MER Article The Kurdish Experience Numbering over 22 million, the Kurds are one of the largest non-state nations in the world. Their homeland, Kurdistan, has been forcibly divided and lies mostly within the present-day borders of Turkey, Iraq and Iran, with smaller parts in Syria, Armenia and Azerbaijan. The greatest number of Kurds Amir Hassanpour • 20 min read
MER Article Studies of Structural Adjustment Bent Hansen, Egypt and Turkey: The Political Economy of Poverty, Equity and Growth (World Bank, 1991). Heba Handoussa and Gilliam Potter, eds. Employment and Structural Adjustment: Egypt in the 1990s (AUC, 1991). Mustafa Kamil al-Sayyid, “Privatization: The Egyptian Debate,” Cairo Papers in Social Marsha Pripstein Posusney • 6 min read
MER Article "By Compass and Sword!" It is hard not to be impressed by the changes that took place in the world during the second half of the fifteenth century. Bartolomeu Diaz rounded the southern cape of Africa in 1488; Columbus completed his first voyage to the Caribbean in 1492; Vasco da Gama arrived in India Resat Kasaba • 13 min read
MER Article The False Promise of Operation Provide Comfort The US-led response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait has had many immediate repercussions on the international humanitarian network set up at the dawn of an earlier “new order” -- the close of World War II. It also has more than a few similarities to the protection scheme set up then to assist and prote Bill Frelick • 12 min read
MER Article Women and Work in Istanbul On the Asian side of the Istanbul lies a district which I will call Yenitepe. [1] At its center it is a teeming municipality of small shops and low-rise working-class apartments, but at its edge Yenitepe’s streets branch into a haphazard network of dirt roads threading together Jenny White • 16 min read
MER Article Hearts and Minds in Kurdistan For the people of Şirnak, a Kurdish town of 15,000 located at the foot of the Cudi Mountains in southeastern Turkey, the grave of 16-year old Zayide is something of a shrine. A guerrilla fighter with the separatist Workers’ Party of Kurdistan (PKK), Zayide was killed five years ago in a skirmish in Aliza Marcus • 6 min read
MER Article Report from Paris: The Kurdish Conference “There’s not much talk about the Kurds because we have never taken any hostages, never hijacked a plane. But I am proud of this.” So wrote Abd al-Rahman Qassemlou, the Iranian Kurdish leader who was assassinated in Vienna last July. The Kurdish Institute of Paris and France-Libertes, a human rights Sami Zubaida • 4 min read
MER Article Occupational Health and Safety in Turkey Kandir Baysu has been hospitalized twice over the past eight years, both times for more than two months and requiring dozens of blood transfusions. Baysu, a worker at a battery manufacturing plant on the outskirts of Istanbul, thinks he is about due for another hospital stay. As in the past, he expe Aliza Marcus • 8 min read
MER Article Recent Books on Turkey Mehmet Ali Birand, The Generals’ Coup in Turkey: An Inside Story of September 12, 1980 (London: Brassey’s Defence Publishers, 1987). Irvin Cemil Schick and Ahmet Ertuğrul Tonak, eds., Turkey in Transition: New Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Turkey suffers more than its share Ömer Karasapan • 4 min read
MER Article Music, Fate and State In a violent act of vengeance, the kind of crime of honor which fills Turkish jails and the pages of the tabloids, a lorry driver in Istanbul catches his wife and boss in flagrante delicto, shoots them both and flees to his home village. The police surround the village house. The man surrenders and Martin Stokes • 12 min read
MER Article Turkey: A Primer The People Turkey’s population, about 54 million, is growing at a rate of 2.5 percent -- higher than European countries, but lower than most Third World nations. Birth rates vary widely, from no more than two children among middle-class families in western cities to as many as 17 in rural families Martha Wenger • 9 min read
MER Article Constructing a Cinema of the City Turkey’s much vaunted “return to democracy” suffered an embarrassingly visible setback at last year’s Istanbul International Filmdays when censors banned four of the 92 films invited for the foreign section: three on grounds of obscenity and a fourth -- Georgian filmmaker Tenguiz Abouladze’s 1968 cl Miriam Rosen • 8 min read
