Are Turkey's strained relations with the European Union, which it still hopes to join, starting to spill over into other international organizations? That seems to be the case after a diplomatic spat has developed between Turkey and Austria over the selection of a new head for the Organizations for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). From the Austrian Independent:
The Turkish government decided at the weekend to veto Ursula Plassnik’s application for the position as secretary-general of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The former Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) foreign minister said earlier this year she wanted to take over from Marc Perrin de Brichambaut. The French diplomat’s term ends on 30 June.
Turkey argued that the ÖVP MP "does not accept" the country’s European identity. The Austrian was harshly criticised by Turkey during her term as federal foreign minister between 2004 and 2008 due to her opposition to the country’s bid to join the European Union (EU). Austria became a member of the EU in 1995. Turkey has held talks with European leaders about an accession since the 1960s.
ÖVP Foreign Minister Michael Spindelegger said today (Mon) Turkey’s veto was "totally incomprehensible and baseless."
The minister warned Austria will consider very carefully which stand to take on Turkish regards of international meaning from now due to the country’s decision to speak out against Plassnik’s application.
Full details here. And more from Today's Zaman here.
Is that zombie of energy politics, the Nabucco gas pipeline, coming back to life once again? Of course, for every "Nabucco's comes back to life" story there's the corresponding "final nail in Nabucco's coffin" story, but a recent agreement to be signed in Turkey offers some hope for the pipeline's boosters. From a report in New Europe:
Turkey gave a boost to the ambitious Nabucco gas pipeline project, which aims to pump Caspian or Middle Eastern gas to Europe, ahead of upcoming elections by planning an official signing ceremony in Kayseri on 8 June of Project Support Agreements (PSAs) between the Nabucco Companies and the responsible Ministries of the five transit countries (Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Turkey).
This message was long overdue, Peter Poptchev, Ambassador at Large for Energy Security and Nabucco Coordinator for Bulgaria, told New Europe on 3 June in the sidelines of the South East Europe Energy Dialogue in Thessaloniki, organized by the Institute of Energy for South-East Europe (IENE). “The meeting of the parties to the Nabucco intergovernmental agreement in the Turkish city of Kayseri will be a strong political message to the outer world that Nabucco is up and running, it is developing, it is considering very important new options. It’s a strong political message. We have needed such a message for a long time. Now it has come,” Poptchev said.
Mashallah News, a great site covering culture and arts in the Middle East, has a mind-blowing post up about the "Apache," a dance craze sweeping across Turkey and snaring young and old in its path. The post, with lots of great videos, can be found here.
Say what you want about his politics, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is one brave man.On Tuesday, after his bus convoy was attacked by rock-throwing protestors in the Black Sea town of Hopa, he continued on to even more hostile territory: the historic city of Trabzon. The issue in Trabzon was not so much politics, but something even more divisive (in Turkish terms, at least): football (aka, soccer).
Erdogan is a well-known fan of Istanbul's Fenerbahce team, which became this year's Turkish premier league champ after just narrowly beating Trabzon's Trabzonspor for the title. Turks take their football and their teams with deadly seriousness and Trabzonspor team officials and fans are crying foul over Fenerbahce's victory, claiming it was rigged and implying there was even prime ministerial support for it. From the Hurriyet Daily News:
Many Trabzonspor fans have pointed to a meeting between Fener supporter and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Fenerbahçe chairman Aziz Yıldırım and captain Alex de Souza with only weeks left to go in the season as evidence of a fix. Furthermore, the revelation that some Fenerbahçe players sent text messages to their Ankaragücü counterparts before a match in mid-May, demanding that they “not cause trouble for them in a match being played with only a week left until the end of the league” has deepened the anger in the city. Fener won that match 6-0, driving them closer to the title.
Erdoğan came to the city Tuesday for an election rally, but was by met hundreds of Trabzonspor fans clad in maroon and blue – the team’s colors – who protested him and his government while accusing him of stealing the team’s long-awaited championship. One placard visible said, “We do not want a Fenerbahçe supporter as prime minister.”
As previously reported on this blog, new Turkish regulations that would strengthen the government's ability to filter the internet have caused a lot of friction in the country and even led to wide-scale protests.
The regulations, which are supposed to go into effect later this summer, have recently been defended by Turkey's Deputy Prime Minister, Bulent Arinc, who said the filtering is designed to keep internet users from accessing pornographic and violent material, as well as sites that might be terror-related. Today, Arinc again defended the filtering program, saying among the sites to be weeded out by the state's filters are some that show you "how to kill your wife."
The regulations -- which would require each internet subscriber in Turkey to sign up for one of four filtering programs -- have recently also led to a war of words between Arinc and Umit Boyner, the head of Turkey's largest association of businessmen and industrialists, with the Deputy PM accusing her of wanting to "liberalize" porn because of her criticism of the filtering plan. More details here.
And now for news of bikini-wearing Turkish ladies and European integration.
The German newspaper Deutsch Tuerkische Nachrichten reports that 22-year-old Berna Keklikler of Gelsenkirchen has been named Miss Turkuaz Germany 2011, or the year’s prettiest Turkish-German woman. Kekliker, who works as a bookkeeper and is preparing to enter university, topped the list of some 250 contestants, winnowed to 22 for the final showdown in Cologne on May 18.
The ladies – unmarried, 18-26, and of Turkish heritage – appear to have engaged in usual beauty pageant fare: swimsuit competitions; ball gown strutting; waving theatrically with their arms. Of special concern for the organizers, a marketing firm called Ekip Group, however, was the winner’s ability to portray “the beautiful face[s] of successful integration.”
