Dilip Simeon's blog

Turkey should face charges in front of the international court of justice for being complicit in acts of genocide against the Yazidi people, while Syria and Iraq failed in their duty to prevent the killings, an investigation endorsed by British human rights lawyer Helena Kennedy has said. The groundbreaking report, compiled by a group of prominent human rights lawyers , is seeking to highlight the binding responsibility states have to prevent genocide on their territories, even if they are carried out by a third party such as Islamic State (IS). The lawyers, grouped under the title of the Yazidi Justice Committee (YJC), said there was accountability under international law for states to prevent the crime of genocide under the Genocide Convention. Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, chair of the YJC, described the genocide of the Yazidi people as “madness heaped on evil”. “Mechanisms in place could have saved the Yazidis from what is now part of their past, and part of their past partial d...

The Kurdish people have sacrificed 13,000 lives in the fight against ISIS. Progressives should support their effort to build a secure base for direct democracy, feminism, and pluralism.    In the night of Thursday, January 20, ISIS mounted a  fierce attack  to free its prisoners, several thousand of whom were being held in Sina’a prison in Hasaka, a city in the autonomous, majority-Kurdish area of Syria often called Rojava. As a car bomb ripped into the prison gates, fighters from ISIS sleeper cells attacked with gunfire and a coordinated riot began inside the jail.  In the battle that followed, prisoners took human shields and ISIS snipers occupied nearby buildings while the Rojava militia—the Syrian Defense Forces (SDF)—brought in as many as 10,000 soldiers, with air and ground support from the United States. After prematurely declaring the battle over on Wednesday, the SDF discovered 90 more ISIS fighters hidden in a basement, while sniper and suicide attacks...

A Turkish court has detained well-known journalist Sedef Kabas for allegedly insulting the country's president .  Ms Kabas was arrested on Saturday in Istanbul and a court ordered her to be jailed ahead of a trial. She is accused of targeting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan with a proverb which she quoted on live television on an opposition-linked TV channel. She denies the charge. The charge carries a prison sentence of between one and four years. "There is a very famous proverb that says that a crowned head becomes wiser. But we see it is not true," she said on the Tele1 channel. "A bull does not become king just by entering the palace, but the palace becomes a barn." She also later posted the quote on Twitter.  Mr Erdogan's Chief Spokesman Fahrettin Altun described her comments as "irresponsible".  "A so-called journalist is blatantly insulting our president on a television channel that has no goal other than spreading hatred," he wro...

Nobel laureate  Orhan Pamuk  is being investigated by the Turkish state for “insulting” the founder of modern Turkey and ridiculing the Turkish flag in his new novel Nights of Plague. Pamuk, who denies the accusations, published the book in  Turkey  in March. Set on a fictional Ottoman island during an outbreak of the bubonic plague in the early 1900s, the first complaint against it came in April, when a lawyer accused Pamuk of inciting “hatred and animosity” by insulting Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and ridiculing the flag of Turkey in the work. Complaint   filed against Indian comedian Vir Das for his allegedly anti-India show An Istanbul court decided not to take the claim forward due to lack of evidence, but the lawyer who brought the case, Tarcan Ülük, appealed against the decision and the investigation has now been reopened. Pamuk was previously prosecuted for “insulting Turkishness” after raising the 1915 killings of Armenians and Kurds in an interview. Those c...

The covid crisis has hit Turkey hard and made its mark on the government’s approval ratings. The country already has the highest number of police officers per capita in Europe and the regime is clamping down on dissent with increasing force – be it Pride marches or women’s protests for the Istanbul Convention.  Thousands of women and LGBTQ+ people showed up in the heart of Istanbul during the restrictions imposed under the pretext of pandemic and broke through the police barricades on 26 June 2021. Rainbow flags were banned, journalists strangled, beaten and arrested for recording the police violence. These are usual scenes in Turkey now.  Police brutality has long been prevalent in Turkey, but its intensity has increased recently. Those flooding the streets to demand justice, democracy and equality are usually greeted by riot police blocking their every step. Although the right to protest is engraved in the constitution, in practice it often ends up prohibited for arbitrary r...

