WHEN Humza Yousaf met Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at COP28 and invited him to Scotland, the Turkish president was presiding over a country where internal oppression was matched only by external aggression.
AIR attacks targeting vital infrastructure. Eleven power stations hit affecting more than two million people. Eighteen water stations out of service. Two hospitals destroyed. Forty-eight educational sites hit. No further escalation required for the situation to worsen from dire to catastrophic.
LAST Sunday’s fatal bombing in a busy Istanbul Street has raised echoes of Turkey’s violent pre-election period in 2015. Then, after bombs had killed more than 100 people outside Ankara Railway Station in October 2015, European Union investigators argued there was reason to believe that the government had commissioned the terrorists. This time, the official account of what happened, which conveniently brought in all the government’s adversaries, has already been shown to be riven with cont
"In the Second World War they hunted down Jews in the Polish forest, now it is refugees," Lida Weerts told me. She is just back from a diplomatic mission with the European Kurdish Democratic Societies Congress (KCDK-E) – a majority of the people attempting to cross the border from Belarus into the European Union are Kurdish.
"Israeli officials are committing the crimes of apartheid and persecution." Not my words, but those of Human Rights Watch.
This will be the seventh year that November 1 has been marked as World Kobane Day ...
IRAN’S tyrannical and oppressive regime ensures that little news reaches the wider world. What does get out often concerns assassinations, imprisonments and state-orchestrated violence. In such circumstances, organised resistance is difficult, but one group standing up to the regime is the Free Life Party of Kurdistan, or PJAK, who follow Abdullah Ocalan’s ideas for radical democracy, feminism, ecology and multiculturalism.
AS lockdown eases, many people’s thoughts will be turning to the possibility of a foreign holiday, and travel agents are setting out their offers, desperate to make up for lost time and lost money. Among their tempting destinations will be Turkey.But holidaying in that country has consequences.
LAST Friday, our increasingly through-the-looking-glass politics saw the pretrial hearing of Paul Newey for the crime of giving his son, Dan, £150. Paul is being charged with funding terrorism, and his other son, Sam with assisting terrorism. Dan Newey is a member of the Kurdish YPG in north-east Syria, the same forces that have spearheaded the fight against Daesh, with the backing of the US, France and the UK.
‘WE saved all the world,” Kurdistan activist Honar Kobani told me on Thursday. “But today children in Serekaniye are being killed by Erdogan with chemicals.’’ What do you do when world leaders stand aside in the face of fascism? Friends of the Kurds, and of their social revolution, will continue to call on the politicians to take action.
