Turkish Politics & Internal Affairs

[what]

If you read my introduction you will find the reason. I was one of the 2000 in BW. Now the number increased.

Interesting can you link it? Cant find it.
Could you share your experience there?

 

[Attila the Hun]

http://aa.com.tr/tr/dunya/kerkukte-turkmenlerin-can-guvenligi-tehlikede/716001

What we really need to be doing is building them homes along our borders and get them the hell out of there.

 

[Hamzza]

Istanbul for me. as someone that's been to most cities in the world. is the BEST CITY IN THE WORLD.
The Aegean is beautiful too.
Our economy and tourism should be much better than it was(before the coup and terrorism). We're on bloody Romania levels of GDP per capita.
And do you have a problem with Ataturk?
I hope you're not one of those that think he was some anti-Turk that hated Muslims lol.

I don't hate Ataturk nor do I love him, I admire him to an extent, he was a good leader during the war. He also had an admirable personality. But he did suppress any movement of Islam/Ottoman Empire.

 

[Friendly]

Interesting can you link it? Cant find it.
Could you share your experience there?

17. Mai 2010, 21:20 Uhr
Deutsch-Türken bei der Bundeswehr
Denn die Jungs seien topfit: Zwei arbeiteten nebenher als Kampfsporttrainer, einer spiele hervorragend Fußball. Alle haben einen deutschen Pass. Unter den fast 2600 tauglichen Deutsch-Türken war es dagegen nur etwas mehr als ein Drittel (35,2 Prozent). Die Zahlen umfassen laut Ministerium zwar nicht alle Deutsch-Türken, weil Angaben zu einem zweiten Pass bei der Musterung freiwillig seien. Wer von den 2600 tatsächlich antreten musste, lässt sich aber zuverlässig feststellen.

It was ok. Top technology and perfect comrades, no racism and discrimination.
Later some changed to Police (limit 31 year and Abitur) , some to private security.

I can't write more about it. @Bismarck is watching .
We signed a confidential agreement with threat of punishment.

 

[Attila the Hun]

I don't hate Ataturk nor do I love him, I admire him to an extent, he was a good leader during the war. He also had an admirable personality. But he did suppress any movement of Islam/Ottoman Empire.

Good thing he did suppress the Ottoman Empire, as the Ottoman Empire was shit towards the end. That's the one thing you should love him for.
We were the "Sick man of Europe".

 

[Friendly]

@what

I got already a penalty here. I don't know why. But to answer your question

https://www.reservistenverband.de/evewa2.php?d=1432649825&menu=0110&newsid=29978&

Brigadegeneral Dr. Ferdi Akaltin

He is on the peak

Akaltin bedankte sich bei seinem Stab für die hervorragende Zusammenarbeit. Er habe sich nicht nur dienstlich, sondern auch menschlich in Amberg sehr wohlgefüllt. Seinen Entschluss, in Amberg den Dienst als Chef des Stabs anzutreten, habe er zu keiner Zeit bereut. Zumal er den Verband bereits in Afghanistan kennen- und schätzen gelernt habe. Akaltin wurde gelobt als ein Vorgesetzter, der freundlich mit seinem Soldaten umgegangen sei und stets ein offenes Ohr für Probleme welcher Art auch immer gehabt habe. Fern jeglichen Kasernentons sei er zudem ein geschätzter Gesprächspartner etwa bei Diskussionen mit Schülern gewesen.


@Bismarck

Now are you from M or HH ?

Nach der Promotion zum Dr. phil. und eine Verwendung als Kompaniechef einer Panzerkompanie durchlief er die Generalstabsausbildung an der Führungsakademie der Bundeswehr in Hamburg sowie an der königlich dänischen Verteidigungsakademie in Kopenhagen.

 

[Hamzza]

Good thing he did suppress the Ottoman Empire, as the Ottoman Empire was shit towards the end. That's the one thing you should love him for.
We were the "Sick man of Europe".

Towards the end yes, that's how the Ottoman Empire starting declining initially. But he was extremely strict on religion after he made it a Secular constitution. Ezan was made to be recited in Turkish for example.

 

[blondeturkish]

Towards the end yes, that's how the Ottoman Empire starting declining initially. But he was extremely strict on religion after he made it a Secular constitution. Ezan was made to be recited in Turkish for example.

quite the irony. yet you live in a secular country like canada..

 

[Attila the Hun]

Ezan was made to be recited in Turkish for example.

What's wrong with that?
The Arabs help end the Ottomans, but none of you ever have a bad thing to say to them, do you?

