MER Article Prison Conditions in Turkey Herman Schwartz is a professor at the American University law school in Washington, DC and is a contributing editor of The Nation magazine. In late March he visited Turkey on behalf of Helsinki Watch to investigate prison conditions in that country. He has done similar missions to Poland, Cuba, Czec Ömer Karasapan, Joe Stork • 8 min read
MER Article Talking Up Turkey No one can say that the Turkish government does not know the importance of public relations. In Europe, where Turkey’s candidacy for membership in the Economic Community is hampered by the government’s poor human rights record, Ankara has hired the top-ranked British advertising firm of Saatchi and Joe Stork • 3 min read
MER Article Turkey and US Strategy in the Age of Glasnost On May 20, 1989, a top-of-the-line Soviet MiG-29 fighter evaded pursuing Soviet interceptors and landed at Trabzon airport in northern Turkey. An apparent intelligence bonanza had literally landed in NATO’s lap. Though a regular exhibit at Western air shows and sold to India, Iraq, Yugoslavia and ot Ömer Karasapan • 22 min read
MER Article From the Editors (September/October 1989) Visiting Ankara in early December 1981, at a time when the European Common Market countries had halted more than $600 million of aid to the new Turkish junta for its human rights abuses, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger told General Kenan Evren that “we admire the way in which the order and law h The Editors • 4 min read
MER Article Harlow, Resistance Literature Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (New York: Methuen Press, 1987) Resistance Literature is a wide-ranging and impressive critical study of the literatures of contemporary “Third World” liberation movements as they confront and alter the literary and political categories of the “West.” It is not Mary Layoun • 3 min read
MER Article Art Review: "It's Possible" It’s Possible, A Joint Exhibition of Palestinian and Israeli Art “It’s Possible” is the theme of an exhibition by Palestinian and Israeli artists currently touring the United States. Twenty-four artists -- 12 Palestinians and 12 Israelis -- are displaying their works together in the first such effo Zeina Azzam Seikaly • 2 min read
MER Article Two Films Shadows Over the Future, A film by Wolfgang Bergmann. 1985. 92 mins, 16mm. Last Exit: Berlin, A film by Marilyn Gaunt. 1988. 28 mins. video. Elizabeth Warnock Fernea • 3 min read
MER Article Mitchell, Colonising Egypt Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Barbara Harlow • 11 min read
MER Article Human Rights Watch Perhaps the saddest commentary on the situation in Iran is Amnesty International’s recent statement that “some former prisoners of conscience held during the 1970s when the late Shah was in power, for whose unconditional release [Amnesty] then worked, now figure among those with responsibility for t Ömer Karasapan • 3 min read
MER Article Column These days the mainstream media in the US generally thinks twice before publishing crude slurs against entire ethnic or racial groups. But there remain those whom it is still apparently respectable to denigrate, foremost among them Arabs and Iranians. Al Miskin • 3 min read
MER Article The Uprooted Cinema My friend Jacques got as far as a screenplay when he died. He was Palestinian (Armenian) from Jerusalem, a photographer by trade, and after his family moved from occupation to Australia, Jacques made his way to the States on a tourist visa. Settling in New York, he found work in a series of custom p Miriam Rosen • 13 min read
