certainly the first to get the story out, it would be another three days before an official U.N. statement muttered vaguely about “unfortunate misunderstandings” now “satisfactorily resolved”. In long form, that meant Secretary General Ban Ki-moon had apologized to the Turkish PM, as well as suspending six to nine (depending on the source) of his own guards on full pay.

With little to glean from the U.N. spokesman’s ‘clarification’ of the incident on Monday, the New York Times dug deeper:

Mr. Erdogan was having a tête-à-tête with President Jalal Talabani of Iraq on the obscure fourth floor of the General Assembly hall — tiny meeting spaces have been tucked into every nook and cranny because the Secretariat Building is gutted for renovations.

Learning that the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, was making his address demanding full United Nations membership for a state of Palestine, Mr. Erdogan, a big fan, rushed to the nearest entrance to take Turkey’s seat on the main floor.

But the fourth floor is actually the visitors’ gallery, with no access to the main floor, and it was packed. So a United Nations security guard refused to let the Turkish leader pass. When Mr. Erdogan pressed forward, the guard pushed him (by most accounts), and then a fracas erupted that was audible four flours below.

One United Nations guard was taken to the hospital with a rib injury, and there were reports of bloodstains on the floor, although that could not be confirmed.

On the same day, 26 Sept., Inner City Press updated its own scoop, apparently confirming the unconfirmable:

A scuffled ensued, with Officer Matthew Sullivan being injured in the ribs, and according to sources a female Jamaican officer being injured in the face.

“They called a Code Thirteen, calling all officers available,” a source told Inner City Press. “I saw my colleagues on the ground, with blood on the floor. They didn’t let us approach.”

By Tuesday, the story opened a fraction more, with the Wall Street Journal reporting even more clashes between the PM’s men and U.N. security. Again, what exactly went down is thin on details but according to the WSJ, “fights erupted on three separate floors” of the U.N. building. Aside from the main brawl, “the second incident took place after Mr. Abbas’ speech as Mr. Erdogan was trying to congratulate him,” and “the third incident occurred as both Mr. Abbas and Mr. Erdogan were getting into their cars at the Delegate’s exit”. But wait, there’s more:

[U.N. officials] added that there had been two earlier violent incidents last week between Mr. Erdogan’s guards and U.N. uniformed personnel. Last Monday, a U.N. lieutenant was shoved on U.N. grounds and during the week a Turkish diplomatic vehicle entered U.N. premises without prior notification to U.N. security, the officials said.

All in all, that should be just about enough context to bring you the video, slipped out today (the 29th) courtesy of Associated Press:

… which begs one more question: Why is the guy loaded with cameras at the end of this video not shooting anything? Call yourself a photographer?

]]> http://istanbuldespatch.com/2011/09/29/turks-kick-ass-at-u-n-literally/feed/ 0 colellajim http://istanbuldespatch.com/2011/09/25/how-to-stop-football-hooliganism-ban-men/ http://istanbuldespatch.com/2011/09/25/how-to-stop-football-hooliganism-ban-men/#comments Sun, 25 Sep 2011 16:53:21 +0000 Jim Colella http://istanbuldespatch.com/?p=2451 ]]> SEGREGATION OF THE SEXES is alive and well in 21st century Turkey, with a refreshing twist. In the age-old problem of punishing a team’s fans for running riot during a game, the Turkish Football Federation have turned the tables. Instead of meting out the usual punishment of forcing the team to play behind closed doors (and so, to a ticketless empty stadium), this time only the men were locked out while women and children got in. And all for free. With over 41,000 women and children under 13 pouring into Fenerbahçe’s Şükrü Saracoğlu Stadium on Tuesday, 20 Sept., it was billed as a world first for football. This report from the UK’s Channel 4 News knows the score:

UPDATE [Guardian, 30 Sept. 2011] : Fenerbahçe to set up women-only spectators’ area

… And as much as I admire Şafak & her work (she really is a “huge deal” in Turkey), her defence that it’s all an attempt to ‘wear her down’ sounds a little too “TSK” (read: Turkish Armed Forces). The real nut here, though, is Fikir Mahsulleri Ofisi’s response to Şafak’s:

As for plagiarism, when it is held up with concrete information, it is a serious claim that must be responded to with a cool head. It’s a criticism. Since this isn’t something that is well-known in Turkey let me spell it out again so that it’s well understood: CRITICISM.

