MER Article Mediterranean Blues Under pressure to solve immediate economic problems, Middle Eastern countries seek to industrialize as quickly and as cheaply as possible. While developed countries around the world are very slowly adopting technologies and production methods that exert less pressure on the environment, Western in Zeina al-Hajj • 4 min read
MER Article Document: Forced Evictions and Destruction in Villages in Turkish Kurdistan This document is excerpted from a longer report by the Netherlands Kurdistan Society, Forced Evictions and Destruction of Villages in Dersim (Tunceli) and the Western Part of Bingöl, Turkish Kurdistan, September-November 1994 (Amsterdam, 1995). (Author not identified) • 8 min read
MER Article Turkish Women and the Welfare Party After the victory of the Welfare Party in the municipal elections of March 1994, the newly-elected mayor of Istanbul, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, thanked the disciplined and devoted Islamist women who had campaigned door-to-door until election day. Islamist women also gave the same determined performance Nukte Devrim-Bouvard • 6 min read
MER Article Turkey and the European Union There are three kinds of people in Turkey who most look forward to the country’s membership of the European Union. The first group, most obviously, comprises big businesses -- “Istanbul” capital as opposed to small and medium domestic market-oriented Anatolian capital. The other two groups are rathe Ronnie Margulies • 3 min read
MER Article "Should I Shoot You?" The stark black letters on white stone in the cemetery are all that remain of rioting that left 17 dead last year in Istanbul’s Gazi neighborhood. The shattered glass has been replaced, the burned cars swept off the streets, the angry leftist slogans on walls painted over. What remains of those two Aliza Marcus • 8 min read
MER Article Turkey's Death Squads The emergence of legal Kurdish parties and the frequent occurrence of death squad-style political assassinations were two developments in Turkey’s political life during the 1990s. For the first time in Turkey’s history, there was a group in the parliament that represented -- if only implicitly -- Ku Martin Van Bruinessen • 12 min read
MER Article Turkey's Elections and the Kurds It is now a dozen years since the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known by its Kurdish acronym PKK, launched a protracted guerrilla war against the Turkish state. Today Turkey’s Kurdish crisis seems to be deadlocked. Both of the warring parties seem to have reached their limit in terms of their Hamit Bozarslan • 12 min read
MER Article Turkish Islam and National Identity Turkish Islam is tied up with Turkish nationalism in a unique fashion, the product of Turkish history and identity. Turkey’s brand of Islamist ideology challenges the secularist components and the European identification of Kemalism, historically the dominant form of Turkish nationalism, but retains Sami Zubaida • 17 min read
MER Article Cartel: Travels of German-Turkish Rap Music “You are a Turk from Germany.” The words are from the song “Sen Turksun” (You Are a Turk) by German-Turkish rap group Cartel. Cartel shot to prominence in 1995 in Germany and Turkey with their album, “Cartel,” which within a month of its release sold 30,000 copies in Germany and 180,000 in Turkey. T Alev Çınar • 5 min read
MER Article Migrant Women in Waged Domestic Work in Turkey “If we were to continuously work until 5 o’clock as hard as the employer wants, we would not be able to get to work the next day. No human being can work as much as that.” -- Domestic Worker Hayat Kabasakal, Işik Urla Zeytinoğlu, Ömür Tımurcanday Özmen, Alev Ergenç Katrınlı • 4 min read
MER Article The Malaise of Turkish Democracy In his first televised interview in late 1996, just months after taking office, an avuncular-looking Necmettin Erbakan seemed unsurprised at a question about his taste in clothing. “Mr. Prime Minister, we hear that you favor ties by the Italian designer Versace,” said commentator Mehmet Ali Birand. Aslı Aydıntaşbaş • 11 min read
MER Article Transsexuals and the Urban Landscape in Istanbul Few social groups can boast the visibility and media attention that male-to-female transsexuals have received in Turkey in recent years. At one point, hardly a month went by without some feature in a popular magazine or a television interview. The cartoonist Latif Demirci captured this frenzied inte Deniz Kandiyoti • 5 min read