“Integration is not just subway fights, the Islamic conference, the debate around head covering, and education about Islam," the organizers of the event, Ekip LLC, write in a press release. Apparently, it is also a nice body and the desire to compete for the title Miss Germany, the prize of the competition along with a modeling contract and an iPad.
“Fifty years after the labor recruitment agreement between Turkey and Germany, integration is more important than ever. And prettier than ever,” the same high-minded press release goes on to say. “The return of the very impressive MISS TURKUAZ, Germany’s only beauty contest honoring the prettiest German of Turkish origins, illustrates this as well this year.”
Although the hit song "Namag," which sounds like many other Turkish pop songs, doesn't break any new artistic ground, it certainly has broken political ground in Turkey. The video to the song, sung by Armenian Turk Sibil Pektorosoglu, is the first ever Armenian-language music video to be aired on Turkish television. From the Hurriyet Daily News:
“Namag” (Letter) by Sibil Pektorosoğlu, an Istanbul Armenian, has been gaining mainstream popularity and can now be heard echoing from shops along the city’s iconic İstiklal Avenue. The lyrics were written by master Armenian poet Hovhannes Şiraz while the singer’s music video was produced by one of Turkey’s most famous directors in the field, Özkan Aksular.
Pektorosoğlu said it was like a dream to release her album and broadcast her music video on Turkish television. “When I hear my songs on İstiklal Avenue, I cry,” she recently told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review.
The showing of Sibil's video seems to follow an interesting pattern in Turkey where various political efforts to reconcile with historic problems (Armenian and Kurdish, in particular) have faltered, while interesting new ground is being broken on the cultural front. More on that here.
The Zaza language is frequently lumped together with Kurdish, but those who speak it in Turkey are now asking the language -- spoken by an estimated four million -- be given its due. From a Hurriyet Daily News article about a new push by Zaza activists in Turkey:
“The [state-run] TRT broadcasts [in Zazaki] for only a few minutes, and this is not enough. The duration of these broadcasts need to be lengthened and their content needs to be diversified,” Mehmet Tüzün, the chairman of Zaza Language and Culture Association, or Zaza-Der, recently told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review.
Zaza-Der opened its first office in Istanbul’s Beyoğlu district at the end of April to help serve the country Zaza community, which is estimated to total 4 million people in Turkey.
“The teaching of our language at an academic level also represents a second step [in gaining our] linguistic rights. State institutions are dominated by the ‘one nation, one language’ mindset. Our people have not passed on their language even to their children to avoid running into problems,” said Tüzün.
Zaza-Der will be lobbying for broadcasting and education rights in their native language during their trip to Ankara and plans to request assistance from the Education Ministry to have textbooks published in Zazaki, Tüzün said.
“A significant portion of the Zaza thought it was sufficient to [solely] learn Kurdish because it was [mistakenly] believed that the Zaza tounge was an offshoot of Kurdish. This turned out to be a big mistake, however,” said Tüzün, explaining the reason why many Zaza failed to hold protect their mother tongue.
The drama over the selection process for the next generation New York city taxi has not ended.
As reported earlier in this blog, the contender put forward by Turkish carmaker Karsan was recently rejected in favor of a model made by Nissan. One of the reasons given for turning the Turkish option down was Karsan's "inexperience," with Mayor Michael Bloomberg reportedly saying he was worried Karsan's model wouldn't hold up in New York.
Now Jak Nahum, Karsan's top executive and a fixture of Turkey's automotive industry for decade, is striking back, saying it's Bloomberg who may be inexperienced, at least when it comes to his knowledge of the Turkish automotive sector.
“This is very unfortunate on his behalf. He has not been thoroughly informed about us," Nahum said during a recent visit to New York. "Today, Turkey is among Europe’s most important car manufacturing centers. Investments are gradually increasing and the sector is showing sound growth. Our production infrastructure has been rewarded many times."
As reported here earlier this year, Freddy Adu, an American soccer players whose career nosedived after his becoming a sensation at the tender age of 14, has been working on making a comeback by playing for Rizespor, a small team on Turkey's Black Sea coast.
According to Goal.com, turns out small town Turkish life is working out for Adu -- and his game. From the website's article:
“It’s a small town filled with really nice people, there’s no nightclubs or no malls," Adu says. "People like to hangout together at the café’s drinking tea. It’s just basically a very small town with a simple mind set and way of life.”
At his club Çaykur Rizespor things are different. There is a family-style setup and a sense of team unity. The players share meals at 11 a.m., as a team. This happens daily. They practice at 2 p.m. for about two hours and after Adu stays back to work on his free kicks, does some core work and works on his quickness. He is focused on soccer because there is nothing keeping him from staying behind after practice.
“I’m not distracted with other things," he says. "That has made a big difference for me. All I do is focus because I go to training and that’s the highlight of my day.”
Adu's success in Rize, best known for its tea plantations, comes as marked contrast to how another washed up American sports legend, basketball player Allen Iverson, has done in Turkey. Iverson signed up to play with Istanbul basketball powerhouse Besiktas after fizzling out in the NBA, only to spend more time on the bench than on the court.
The Turko-file is written by Yigal Schleifer, a freelance journalist based in Istanbul, Turkey, where he works as a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor and the Eurasianet website, covering Turkey and the surrounding region. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Ha'aretz, The Jerusalem Report, The Times (London), The Walrus and other publications.