For a blow by blow account replete with timeline, dodgy translations, and Elif Şafak crying “Enough already!” follow here.

According to the Radikal report, headlined “It’s okay if the prime minister says it, but a crime if Barış says it”,^[1] university student Barış Ünver somehow caught Erdoğan’s eye — and so his lawyers’ — for daring to state an opinion in the run up to last year’s constitutional referendum on 12 September.

While on the campaign trail for a Yes Vote to amendments to the 1982 military-backed constitution,^[2] Erdoğan had stated that all of the differing opposition parties were aligned against the reforms, with a rather poignant dig at the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) being in a “soul threesome with the terrorist organisation”.^[3] In terms of Turkish political rhetoric that meant — by favoring a No Vote — the CHP and the MHP were no different from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

As a retort, the 22-year-old blogger invoked last year’s so-called Kurdish Intiative by Erdoğan’s government, alluding to reported secret talks with the imprisoned leader of the PKK, Abdullah Öcalan. Playing on the PM’s words and charging Erdoğan with the very same, Ünver titled his post on his beyn.org blog, “Soulmates with Öcalan”.^[4]

In addition, according to Radikal, the student illustrated his blog post with an adapted logo of Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) “made similar” to the PKK flag.

With the ‘crime’ identified, Ankara Public Prosecutor Osman Atalay duly opened a case against Barış Ünver at the local criminal court of peace, asking for a two-year prison sentence. Furthermore, Radikal stated that indictment also called for the student to be charged under Article 53 of the Turkish Penal Code, whereby Ünver could, among other punishments, lose his right to vote.^[5]

Understandably, the youth balked at the charges and has since pulled the offending piece from his blog. In his affidavit to the prosecutor, Ünver said he had not intended to attack or insult the prime minister. His aim, he stated, was just to criticize and he didn’t think he had used words that were insulting.

In the customary statement accompanying any litigation, the 56-year-old prime minister argued that these “were insults, extremely heavy and difficult to bear.”

Despite the busy start to the year for the PM’s legal counsel, they are certainly no stranger to alleviating the democratically elected leader’s burden. “He has sued more journalists than any previous leader,” wrote Time magazine recently, whereas six years ago, during his first term of office, UK paper The Guardian referred to Erdoğan as a “zealous litigant on matters of free speech“. Indeed, Asia Times Online put the toll of defamation cases against Turkish journalists at 71 between 2003 and 2006, with the prime minister winning over half of them as well as 254,000 Turkish lira (approx. UK£99,200 or US$160,600). He also earned himself into the bargain the tag “damages-rich” from a much-scolded Turkish press.

While the latest round of litigation against Ahmet Altan — prominent Turkish author and chief editor of the hard-hitting liberal paper Taraf^[6] — has caught many by surprise,^[7] the latest overreach into the depths of the Turkish blogosphere signifies an even more disturbing twist.

For one, the trend in Turkey when it comes to free speech on the Internet — and this is no defence of the situation — is to block the site in question, no further questions asked. The OSCE report on Turkey and Internet Censorship released early last year concluded that “in the majority of cases, no further prosecutions seem to take place with regard to the authors of such publications or owners of such websites.” In 2010, the OSCE report put the number of blocked websites in Turkey at a shocking 3,700. Now, one year on, the number of the effectively silenced has reached an epic 8,547^[8] — that’s a jump of nearly five thousand in a year — with little in the way of chasing the alleged perpetrators through the courts.

So if quietly silencing young Barış wasn’t an option, what gives? Apart from a comparatively limited and rather youthful audience, who of any political import even cared that Barış Ünver’s blog was there? The post in question was hardly creating a political storm.

It’s a far cry from a lively but bipartisan Turkish press adorning the newsstands — either fervently pro-AKP or viciously against (with Taraf mostly in the former camp, erring on the side of democratic reform)^[9] — with their circulation figures pointing to a natural voter base of one political stripe or another. If, that is, there was ever a method in Erdoğan’s increasingly authoritarian madness. For this Turkey-based blogger at least, it points to a new front being opened up in the PM’s shameless attempts to manage his image. In short, you need a search engine. And then you need to key in the terms you are searching for.

