Lefteast
The rise and fall of the coup d’état in Turkey has disclosed a number of situational ironies, each of which indicates a difference between appearance and reality. A brief analysis of the two separate and contrasting levels of meaning embedded in at least six situations reveals some uncomfortable truths about Turkish politics and may also […]
Urgent Call for Solidarity! Members of “Academics for Peace” and Education and Science Workers Union (Eğitim-SEN) have been removed from their positions in public higher education institutions permanently! In January 2016, 2,218 scholars from Turkey signed a petition titled “We will not be a party to this crime,” also known as the Peace Petition. Since […]
The full version was published in Serbian on Masina. The attempted coup of July 15th caught me in Istanbul. What that night of adrenaline, shocking and confusing news, the sounds of machine-gun fire and low-flying military aircraft left me with was a desire to better understand what happened. Being so close to the Bosphorus bridges—a site of […]
On August 16, 2016, Erdoğan regime’s attack on the media and press since the July 15 abortive coup took a different turn by the closure of the daily Özgür Gündem on court orders, and the storming of its Istanbul headquarters by special operations police. The quarter-of-a-century-long history of Özgür Gündem represents all there is to […]
The Realness of the Coup “İçimiz dışımız darbe oldu.”[1] From toes to head the coup absorbed us. The coup has produced many pedestrian-experts, trying to gauge the coup’s hidden internal and external dynamics. This hermeneutics of the secret owes much of its power to a monumental failure… The failure of what could have turned out […]
Within days of the failed military coup attempt, president Erdogan announced his “good news” to the Turkish public: a state of emergency for three months. It’s been exceedingly difficult to identify with any of the protagonists of the last couple of weeks in Turkey. Essentially, what happened were two coups in quick succession: one—abortive military, […]
Note from LeftEast Editors: This text was originally in N+1 Magazine. AN HOUR OR TWO BEFORE SUNSET on a warm evening in mid-July, my friends are wondering where they can get a beer. They’re surprised that the local grocery store doesn’t carry alcohol, and that its sale on campus is illegal. But this is a fun-loving […]
We republish this analysis by Kurdistan National Congress (KNK), published on 19 July 2016 on http://www.kongrakurdistan.org. On 15thJuly 2016 an unsuccessful attempt at a coup happened in Turkey. Even at this early stage, the post-coup process obviously will have important consequences. It is important to understand that this process was started on the 7th June 2015, […]
This interview with Selahattin Demirtaş, co-chair of Peoples’ Democratic Party, was conducted by OSMAN OĞUZ and HABER MERKEZİ of YENİ ÖZGÜR POLİTİKA. This English language translation was taken from HDP’s English language blog. Öcalan had warned Erdogan about this matter a lot. “Tell him, he does not get it, he is acting like an idiot” […]
Monthly Review, March 3, 2016 Turkish Islamists used to dismiss the European Union as a “Christian club.” Their claim has acquired greater plausibility now that EU leaders have appointed Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Europe’s refugee gatekeeper, bolstering his Islamist government in order to keep Muslims out of Europe. Such was the import of the agreement the […]