Monthly Archives: October 2015

The unlawful government takeover of Koza İpek Holding’s 22 companies, including the third-largest media outlet in Turkey, by abusing the criminal justice system is not a seizure of a bankrupt group to protect shareholders and the public at large, but rather is a blatant intervention in the mass media ahead of a crucial national election.
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Turkey’s growing and increasingly resilient opposition has successfully employed what one may call “strategic patience” to wear down the authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Islamist associates, who have been throwing punches in every direction including useless ones into the air for some time.
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After the failure of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s “pre-election chaos” plan to shore up enough support for his Justice and Development Party (AKP) to regain the majority, he has run out of all options except for one: to steal the election in plain sight on Nov. 1 and crush the ensuing uprising with brute force. Continue reading →

Even though he was not nominated, Turkey’s embattled president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s awkward dismissal of the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize as being politically motivated reflects his desperate attempt to get away with helping out radical Islamist groups in Syria, Libya and other Muslim nations rather than his lifetime disappointment over not receiving one. Continue reading →

Just as the ruling Islamist elite in Turkey has turned the taxpayer-funded public education system into a breeding ground for a young generation of Islamists, they have also seized the key judicial training institution called the Justice Academy in order to create a cadre of partisan and ideological judges and prosecutors for the perpetuation of their grip on the judiciary. Continue reading →

Bülent Keneş, a veteran journalist of more than 20 years and Today’s Zaman’s editor-in-chief of eight years, was unlawfully arrested on trumped-up charges last Friday and is a political prisoner who should be treated as such under the circumstances.
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By all accounts, the 1,453-page indictment against dozens of high-ranking anti-corruption investigators and Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen is a frivolous compilation of far-fetched conspiracy theories tying veteran police chiefs, Mr. Gülen and other critics of the government to foreign powers without any evidence whatsoever. Continue reading →

The resurgence of violence, a stubbornly lingering narcotic-financing chain and growing economic difficulties in Afghanistan have put a damper on optimism for the future of the country, yet I believe hope is still strong among the resilient Afghan people and certainly there is no shortage of success stories that will keep them going. Continue reading →

Domestic remedies for rights violations have practically been exhausted, with the top criminal and administrative courts in Turkey as well as the Constitutional Court in shackles as hostages to the whims and emotions of the country’s ruling Islamist elites. Therefore, the importance of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), as the last beacon of hope for the complaints of frustrated Turkish citizens to be heard, has become paramount for the prospect of restoring the rule of law in the third most populous country in the Council of Europe (CoE). Continue reading →