 

[Deliorman]

Towards the end yes, that's how the Ottoman Empire starting declining initially. But he was extremely strict on religion after he made it a Secular constitution. Ezan was made to be recited in Turkish for example.

Exactly how it is supposed to be and how it should be... after all it's Türkiye- the land of the Turks. What's the point to listen to prayers you don't understand?

 

[Hamzza]

Exactly how it is supposed to be and how it should be... after all it's Türkiye- the land of the Turks. What's the point to listen to prayers you don't understand?

I know that. But majority Turks were and are Muslim. It's not about understanding, plus most Muslims can understand the words of the ezan. The ezan is establish from Quran and and practiced by Prophet Muhammad (s.a.v). It's forbidden to violate ezan, which is by reciting it in another language.

Plus if Turks were okay with the translation into Turkish then it would've never changed back to Arabic and there wouldn't have been so many people going against the translation, all the Turks went by the original version of the ezan until the reform after 1924+.

What's wrong with that?
The Arabs help end the Ottomans, but none of you ever have a bad thing to say to them, do you?

Lol, Arabs were not part of the topic that's why. I'm against anyone who betrayed the Ottomans, including the Arabs of that time.

quite the irony. yet you live in a secular country like canada..

I live here cause my parents moved here, and I was born here, but I am 100% Turkish. Canada is secular yes, but at the same time it's Christian majority, Church bells ring from churches, so even if it wasn't secular you wouldn't hear Ezan at all. Just like Turkiye, it's secular, but Ezan is recited from every single mosque, and church bells don't start ringing. That's because Muslim majority and Christian minority.

 

[Solomon2]

How a Top International Judge Was Trampled by Turkey’s Purge
Aydin Akay retired as a renowned defense attorney. He is now in an Ankara prison for downloading a chat app
By Margaret Coker | Photographs by Rena Effendi for The Wall Street Journal



Aydin Akay is confined to a prison cell that holds four beds and six men.

In September, Mr. Akay, 66 years old, a judge and internationally known defense attorney, was taken from his three-story island home to Block C of Turkey’s maximum-security Sincan Prison outside Ankara, where he is held as a terror suspect.

The grounds for his arrest show how far the government has gone in its voracious hunt for traitors after the summer’s failed coup: Mr. Akay downloaded a message app available from Google Play and Apple’s App Store.

Turkey’s intelligence service believes he and hundreds of other detainees used the app to hide membership in a secretive Turkish religious group, led by U.S.-based Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen, which President Recep Tayyip Erdogan blames for the failed overthrow.

About 40,000 people have been arrested. The first wave swept up mostly military personnel and civil servants who allegedly participated in the coup attempt or had ties to Mr. Gulen. Mr. Gulen denies any involvement.

Photos of Aydin Akay and his family at their home in Turkey.

The purges have since expanded to public figures, politicians and activists—in effect, those who have opposed Mr. Erdogan and his ruling party.

Among the criteria cited by the government are Twitter posts or newspaper headlines that allegedly show support for the Gulenists. Turkey has classified the group as a terrorist organization.

Mr. Akay wasn’t a government critic. Instead, he was part of Turkey’s pro-European secular elite. He did not speak publicly about politics. As a lawyer, he worked at various times defending Turkey at the European Court of Human Rights and served as a judge on a United Nations war crimes tribunal.

“How can a society go between such polar opposites this quickly and this much?” Mr. Akay wrote in a prison note viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

More than 3,000 judges, prosecutors and court staff have been dismissed or arrested since summer, crippling work at court houses around the country, Turkish criminal and civil lawyers said.

Turkey’s Accused
Others caught in the purges.

VIEW PHOTOS

Turkey’s Constitutional Court, the nation’s highest, has received tens of thousands of appeals from citizens who believe they have been unfairly detained or fired from their work since the failed coup. Two judges on the high court were arrested this summer, accused of being Gulen supporters.

Prosecutors haven’t charged Mr. Akay but have argued for his continued detention as they investigate users of the messaging app, called ByLock.

Turkish intelligence officials have told the Journal that ByLock wasn’t used by the coup plotters, and that by last year the app had fallen out favor among Gulenists. Even so, authorities have compiled a list of more than 180,000 ByLock users as part of the government’s investigation into other alleged plots. Around 9,000 of these alleged users have been detained.

Another Turkish intelligence official said Mr. Akay’s career and lifestyle didn’t match the usual profile of a member of the organization. But the official said Mr. Akay’s extensive use of the app indicated he was a “functional” member of the group. Mr. Akay has denied being a Gulenist.