As Barış Ünver put it in his statement to the public prosecutor, his article should be taken with the level of acceptance of freedom of thought and of expression to be found in democratic systems.

Contrast that with the jailing of a young, popular mayor of Istanbul some 13 years ago. The then 43-year-old mayor’s ‘crime’ was to have read a poem at a public gathering. Facing a possible three years in jail, the mayor said in his testimony that “the words he spoke were from a poem and were aimed at ‘no person or target‘”. Nonetheless, it didn’t wash in this pre-AKP, pre-EU candidate country of 1998.^[10] The mayor, one Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was handed down a 10-month prison sentence. He got out in four, but you’d think he’d know better, wouldn’t you.

He may talk the talk of a European prime minister, but he’s walking like an Egyptian president.

***

Footnotes:

1. ^ In Turkish: “Başbakan söylerse serbest, Barış söylerse suç” — Although serbest means free or unrestrained, okay makes for a better news headline in English, without losing the meaning.

2. ^ The date of the referendum, 12 Sept. 2010, was symbolic in that it was 30 years since the last direct military coup (there were 4 military interventions in total: 1960 and 1980 by force; 1971 and 1997 by issuing a ‘memorandum’). The present Turkish Constitution was drawn up under the military junta that ruled Turkey from 1980 – 83, and voted on by public referendum in ’82. Campaigning against the referendum was made illegal by the then-president, General Kenan Evren (source: Pope, Nicole & Hugh. Turkey Unveiled: Atatürk and After. London: John Murray, 1997). For a general round-up of the 2010 amendments, check the BBC Q&A here.

3. ^ In Turkish, Erdoğan’s full quote reads: “PKK, BDP, MHP, CHP, YARSAV hepsi aynı cephede, hiçbiri evet demiyor. CHP, MHP terör örgütüyle ruh üçüzü oldu.” The 1st sentence also points the finger at the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) and the Judges and Prosecutors Association (YARSAV) as being against the reforms. But in the 2nd sentence Erdoğan specifically singles out the CHP and the MHP as being in a ‘soul threesome’ (i.e., soulmates) with the ‘terrorist organization’, the PKK — a particular anathema to the Kemalist CHP, and the ultra-nationalist MHP. Like the Radikal headline says, it’s okay for the PM to ‘insult’ the opposition…

4. ^ In Turkish: “Öcalan’la ruh ikizi”. See also note 3.

5. ^ Radikal lists all the punishments as not being able to take up state duties or be a civil servant, and lose the right to vote or to be elected. To be fair, Article 53 states that this disqualification of certain rights (and there are more than Radikal lists) is only applied while the accused is imprisoned, or for a set period if a fine is imposed instead. However, there are extenuating circumstances whereby the court can apply or increase the period of this disqualification. The Radikal article implies he will lose these rights for life.

6. ^ Turkey’s own WikiLeaks-on-paper. It’s strapline reads: “To think is to take sides” (Taraf means side in English). A series of scoops revealing plans from within the Turkish Armed Forces to overthrow the AKP government have left the rest of the press pack standing since its inception in 2007. Bulging files and data CDs leaked by disaffected officers within the military have also gone onto kick start unprecedented court trials for senior ranking officers, most notably the ‘Sledgehammer’ plot revealed in Jan. 2010.

7. ^ Some columnists on pro-AKP English-language daily Today’s Zaman are finding it hard to reconcile their support for the PM with their respect for Ahmet Altan (see: Freedom of expression, the prime minister, and the silencing of writer Ahmet Altan (1) & (2) by Orhan Kemal Cengiz). Rather ironically, the paper also named Altan ‘Person of the Year 2010′ (see: Ahmet Altan: taboo-breaking journalist).

8. ^ Accurate at time of writing — but it’s sure to rise. In Internet: Restricted Accessby Yaman Akdeniz and Kerem Altıparmak (pub. Nov. 2008), the authors listed the number of bocked sites at 1,115. They also credited engelliweb.com with identifying 63% of the 1,115 blocked sites. On that basis, the current figure of 8,547 is only two-thirds of the true picture. It could be even higher.