On 1 June, Orhan Inandi, a Turkish-Kyrgyz national  was declared missing  in the Kyrgyzstan capital, Bishkek. His car had been found early that morning, with its doors wide open and with valuables left inside. Many suspect he was kidnapped by the Turkish security services. Inandi is the founder of a network of schools in Kyrgyzstan linked to the  Gülen movement , which Turkish President Erdogan accuses of masterminding the  2016 coup attempt  in Turkey. Inandi’s spouse has  claimed  to have information that her husband is being held in the Turkish embassy in Bishkek for rendition to Turkey. This case is just the latest example of Turkey’s global campaign of abductions  targeting its perceived enemies.  Since the 2016 failed coup, which nearly saw Erdogan removed from power, he has lashed out against political opponents in Turkey. In  one of the most sweeping purges of perceived dissidents  in modern political history, thousands of...

In April 20, the State Department  renewed multimillion-dollar bounties  on three senior leaders of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK): Cemil Bayık, Duran Kalkan, and Murat Karayılan. Bayık and Karayılan are founding members of the PKK and Kalkan is a senior commander.  The Kurdish freedom movement sees these men as  instrumental in the defeat of ISIS , but to some this is no recommendation. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan would rather hit the Kurds than the Islamic State.  In renewing the bounties, the State Department has given him tacit permission to attack Kurdish democratic movements in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, since according to Erdogan they are all really PKK.  The bounty renewals are part of a long history of the United States bribing or rewarding Turkey by facilitating its attacks on Kurds. The bounties were originally part of an apparent deal in 2018 to get Pastor Andrew Brunson, a  Christian evangelical preacher , released from a Turk...

On 17 March, a top prosecutor  filed a case  with Turkey’s Constitutional Court demanding the closure of the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), as well as a five-year political ban on more than 600 party members. Around the same time, HDP parliamentarian and prominent human rights advocate Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu was  forcibly removed  from parliament, and later detained. These proceedings came just weeks after Turkey’s failed military operations in northern Iraq against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in February and the  arrest of more than 700  members and supporters of the HDP in a single day (14 February) on dubious charges of “terrorism”.  The HDP is the country’s third-largest party, receiving six million votes in the last general election in 2018. It has faced mounting repression ever since it first won seats in parliament in 2015, preventing President Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) from maintaining a single-party ...

In October 2014,  protesters in dozens of cities and towns throughout Turkey came together  to pressure the government into providing assistance to the mostly Kurdish inhabitants of Kobanî, a Syrian town directly adjacent to the Turkish border that was then under heavy siege by Islamic State forces. Police and demonstrators clashed violently and repeatedly during these protests. Among those supporting the protests were members of opposition political parties such as the Peoples’ Democratic Party (Halkların Demokratik Partisi, or “HDP”). Six years later, on 25 September 2020, Cihan Erdal, a PhD student at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, was  detained  in Turkey, along with dozens of other academics, activists, and elected officials, for his involvement in the HDP at the time of the 2014 protests. Erdal had returned to Turkey in August to conduct research and check on his elderly parents. During the first 36 hours of his detention, Erdal was prevented from mee...

After decades in hiding, in prison or keeping low profile, players from a bloody period in the country’s history are now seen as ‘folk idols’ by the Turkish right. At first glance, the photograph of two smartly dressed older Turkish men, posing for the camera in an office filled with flags, could be of any important figures in the country – but it is rare for a picture to say so much about both the past and the future. On the left is Devlet Bahçeli, an ultranationalist political dinosaur who has in the past few years become an influential coalition partner in the government of Turkey’s president,  Recep Tayyip Erdoğan . The man on the right, Alaattin Çakıcı, is the most notorious mobster in Turkey. Accused of 41 political murders, and jailed for ordering a hit on his ex-wife, who was shot dead in front of their young son, he was nonetheless freed from prison along with dozens of other mafia heavyweights in a coronavirus amnesty last year that notably  ignored political priso...

