Lefteast
LeftEast is grateful to Eylem Taylan and H. Deniz Sert who conducted this interview and to its subject, Cihan Tuğal for letting us translate the original Turkish text that they published at İlerihaber.org. The May 14 and 28 elections in Turkey resulted in the continuation of the Erdoğan regime even though almost half of the […]
Note from LeftEast editors: This article was first published in Mašina, we publish it here in English as part of a collaboration within ELMO – The Eastern European Left Media Outlet. Turkey goes to the polls on 14 May for presidential and parliamentary elections. Opinion polls suggest that the ruling Adalet ve Kalkınma Parti (AKP) […]
Note from LeftEast editors: This interview was first published in Mašina, we publish it here in English as part of a collaboration within ELMO – The Eastern European Left Media Outlet. Andrej Konstantin Hunko is a German politician and member of the left-wing political party The Left (Die Linke). He has been a member of […]
What would the earthquake-stricken landscape look like if the AKP-connected construction industry had had to abide by building codes? Justus Links for N+1mag. Reprinted with permission. TWO MEN LIE ON THEIR SIDES on the cobblestone, looking sideways toward the car’s tires. A heavy winter boot bears down on the right cheek of one of these men. […]
This article reads like Garcia Marquez’s 1981 Chronicle of a Death Foretold. The dead this time is not Santiago Nasar but the passengers of a train that crosses Turkey’s European part and the murderer—not the Vicario twins, but the state-led liberalization of Turkish Railways, one of the crowning achievements of the AKP government. The Çorlu […]
Note from LeftEast editors: We share the international call for solidarity with the academics of Boğaziçi University, originally published by Jadaliyya Reports. Boğaziçi University is under greater threat than ever before as the new term begins. It has been 10 months since the Turkish President appointed a rector to Boğaziçi University by a midnight decree […]
Germany’s ruling center-right CDU (Christian-Democratic Union) has the lowest number of politicians with immigrant backgrounds, yet it looks like in this election the party will be supported by immigrants and their descendants to an unprecedented degree. A study conducted this year has shown that in recent years the percentage of Turks who would vote for […]
Refugees, Racism, and the Turkish Ideology Villagers in the Turkish province of Konya murdered a whole family of Kurdish farmers on Friday, July 30. It was a premeditated massacre that announced itself well ahead of time to anyone willing to notice. Neighbors in the farming village of Hasanköy in central Anatolia had assaulted the Dedeoğulları family of […]
The EU recovery plan is reinforcing an idea of welfare and economic reconstruction which reproduces patriarchal and racist hierarchies and exploitation, while some EU member states like Italy and Greece are already promoting measures – like divorce regulations and child allowances laws – that materially make Istanbul Convention void of any meaning. But women have not been silent in these months and are organizing their counterattack. During the last E.A.S.T. public assembly we started to discuss the multifaceted dimensions of these patriarchal attacks and the struggles we can build together towards a big transnational mobilization. This interview with Kalina Drenska, member of E.A.S.T. and LevFem (Bulgaria) is the first of a series of texts that wants to start from Istanbul Convention to explore ongoing fights against violence against women and lgbtqi+ people, in their connections with the struggles against racist and exploitative policies. Kalina talks about the stratified political meanings attributed in Bulgaria to Istanbul Convention and shows the links between attacks on women and lgbtqi+ people and the policies of cutbacks that lead many women to find better living and working conditions abroad. Furthermore, she unveils the hard pathways that feminist struggles must take – in Bulgaria and beyond – to overturn isolation and accumulate power on the transnational level.
This text was originally published on the Transnational Social Strike Platform website. There is also a Turkish, a Polish and an Italian translation available. Authors’ note: On April 11th, EAST members, women and LGBTQIA+ people from Turkey, Poland, Greece, Italy, Bulgaria, Romania, […], drawing from Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention, gathered together in a […]