9. ^ With much of the paper’s coverage revealing plots from within the military to unseat the AKP government (see note 6), Taraf’s critics have accused it of being funded by everyone from the AKP themselves, to exiled Islamic leader Fetullah Gülen, to George Soros, and even the CIA (see: Eye of the storm by Suzy Hansen). However, even before the current fallout between the editor and the PM, there was at least one front page in 2008 calling the PM the military chief’s lapdog.

10. ^ The AKP was formed in 2001, and won an outright majority to form a single party government in 2002. In Dec. 2004, the European Union agreed to start accession negotiations with Turkey.

“We like WordPress. We use WordPress. We support WordPress. We wouldn’t want to hurt the Automattic, Inc. guys, or their users and customers. And that is why we set up WordPrexy.com, because we don’t want WordPress to get hurt by our crooked legal system. If WordPress gets back online in Turkey, we’re out.”

With the last line saying it all for me, I’m confident that their intentions are in the right place. Their disclaimer explains the techy bit:

“WordPrexy is a WordPress-specific proxy server. It only mirrors the content; it does neither copy nor host any of the actual content found on WordPress.com. WordPrexy.com is not responsible from the material and content found in it’s sites and cannot be held liable for them.”

…and as they stress at the top of their page, “plagiarism is NOT what we do at WordPrexy.com.” So as an easier means of checking WP blogs in Turkey rather than firing up painfully slow and possibly illegal software, or the even more cumbersome finding of alternative IP addresses to punch into the preferences of your browser, I’d give it the thumbs up for its guerilla attitude and as a temporary solution.

There did appear to be a lot of angry debate below their explanation page on the sticking point of having AdSense ads on their site — which many disagreed with being present alongside the non-profit making clause of the Creative Commons license inherent in WP blogs — but with WP boss Matt weighing into the debate somewhere down the page, the Ads have since been removed.

I hasten to add though, for WP bloggers in Turkey, you cannot log in to the dashboard through this method. I’ve tried. (Which is probably best, my technical intuition tells me.) So its purely for reading and posting comments to a WP blog. That said, I have only one remaining nagging doubt. Does a comment posted to the “wordprexy” version appear on the “wordpress” version? I’m sure it does, but I’ll test it below anyway.

Any WP bloggers anywhere at odds with this method can contact the GFOT guys to have their specific blog removed from the “wordprexy” list. The contact link is on their explanation page, “What we are, and what we are not.”

During the previous incident, the “insulting” videos were soon removed and YouTube became available to the Turkish public again. This time around YouTube have said in a written statement that they are “ready to cooperate with Turkish authorities to resolve the dispute,” according to the state-run Anatolia news agency.

“Cooperate? More like, get threatened into self-censorship,” comments MidEast Youth in their analysis, contrasting YouTube’s eagerness to please the authorities with the ongoing block of popular blog domain WordPress, who have refused to remove any content. The now one-month-old block of the world’s fourth largest blogging network — effectively censoring 20 thousand plus Turkish bloggers — stems from a private libel lawsuit by controversial Islamic creationist Adnan Oktar, often referred to as “Adnan Hodja” in countless Turkish headlines.

In a recent interview, the network’s 23-year-old founder, Matt Mullenweg, stated that he would “never limit Turkish bloggers’ freedom of speech.” The defiant stance has drawn praise from Western commentators posting on his personal blog, but Turkey-based bloggers have remained more critical in the absence of a legal challenge to the deadlock.

An English translation* of the Matt Mullenweg interview on turk.internet.com, by Fusun S. Nebil (first published in Turkish on Aug. 28, 2007) appears below.

turk.internet.com.: Could you give us some brief information about WordPress?

Matt Mullenweg: WordPress.com has started to get a lot of attention recently. It gets 72 million visitors to its blogs every month. The number of page views it has per month is 300 million. Its content varies, everything ranging from CNN coverage of the American presidential election to humorous sites about cats, such as www.icanhascheezburger.com.

t.i.c.: We know you also have Turkish bloggers. Could you tell us about them?

M.M.: We’ve got 20 to 30 thousand Turkish bloggers. Before our site was blocked, we had 12 million page views per month for the Turkish blogs. At the moment, and if the block continues, we have 250 thousand views per month.

t.i.c.: What do you think of this block?

