Turkey through the eyes of the Hurriyet Daily News

[tangaroa]

Fair warning: these are all single-sourced to one English-language Turkish newspaper which seems clearly to be against the ruling Adalet ve Kalkinma (Justice and Development) Party.

• Turkey's Parliament has passed a set of Constitutional reforms. I have yet to find a simple list of the reforms.
  • Another Hurriyet article describes the reforms as allowing public employees the right to unionize, preventing employers from restricting workers' freedom of speech in the workplace, and allowing judicial review of military dismissals.
  • The Financial Times describes the reforms as a means for the ruling party to stay in power.
  • The New York Times vaguely discusses the reforms.
  • Turkey's Revolutionary Socialist party supports the reforms as an anti-military measure.
  • Burak Bekdil of Hurriyet says one of the reforms will reduce the independence of the judiciary.
• Relatives of one of the Ergenekon suspects describe the prosecutions as "deliberate attempts to frame innocent individuals" and blame the prosecutions on an unidentified "shadowy third group [that is] manipulating both the media and the judiciary with great success, using manufactured evidence to deliberately stir conflict". It should not need to be said that relatives of the defendant may be biased.
• Soner Cagaptay of the Washington Institute for Near-East Policy has a four-part background in the Hurriyet Daily News on the recent rise to power of Islamic fundamentalists in previously secular Turkey.
  • Part one
  • Part two
  • Part three
  • Part four