Last Day June 15, 2007
Posted by cpapuschak in Travel.add a comment
This will be my last post from Turkey. I will leave Ankara on this evening for Amsterdam, where I will spend a week with my friend Mike before returning home. It is hard to believe that after ten months in this country, I am now on my way home. While I am looking forward to going home to Canada, it is difficult to say goodbye to the place that has been my home for so long.
I am going to miss this country. Even though there are things about Turkey that irritate me, it is still a home for me. You learn to live with the annoyances and to see past them. After a while those annoyances just become part of the overall experience, neither positive nor negative. It is a complicated feeling that I do not rightly know how to explain.
Yet more than the country, I will miss the friends I have made here. Over the months we had a lot of really good times together. My experience in Turkey will be forever linked with those people, and so returning here surely won’t have the same feeling without those people.
Since this began as a travel blog, I do not intend on updating it while I am at home. However, I will begin updating it again when I return to Cyprus later in the year (September) for my internship. There ought to be plenty of stories to come out of that adventure as well.
Turkish Incursion in Northern Iraq June 9, 2007
Posted by cpapuschak in News, Politics.add a comment
A couple days ago, the Turkish military launch an incursion into northern Iraq, ostensibly to counter increased PKK activity after the bombing in Ankara, and the killing of several Turkish soldiers in Tunceli.
Information about this incident is conspicuously difficult to attain. In the relations between the media and military, it is almost a “don’t ask, don’t tell” relationship. The first I heard of the incursion came from Canada’s Globe and Mail, which reported the effect of the incursion of “several thousand” Turkish troops on the price of oil.
Today’s Zaman reports that military officials first admitted Turkish troops were conducting “limited operations” in northern Iraq, but speculation was immediately turned down by officials who later denied any incursion at all.
It is frustratingly difficult to find information on this, but that is the nature of the military in this country. Information is tightly controlled, and there is no civilian discussion on such issues.
There is criticism of the military’s adventure in northern Iraq, from both inside and out. An editorial in the New York Times argues that, “Turkey’s government needs to know that it will reap nothing but disaster if [an incursion] happens.”
Columnist Abdulhamit Bilici posits a controversial suggestion:
Strangely enough Turkey does not need a foreign enemy or an imperialist power to harm itself. It does so through the hands of its own elite, who are responsible for the economic crises in every five years, the military interventions that destabilize democratic order and the meaningless tension between the state and the people.
At times, I am inclined to agree. Granted the Turkish state faces a real threat from PKK terrorists, this incursion into northern Iraq may cause more harm than good.
Some Reflections June 6, 2007
Posted by cpapuschak in Travel.add a comment
Not much time left in Turkey. I leave in less than two weeks. I sit down now trying to recount the last nine months. It feels like just yesterday that I met my host student, Yiğit, in the old terminal of Esenboğa Airport, which has since been replaced by an expanded modern terminal. Construction seems to have been the common theme of my stay in Ankara.
After so long, it is difficult to look back at what I’ve learned since arriving. There have been good times and bad, and while at times I found myself wondering why I came to this country, the totality of my experience has been a good one.
This has no doubt been an interesting year to study in Turkey. Coup revelations, a presidential crisis and military intervention, a terrorist bombing, and so on, have been events I couldn’t possibly experience in Edmonton.
I came to Turkey with a very neutral impression and was ready for the unexpected, lest I suffer some degree of culture shock. Before coming I knew about Atatürk, Islam and Turkey’s troubled relations with the EU, but little beyond that.
Because I am interested in history and politics and follow political developments closely, much of what I saw in Turkey disappointed me. The political developments in this country are often depressing if you believe in the values of human rights and democracy. Before coming I did not fully appreciate the degree to which the military controlled the government and state, nor did I appreciate the degree to which the people acquiesce to a serious democratic and human rights deficit in this country.
So many topics are taboo – sex, the Armenian genocide, Kurdish separatism, and so on. This is changing, thanks in part to the democratizing and liberalizing pressures exerted by the EU accession process. However, there is still hesitation to critically discuss these issues, and there has been an ultranationalist backlash to the EU.
It is useful to recall that Thomas Jefferson once said, “The highest form of patriotism is dissent.” While this means something in the West, it means little here. While I believe that it is possible to love one’s own country while being critical of one’s own government, those in Turkey who believe the same appear to be a minority. To criticize the military is to criticize the state, government, country, and therefore ‘Turkishness’.
I do not propose an orientalist view of Turks as being ‘stupid’ by any means. I do argue, however, that the hegemonic ideas of Kemalism and secularism have framed discourse in this country by defining what is undeniably ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. Almost 84 years of state-driven indoctrination and dogma has a tendency of influencing what people think, and it is difficult to think outside those parameters. Seeing this so blatantly in Turkey has made me reconsider what I previously considered to be ‘true’.