M.M.: I think it’s very sad. Maybe US laws are different from Turkish ones, but each WordPress.com blog has its own domain. For that reason, instead of the whole site they could’ve blocked the ones relating to that law. Now they have done this, thousands of innocent bloggers are silenced as well.

t.i.c.: Are you thinking of doing anything to challenge this?

M.M.: We aren’t thinking of what we are going to do, but what we are not going to do. We are never going to limit our Turkish bloggers’ freedom of speech.

t.i.c.: And one last question. What do you think on the future of Web 2.0?

M.M.: Blogs have just started becoming popular. Especially in European and Asian countries, where every month page views are doubling. I think no free person would deny the importance of blogs.

t.i.c. Note: WordPress.com continues to be blocked because the company has no lawyers or representatives in Turkey. Due to this, there are no plans to challenge the ban as there is no one to appeal against the court ruling.

* Translation by İstanbul Despatch

Those familiar with the original WP blocked in Turkey story will know that the court order stems from the an attempt to close down a number of WP blogs “slandering” the controversial Islamic creationist. But, instead, the entire network of the fourth largest blogging platform in the world has been suspended on Turkish soil. So is there any slanderous/defaming/libellious material to be found when scouring CNN’s Political Ticker? Well, considering that the whole blog is decicated, more or less, to covering the US 2008 Presidential campaign you’d think you’d be hard-pushed to find something wouldn’t you? But not wanting to discredit the Turkish legal system’s objectivity outright without further investigation, I did a thorough “find on this page” word search for the words “Adnan” and “Oktar.” Not surprisingly my probe yielded no results. Still, with a cigarette-rolling-paper-thin hope that the Turkish legal system could not be that blind, I extended the probe to include the pen-name of the self-described (on his own Web site) “prominent Turkish intellectual,” who is “[c]ompletely devoted to moral values and dedicated to communicating the sacred values he cherishes to other people,” namely “Harun Yahya.” The thorough 30-second probe is now officially closed, and the paper-thin faith totally burnt. It seems that Hillary, Obama, Rudy and the rest of the US presidential hopefuls couldn’t find a single thing to say on the man on every Turkish WP blogger’s lips (often preceded by expletives).

Likewise, another similar search on the photo-sharing Flickr Blog on the two alternative names — or any combination thereof, as Oktar’s lawyers’ demanded from WP in their initial letter explaining why the WP network was now blocked — revealed, equally, not a single pic. (Viewers still keen to see his visage can easily check his own Web site — even in Turkey.)

However, there does seem to be apparent negligence on the part of both CNN Political Ticker and Flickr Blog. The evidence can clearly be found at the foot of the page: “Powered by WordPress.”*

Some enlightenment on the issue, perhaps, can be found on WP founder Matt Mullenweg’s personal site, Photo Matt. In his latest Turkey update, whereby the lawyers for Oktar seemingly rub the Internet community’s face in it (see “WordPress block: Oktar lawyers issue ‘threat’ to Internet“), one Turkish commenter wrote:

“Istanbul is [the] last stop for old judges before retirement. They’re all too old (to rock and roll and) to learn web technologies. They’re also too busy to research for [these] kind of ‘childish’ issues. That means, if someone requests a domain blocking to any Istanbul court, [the] judge (probably) thinks: ‘There may be [no] risk for society (or for my carr[e]er [in its] last minutes), let me block now, some other one [can] fix it anyhow’.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Whilst it is apparent that the above piece appears quite mocking in tone, the author has reassured us of its authenticity. In fact, the source for the above (available in Turkey) can be reached here, on Photo Matt’s Turkey Update, whereby a commenter stated that the “CNN Political Blog” (sic) was also blocked. It was duly checked from within the borders of Turkey and found to be correct. The author, one Jim Colella, wishes it to be known that he is still capable of objective journalism, although the current and very apparent “ridiculousness of this affair,” as he put it, is making this noble aspect of his work increasingly difficult. He is currently seeking refuge in the WC — “one of the few outlets for expression not blocked in Turkey,” he said.

* For the real and technical explanation of why CNN and Flickr are also caught in the block on WP in Turkey, see Bulent’s very useful comments below this post. In short, their alias URLs are sub-domains on WordPress.com