Mr. Akay’s lawyers couldn’t view his case file, they were told, for reasons of national security. They don’t believe it contains any evidence of wrongdoing—only that Mr. Akay downloaded ByLock.

“There is no proximity between Judge Akay and the coup, or Judge Akay and terrorism,” said Yaman Akdeniz, a Turkish constitutional law expert and one of Mr. Akay’s defense lawyers. “In most countries, there are legal statutes that make possession of certain items a crime unto themselves, like child pornography or hard drugs. But there is nowhere that I know of where possession of an app indicates criminal behavior.”

The Turkish Justice Minister’s office and the prosecutor assigned Mr. Akay’s case declined to comment, citing privacy grounds.

Graphic: How the Turkish Purge Unfolded

VIEW INTERACTIVE

Mr. Akay’s release isn’t expected soon. The loyalty of any judge who frees a detainee in the current political climate would come under immediate suspicion, his lawyers said.

For now, Mr. Akay wakes before dawn to write letters home and fill his diary. To escape the monotony, he walks in the exercise yard, where he can escape in memories of his family and the narrow streets of Istanbul’s historic quarter, of a life abroad, in Paris, in New York and in Africa.

Lawful rise
Strengthening Turkey’s rule of law was a goal drilled into Mr. Akay from an early age, his family and colleagues said. He was raised in Ankara, and his politically active father, also a lawyer, helped build the secular, anti-Communist party now known as the Nationalist Movement Party, or MHP.

Mr. Akay avoided politics, and after passing the bar went into private practice in the capital. In 1985, he met his future wife, then a graphic designer, at a dinner party hosted by mutual friends.

Over cigarettes and glasses of Turkey’s anise-flavored alcohol raki, they discussed politics and philosophy. Alahan Akay said her future husband wasn’t put off because she was a single working mother with a young son: “He had a progressive and open mind.”

On weekends, Mr. Akay, who lived in Ankara, began visiting his future wife, who lived in Istanbul, a five-hour drive each way.

Once married, Mr. Akay followed his wife’s advice and joined the Turkish foreign service, where her brother worked. The couple, who later had a daughter, sought adventure in a cosmopolitan life abroad.

In 1989, they moved to New York City, where Mr. Akay worked as the legal attaché for Turkey’s mission at the United Nations in Manhattan. The family lived nearby, on 2nd Avenue and 43rd Street, and the children attended local Catholic schools. The family toured the U.S. by car on vacations, Mrs. Akay said. They tried new cuisine, like crabs from the Chesapeake Bay in Baltimore. Their son became a long-suffering fan of the New York Jets.

Alahan Akay has been separated from her husband, Aydin, since he was arrested in September by Turkish authorities. Below, a notebook containing some of Mr. Akay's writing.

In the mid-1990s, Mr. Akay was posted to Strasbourg, France, where he defended Turkey at proceedings at the European Court of Human Rights. Turkish citizens, mostly Kurds, alleged they were tortured and abused by the security forces during some of the bloodiest years of insurgency by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party.

Mr. Akay also participated in debates at the Council of Europe, the body that oversees international human-rights conventions, which the newly independent Eastern European states were eager to join. Jon Ivanovich, the Macedonian ambassador there at the time, said he and Mr. Akay became friends after hours spent talking about the transition from authoritarian societies to nations where civil liberties were enshrined.

“He was proud of his nation and was a real believer in Turkey’s rightful place in Europe,” Mr. Ivanovich said.

TURKEY IN TURMOIL
Continuing coverage of a nation in crisis

• Turkey’s Powerful Spy Network Failed to See Coup Coming
• Turkish President Foiled Coup With Luck, Tech Savvy
• In University Purge, Turkey’s Erdogan Hits Secularists and Boosts Conservatives
• Turkey’s Crackdown Sweeps Through Business and Finance, Imperiling The Economy
• Turkey’s Battle With Muslim Cleric Careens Through U.S. Classrooms

By the early 2000s, after another tour in Strasbourg, the Foreign Ministry nominated him as a judge for a tribunal set up by the United Nations Security Council to adjudicate alleged war crimes during the Rwanda genocide. In 2009, he moved to Arusha, Tanzania, and ruled over five cases there.

Mr. Akay took a break from his legal career and accepted a two-year post, starting in 2012, as Turkey’s first ambassador to Burkina Faso. He was motivated by retirement worries after a life in civil service: An ambassadorship would significantly increase his government pension, his family said.

