Anatolian Dispatches
Posts from across the Bosporus. The Republic of Turkey is turning its attention eastwards and proving itself a heavyweight in the Middle East arena. ‘Anatolian Dispatches’ sets the compass to the new Turkish orientation.
on :
Thursday, 16 May, 2013
On May 11, two powerful car bombs ripped through the Turkish town of Reyhanlı on the Syrian border, killing at least 51 people. This was not only the worst cross-border spillover of the Syrian conflict to date—it was also the deadliest terror attack in Turkey’s recent history.
But if you were watching Turkish television or reading the national papers the next day, you could be forgiven for thinking that nothing had happened in Reyhanlı. Dominating the airwaves instead were the seas...
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on :
Monday, 13 May, 2013
“For years, I have told my foreign friends that there is no such issue as the Armenian question,” confided a Turkish businessman in his fifties. “Now, I feel cheated,” he said in a private conversation we had recently.
His sense of feeling duped over the facts of what happened to the Armenian community in the last days of the Ottoman Empire is not shared by the majority in Turkey. However, the number of Turkish people who are becoming aware that they were not told the truth is growing...
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Wednesday, 1 May, 2013
Recent comments from the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Öcalan puzzled groups that have long been allied with his party. In a letter that was read out to crowd...
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on :
Monday, 22 Apr, 2013
önlük [EARN-look] n. apron, uniform
If somebody asked me to choose a single sound that summed up my childhood summer holidays, I would probably pick the tune played by the...
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on :
Saturday, 13 Apr, 2013
Imagine yourself catching a taxi in Paris or London. On discovering you are a tourist, the driver may—or likely will not—inquire after your opinion of the city. This is sma...
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on :
Tuesday, 2 Apr, 2013
It is only a fish restaurant, but Memet gasps with surprise when he sees it. “I’ve never seen this in Diyarbakır before,” he says. “The sign is written in Kurdish.” ...
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Thursday, 28 Mar, 2013
“There is peace between Israel and some Arab countries, but it is a cold one. The exchange in tourism is not that significant. This has not been the case between Turkey and I...
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Monday, 18 Feb, 2013
My career as a diplomatic reporter began just a couple of months before the start of the First Gulf War. It was then that the sentence “maintaining the territorial integrity ...
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Saturday, 9 Feb, 2013
It seemed as though Turkey’s boisterous prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, had finally lost his patience with the state of affairs in Syria, when he snapped at a recent p...
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on :
Thursday, 10 Jan, 2013
A welcome new opportunity has opened up to settle the thirty-year conflict between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). After eighteen months of bitter c...
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