Searching for the roots of present Turkey, by Etienne Copeaux
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During the 90s, the war had entered everybody's life in Turkey, even for those living far away from the clashes; war had become an almost everyday “ground noise” made of signs and icons, at the least. It had taken away young men and sent back coffins....
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[Published in French on susam-sokak.fr on January 19, 2013] At the end of April 1998, the General Staff of the Turkish Army organized, on the premises of the Ziraat Bank on Istiklal Street in Istanbul, an exhibition on " The Turkish Armed Forces in their...
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[This paper was first published in French in susam-sokak.fr, on December 24, 2014 - https://www.susam-sokak.fr/2014/12/l-anatolie-en-ville.html] During the 1990s, Turkish daily newspapers sometimes presented on the front page a photograph taken in a very...
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In the preceding article on the suicide attack of June 1996, the first committed by the PKK on Turkish soil, I focused on the fact itself, mainly using a set of press articles gathered at the time of the event. In 2015, almost twenty years after the suicide...
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On June 30, 1996, the PKK succeeded for the first time in a suicide attack in Tunceli, sacrificing one of its young female fighters whose nom de guerre, Zilan, refers to the massacres of 1930. Why this modus operandi? Why in Tunceli? And above all, why...
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This article has been previously published in French on susam-sokak.fr on September 21, 2015: https://www.susam-sokak.fr/2015/09/esquisse-n-58-villages-fantomes-3-l-impossible-retour.html Will there be a new Yasar Kemal, a Kurdish Giono, who will put...
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Many of the young people of the "90s generation", the one that attended the Gezi movement, the one that revolts in the cities of the Southeast, the one that voted HDP in June 2015, have suffered, as children, the forced displacements of the years 1994-2000....
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Strange archaeology, strange places are these 3800 ghost villages in Turkish Kurdistan, emptied of their population, often burned by the "security forces" to compel the inhabitants to choose their side. A human and cultural disaster, a total political...
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[First published in French on July 15, 2012 - https://www.susam-sokak.fr/article-le-reveil-du-kurdistan-imaginaire-d-ismail-besik-i-108170075.html] İsmail Beşikçi, who was born in 1939, is one of the most prominent intellectuals in the Turkey of the last...
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This article is the second part o “The War Against the Kurds – The Village Guards” (https://susam-sokak-in-english.over-blog.com/2021/03/korucu.html) So unclear is the legal frame of these amateur units that an allegedly “popular” self-defense unit can...
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