A senior official in Turkey’s National Intelligence Agency, known by its Turkish initials MIT, said the spy agency is now examining whether Mr. Akay was directed by Gulenists to take the post in Burkina Faso, or whether he used his position to further Gulenist ambitions.

MIT believes supporters of Mr. Gulen worked for years to illegally influence state policy, including the expansion of Turkish embassies across Africa to boost their commercial enterprises. Mr. Akay represented Turkish business interests impartially while serving as ambassador, his lawyer said.

Mr. Gulen’s followers number in the millions, and businessmen affiliated with the cleric include those at some of Turkey’s largest companies. Affiliation with Mr. Gulen or his followers’ businesses wasn’t illegal and Messrs Gulen and Erdogan for many years had been political allies. In May, Turkey’s National Security Council labeled the Gulenists an armed terrorist network. And after July’s coup, such relationships exposed many in Turkey to arrest with little or no warning.

Taken away
Mr. Akay returned to Turkey in 2014 and retired from the foreign service around his 65th birthday. In 2015, he took up his judicial duties at the appellate tribunal based at The Hague and formed by the U.N. to hear cases related to Rwanda and former Yugoslavia war crimes tribunals.

Over the summer, Mr. Akay was deliberating a motion filed by convicted war criminal Radovan Karadic when rogue elements of the Turkish military tried to overthrow the government. He and his wife were at home on the island of Buyukada, known as the Martha’s Vineyard of Istanbul.

At least 270 people died during the coup. Jet fighters bombed parliament in Ankara and tanks fired on civilians in Istanbul. Days later, the government called a state of emergency. Officials said they needed extraordinary powers to combat traitorous citizens, as well as Islamic State and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party—two groups that have killed about 300 people in suicide attacks so far this year.

The couple struggled to make sense of the violence. Mr. Akay became disenchanted with some of his friends in his secular social set who had rooted for Mr. Erdogan’s downfall, his family said. In conversations over drinks, Mr. Akay was clear: Military rule was never a better alternative to a democratically elected government.

For the rest of the summer, life for the Akays was relaxed. The couple baby-sat grandchildren and swam at their beach club. In September, they flew to Israel with Jewish friends and visited Jerusalem for the first time.

Three days after their return, on Sept. 19, Mrs. Akay was cooking pasta for lunch when the doorbell rang. A dozen or so police entered the house, handcuffed Mr. Akay and declared him a national-security threat.

A table set at the home of Aydin Akay, a Turkish lawyer and judge who is being held by authorities as a terror suspect.

Police confiscated electronic devices and picked through the 2,000 or so books in Mr. Akay’s home library, which was filled with legal case studies, Paris guide books and histories of Western philosophy. They confiscated two nonfiction books, including one about Mr. Gulen.

Police moved Mr. Akay to Sincan, where suspected senior coup plotters are held. For five days, counterterror police questioned his use of ByLock and his professional associations abroad, according to his lawyers and a copy of the prosecutor’s statement viewed by the Journal. Mr. Akay told them he had downloaded the app and used it in 2015, along with other chat apps such as WhatsApp. He said he used it to communicate with friends in Burkina Faso about personal matters.

Mr. Akay denied to authorities any association with Mr. Gulen or the coup, calling it absurd to suspect him of membership in a religious organization trying to subvert democracy.

“It is evident from my social, cultural and family life that I can’t be thought of in the same sentence as” the Gulenist terror group, he said, according to a copy of the prosecutor’s report viewed by the Journal.

During a Sept. 28 court appearance, Mr. Akay’s legal team argued for his release for lack of evidence. They later said the arrest violated the diplomatic immunity granted Mr. Akay as a U.N. official. The judge denied his release.

Turkey has told the U.N. Mr. Akay stands accused of “very serious” crimes and that any immunity would apply solely to his duties as a tribunal judge, a Foreign Ministry official said.

“We keep hoping every day there is going to be a change, that we will wake up and the country will go back to normal,” said Mrs. Akay, who now lives with her son and his family in Istanbul. “But the reality is that my husband is caught in a spider’s web. For now, there is no escape.”

In Sincan, Mr. Akay shares a cell with five men, who like him, had been among Turkey’s elite: judges, military officers and academics. Sharing two beds and two mattresses on the floor means the six men sleep poorly, sometimes in shifts.

Most of his cell mates wake before dawn for morning prayers. Mr. Akay uses those rare moments of solitude to write letters home. They are read by a prison censor, so Mr. Akay writes as blandly as the prison stew. One described how prisoners sometimes share snacks bought at the prison store.

