Stories From Turkey

Ahval journalist John Lubbock talks to Ryan Gingeras, author of the book 'Heroin, organized crime and the making of modern Turkey' about the recent release of mafia boss Alaattin Çakıcı.

EUME fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin, Yektan Türkyılmaz, discusses the Idlib attack, in which 36 Turkish troops were killed with AhvalPod and suggests that the Erdoğan’s government is turning into a war regime with its current foreign policy vision.

Turkey and its allies are facing a difficult situation in the northwestern Syrian town of Idlib, particularly after the forces of Syrian President Bashar Assad seized the control of Saraqib in eastern Idlib countryside this week, said Timur Göksel, former spokesman for the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Lebanon.

Turkish human rights advocate Şebnem Korur Fincancı shared with Ahval her reflections on last week's United Nations periodic review of Turkey, which focused on the country's human rights violations including the use of torture.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had a tough 2019. He had to deal with rising food prices, losing local elections in his political strong hold of Istanbul, power that opposed his ambitions to build a safe zone in north Syria and even scientists who fail to understand the simplicity of calculating salinity levels of the sea.As the year ends, Hale Akay and Michael MacKenzie discuss the president’s last 12 months through his public remarks and try to understand why Erdoğan said what he did.

Birol Başkan, a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute whose research broadly focuses on religion and political order in the Middle East, spoke to Ahval about how Islamism has incorporated nationalism in Turkey and the characteristics of the country’s “religious market”.

Turkey has been proposing for years to establish a commission of historians to decide whether the mass killings of Armenians in 1915 by the Ottoman Empire should be defined as genocide. Turkish authorities also say that the country’s archives are open to researchers, accusing their counterparts in Armenia for failing to do the same.Yektan Türkyılmaz, a historian focusing on collective violence who has worked in both Turkish and Armenian archives, discussed the validity of such claims with Ahval.

Political scientist Umut Özkırımlı, the author of several books including “Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction”, discusses nationalism in Turkey in the wake of its military offensive in Syria.Özkırımlı, a visiting professor at Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals and Blanquerna - Universitat Ramon Llull, and a visiting researcher at Barcelona Center for International Studies, says in times of peace Turkey witnesses competing ideas of nationalism, but such differences dissolve when Turkey, ruled by a leader who plays the nationalism card skilfully, faces a crisis like the recent one in Syria.

Marco Ansaldo, the Istanbul-based senior correspondent for the Italian daily La Repubblica, shares with Ahval his impressions from his meeting with jailed author and journalist Ahmet Altan during Altan’s temporary release this month. The 69-year-old former editor-in-chief of the now defunct Taraf daily had been in jail since his arrest months after a failed coup attempt in 2016, which the Turkish government accuses a religious group led by the U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gülen of orchestrating. The prominent journalist and author was re-arrested a week after a court ruled that he should be released from prison during his retrial. Rights group Article 19 said that imprisoning Altan again shortly after releasing amounted to psychological torture.

Aykan Erdemir,  a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, former member of the Turkish parliament, Howard Eissenstat, associate professor of Middle East History at St. Lawrence University and senior non-resident fellow at the Project on Middle East Democracy, discusses possible scenarios for Turkey’s domestic and foreign policies when one day power changes hands.

A Turkish higher court this week ruled that the Chora Church in Istanbul, a 4th century Byzantine church which was converted into a mosque like many other churches when Ottoman forces captured the city in 1453, should be used in accordance with its function when it was transferred to Fatih Sultan Mehmet Foundation during the Ottoman period, that is, as a mosque.The move can also clear the way for converting the giant 6th century former cathedral, Hagia Sophia, into a mosque.Hercules Millas, a political scientist working on Turkish-Greek relations discusses the importance of those churches and the political symbolism behind the struggle of some Turks to reconvert those heritage sites into a mosque.

The history of censorship over obscenity in Turkey and the recent public outrage against books over allegations of encouraging’ child abuse - with academic Elizabeth Nolte.