When the Justice and Development party (AKP) came to power in Turkey in 2002, one of the first things its leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, did was surround himself with well-educated bureaucrats. This practice was key to the AKP’s success in subsequent elections, as many citizens of Turkey trusted Erdoğan’s ability to recruit promising names to his cabinet. Competent policies in economy and diplomacy helped with the makings of a strong state – even a model democracy for the Muslim world, as  scholars once argued . It was this merit-based governance that defined AKP’s early years. Ministers such as Ali Babacan, Ahmet Davutoğlu or Abdullah Gül may have been feared by some secular Turks for their Islamic past, but for most others, it was their achievements that mattered…. Yet in recent years, there has been a swift change in conduct, with appointments made not for their merit, but loyalty to the country’s president, and subservience to his political party in power…. https://www.opendem...

In July, shortly after Turkish society emerged from COVID lockdown, members of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) proposed withdrawing the country from the Istanbul Convention. Signed by Turkey in 2011, the Convention creates a European legal framework for preventing, prosecuting and eliminating violence against women and domestic violence.  Arguments that the convention ‘weakens the institution of the family’ and ‘encourages homosexuality’ were consistent with the culture of anti-feminism and patriarchalism long encouraged by the AKP.  However, in the context of a recent wave of femicides, the prospect of losing one of the few legal protections for vulnerable has women provoked outrage, reaching all the way into the conservative camp. What follows is the English translation of a comment published in the September issue of Turkish journal Varlık by the poet and philosopher Betül Dünder, together with an open letter signed by 155 female writers and poets, ...

Feminists in Turkey have called on the rest of the world not to forget the original context of Instagram’s #challengeaccepted trend, which was supposed to draw attention to  sky- rocketing rates of gender-based violence  in the country before it was co-opted by western celebrities.  Femicide, violence against women and so-called “honour” killings are deeply rooted issues in Turkey.  Last week, the country was rocked by the brutal killing of  Pınar Gültekin , a 27-year-old student, who was allegedly killed by an ex-boyfriend.  Campaigners are also deeply worried about fresh efforts by  President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan ’s ruling party to repeal a Council of Europe treaty known as the Istanbul convention, groundbreaking legislation from 2011 that protects victims of domestic and gender-based violence and effectively prosecutes offenders. Marches in four Turkish cities last week mourning Gültekin’s death and calling on Turkish politicians to uphol...

The murder of a 27-year-old woman by an ex-boyfriend has sparked outrage in  Turkey , shining a light on the country’s high femicide rate and government efforts to roll back legislation designed to protect women.  The remains of student Pınar Gültekin were discovered in woodland in the Aegean province of Muğla on Tuesday. According to Turkish media, she was beaten and then strangled to death by her former partner, Cemal Metin Avci, who then burned her body in a garbage bin and covered it in concrete. Violence against women and so-called “honour” killings are deeply rooted and prevalent issues in Turkey. According to a 2009  study  on prevention strategies, 42% of Turkish women aged between 15–60 had suffered some physical or sexual violence by their husbands or partners.  Every year, the problem is getting worse: in 2019, 474 women were murdered, mostly by partners and relatives, the highest rate in a decade in which the numbers have increased year on year....

Solomon, I have outdone thee.” So remarked Justinian, the Roman emperor who commissioned Hagia Sophia, the great cathedral at the heart of Constantinople, now Istanbul. Throughout its history it has been a source of wonder and debate. Now, the decision by the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to  turn it back into a mosque  has reawakened many of the historical and religious ghosts that haunt its sublime spaces. Completed in 537, Hagia Sophia was at once the culminating architectural achievement of late antiquity and the first Byzantine masterpiece. Most remarkable was the huge dome at the heart of the building. “It seems not to be founded on solid masonry, but to be suspended from heaven,” wrote the great historian Procopius. A millennium later, the Ottoman historian Tursun Beg was equally awestruck: “What a dome, that vies in rank with the nine spheres of heaven!” Bethan McKernan - Ayasofya: the mosque-turned-museum at the heart of an ideological battle Beneath t...