Mr. Akay’s morning walks in the prison yard help relieve his worries—about his wife, who survived a bout of breast cancer—and offer reminders of happier times such as the safari the family took to the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania, according to letters viewed by the Journal.

He rarely watches the TV that serves his cell block, he wrote: The scenes of Istanbul trigger a painful homesickness. He is allowed family visits but has asked his wife and daughter to stay away. He is afraid seeing them would crumble the stoicism that shields him day to day.

Only his son, Kerem, also an attorney, visits the prison outside Ankara. The weekly journey reverses the route Mr. Akay would take while courting Mrs. Akay. It is now a trip often filled with dread, the son said, for “the uncertainty over whether it will be my last chance to see him.”

At the end of October, Mr. Akay’s lawyers lost an appeal for his release on bail. They have filed an appeal to the Turkish Constitutional Court. Their next move is to take Mr. Akay’s case to the European Court of Human Rights, where the lawyer had once defended Turkey.

His family struggles to keep faith in the legal system that Mr. Akay spent a career championing. Mrs. Akay hasn’t returned to the island home where she and her husband had hoped to grow old together. The table is still set in blue china plates for a lunch never shared.

Alahan Akay walks a street on the island of Buyukada in Turkey.

 

[brokk]

Throughout the year in Turkey around ~400 people mostly civilians (of all ages) have died and thousands have been injured in different places within Turkey in acts of terror done by derivatives of the PKK. EU, US NATO countries openly supply arms to, fund and educate other derivatives of this terror group, weaponry of these countries (arms, explosives...) end up being used within Turkey in these acts of terror. Similarly Iraq is funding an other derivative of this group directly from its budget.

These are facts, in my view this is reason enough for very serious consequences for all countries involved. I think that the half-baked measures that the Turkish government is and has taken is utterly pathetic. What these could be I don't know any suggestions? But why on earth are military's of these countries allowed in NATO bases within Turkey? Why are they even allowed near Turkey? Let alone, in places like Cyprus where Turkey, Greece and the UK are the only guarantors that can have military there? Why is Turkish military still sending troops and hardware to NATO locations to serve and be used under NATO command?

The 90's and the 00's was a big mistake letting such "animals" ruin Iraq, though understandable as there is little that Turkey could have done and it did do what it could by not opening bases. In Syria it could have done more by not getting on the band-wagon instructed to it by the US, but in the end, though a mess, it aided perhaps more than 1/3'rd of the country within and out of its borders. If the Turkish-Russian-Iranian deal doesn't work for peace and stabilizing the country the only possible solution left for the region is a full-on invasion to clean up the mess made by the US, UK.

- Acts of terror in 2016-2017 in Turkey (Russian) - https://ria.ru/world/20170101/1485052478.html

 

[Kuwaiti Girl]

You can't defeat the PKK by military force alone.

If you truly want to defeat the PKK, then you must grant more cultural and political rights to the Kurdish minority, otherwise the PKK leaders will always exploit the grievances of ethnic Kurds who feel marginalized by the Turkish government.

As long as Turkey continues to think the solution to bloodshed is more bloodshed, then nothing will be solved. On the contrary, the situation will continue to deteriorate, and Turkey will be held back from reaching its economic potential.

As for ISIS terrorism, the Turkish government must be more genuine in the fight against extremism. The AKP is still turning a blind eye to many radical Muslim preachers in Turkey, not to mention turning a blind eye to radical Islamic militant groups in Syria. As long as these suicidal policies persist, the ISIS threat will always remain.

Turkey can still solve all these problems on its own, but the country is running out of time.

 

[usernameless]

You can't defeat the PKK by military force alone.

If you truly want to defeat the PKK, then you must grant more cultural and political rights to the Kurdish minority, otherwise the PKK leaders will always exploit the grievances of ethnic Kurds who feel marginalized by the Turkish government.

As long as Turkey continues to think the solution to bloodshed is more bloodshed, then nothing will be solved. On the contrary, the situation will continue to deteriorate, and Turkey will be held back from reaching its economic potential.

As for ISIS terrorism, the Turkish government must be more genuine in the fight against extremism. The AKP is still turning a blind eye to many radical Muslim preachers in Turkey, not to mention turning a blind eye to radical Islamic militant groups in Syria. As long as these suicidal policies persist, the ISIS threat will always remain.

Turkey can still solve all these problems on its own, but the country is running out of time.

LMAO, this has proven you're not to be taken serious and that you are too ignorant and biased, basically fed with western and pkk propaganda. What is it with foreign PDF commoners becoming sudden 'experts' on Turkey nowadays?