An Istanbul court on Friday convicted two former leaders of Amnesty International’s Turkish branch on terror charges, the rights group said, alongside two other human rights defenders. Idil Eser, former Amnesty  Turkey  director, was among three people sentenced to one year and thirteen months for “helping a terrorist organisation”. Ex-Amnesty International Turkey chair Taner Kiliç was sentenced to six years and three months for “membership of a terrorist organisation”, Amnesty Turkey said on Twitter. The court acquitted seven other activists including Peter Steudtner, a German citizen, and Ali Gharavi, who is Swedish.  “This is an outrage. Absurd allegations. No evidence. After three-year trial Taner Kiliç convicted for membership of a terrorist organisation,” Amnesty’s Andrew Gardner tweeted. “The torment continues. We won’t give up until all are acquitted,” Gardner added.  The activists had been accused of seeking to wreak “chaos in society”  – a s...

For 900 years, Muslim caliphs and sultans took it upon themselves to fulfil the Prophet Mohammed’s prophecy that a great conqueror would one day bring the holy city of Constantinople into Islam’s embrace.   In 1453, when Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II finally succeeded in breaking through the Byzantine city’s walls, he immediately made his way to the largest cathedral in Christendom.  As sunlight glittered off gold mosaics of the Virgin Mary and incense smoke drifted up into the building’s vast dome, he fell on his knees and prayed.  The young conqueror’s decision to convert the  Hagia Sophia  (Holy Wisdom) in Greek, now known as  Ayasofya  in Turkish – into an imperial mosque was a powerful symbolic act, as was a move nearly one hundred years ago by the Turkish Republic’s secular founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, to turn the place of worship into a museum.  Today, the Ayasofya is still at the heart of a potent ideological battle.  Convertin...

Turkey’s recent political history, under the increasingly authoritarian rule of the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP), seems to shackle the republic’s foundational principles and its laicist regime. This development is fraught with extremely unfavourable consequences for women in Turkey. In what follows, I will give an overview of the historical background explaining different positions on women’s issues in Turkey today. I will then present the current state of research on women’s history in Turkey and the history of women’s movements there. In the mid-1980s, a second wave of Turkish feminism triggered an increased interest in feminist academic research. Women’s studies and gender studies became an important area of research within both the social sciences and the humanities, initiated by feminist scholars and academics mostly educated in western universities. Until now, much of the literature has emerged from universities’ women’s studies programmes, as well as graduat...

If Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s belligerent president, were a true patriot with his country’s security and wellbeing at heart, he would resign immediately. He has made an appalling hash of things. His Syrian misadventure, while unusually calamitous, is but the latest in a long line of foreign blunders. Erdoğan abuses his position. He harms his country. He is still in office not because he is popular but because of the fear he instils and the power he crudely wields. It’s time for him to go. Getting rid of Erdoğan is a matter for the Turks. And it wouldn’t be quite as difficult as it might sound. Having said that, doing the decent thing is not Erdoğan’s strong suit. His 16 years in power – as prime minister and then president – have been marked, at home, by growing authoritarianism and repression. The economy is an indebted mess. Corruption and nepotism thrive. After a 2016 military-led coup failed, Erdoğan exploited it to purge political opponents, the judiciary, civil society ...

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Turkey’s incursion into Syria has roiled the Middle East and NATO countries, demonstrating one key polarizing divide on both sides of the Mediterranean. As far as I can tell, that divide is between supporters of political Islam and its opponents.  By political Islam I mean movements like the Muslim Brotherhood that make Islam more than a matter of private worship and belief, seeking to turn it into a political ideology that aspires to come to power and rule a country. Political Islam in the Middle East is analogous to the Christian Right in the United States. The Turkish invasion of northeast Syria  began on Wednesday , with 14 said to be killed, 8 of them civilians, in heavy Turkish aerial and artillery bombardment of 6 Kurdish towns along a 290-mile stretch of the Syrian border with Turkey such as Tel Abyad. Thousands of Kurds were said to have fled their homes, heading south away from the border. Turkey’s president Tayyip Erdogan plans to ...