Thursday, December 9, 2010 

Back when I lived in Turkey in the 1990s, I often liked to enter class on the last day of the semester or course whistling the opening bars from Europe's timeless hit "The Final Countdown." Only instead of singing "it's the final countdown," I would say "it's the final lesson." Jovial laughter would usually ensue.


Sure, teaching in Turkey wasn't always kurabiye and tea, but "The Final Lesson" usually brought out the smiles

I'm stretching out the bayram here, observing both my last "taught" lesson (on Tuesday) and my last actual class (today, when I give the final). It's a very subtle distinction, of course, but you'll have to bear with me: one post wasn't enough of a celebration of the free time I'm looking forward to enjoying. While I will, of course, still be doing a lot of work-related stuff, so far the research and writing generally doesn't feel like work. That's a big reason why I went into academia in the first place.



And on that note, I though I'd pass on a little N as well as some P:

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The biggest WikiLeaks-related story in Turkey continues to be Prime Minister Erdogan's reaction to cables sent by American diplomats in which they allege that Erdogan owns several bank accounts in Switzerland with funds exceeding over one billion dollars.

Who knows if it's true? I wouldn't be surprised, but at the same time I wouldn't be surprised if the story is just a plant.

All in all, there seems to be a bit too much credulity re reports about what the cables or supposed to be saying—and I've been guilty of this as well. Let's wait until we actually see the cables.

And even when we do see them, there's still no need to fetishize a document. I always laugh when I see some historian on Turkish TV (I'm mentioning Turkey because it's the only country I know where real historians regularly appear on prime time television shows , not because Turkish historians are necessarily unique in this respect) holding a document and saying "this document proves..." Likewise, I feel dismay when I sense that scholars are cherry-picking evidence to suit their arguments.

One document out of context means next to nothing. The stuff that I've read in the Ottoman and Russian imperial archives is often filled with hearsay that constitutes nothing more than conventional wisdom (sound familiar) as well as a lot of information that's downright wrong and wrong-headed. Don't get me wrong—I love getting me fingers dirty in the archives! But just because something is a government document, that doesn't mean the information is correct, and sometimes the material is little more than a reflection of one individual's idiocy, one-sidedness, or prejudice. Nor does a single document, or even a small cluster of documents, tell us a lot if we don't know they lay of the land more generally with respect to what the other documents are saying.

Not that the WikiLeaks stuff can't be useful—it can be. But documents don't tell us the whole story.
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Having my cake and eating it too, part I : Radikal writes (in Turkish) that US State Department spokesman Philip Crowley has distanced the US government from the reported stories emerging from the WikiLeaks cables. According to Radikal, Crowley said the writings often just reflect "gossip" and claims found in magazines and other "unserious writings." 

Today's Zaman also covers this, with their own spin of course.
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Having my cake and eating it too, part II: a WikiLeaks cable that appears intriguing. According to this story, there were Afghan and US concerns that a private security contractor named DynCorp was using US taxpayer money to pimp out little boys to stoned police recruits.

The Afghanistan cable (dated June 24, 2009) discusses a meeting between Afghan Interior Minister Hanif Atmar and US assistant ambassador Joseph Mussomeli. Prime among Atmar's concerns was a party partially thrown by DynCorp for Afghan police recruits in Kunduz Province.

Many of DynCorp's employees are ex-Green Berets and veterans of other elite units, and the company was commissioned by the US government to provide training for the Afghani police. According to most reports, over 95 percent of its $2 billion annual revenue comes from US taxpayers.

And in Kunduz province, according to the leaked cable, that money was flowing to drug dealers and pimps. Pimps of children, to be more precise. (The exact type of drug was never specified.)

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Another big story in Turkey over the last few days has been about a 19 year-old pregnant student who was, apparently, kicked by police during a recent demonstration even after she told them she was pregnant. She later miscarried.

So it's a big deal that a pregnant woman was kicked and lost her baby. But it's not a big story when non-pregnant students get beaten up—it's not even news, in many cases, until somebody dies.

The story has drawn a lot of attention to police brutality, and recently there were apparently small demonstrations in response to the event.

Meanwhile, Taraf writes (in Turkish) about Turkish PM Tayyip Erdogan's take on the student protests. Erdogan's approach is to say that, yes, students have a right to protest, but they shouldn't be "provocative." Protesting is democratic, he says, but disrupting meetings and promoting violence is not.

True, true. But even the violence used by student protesters does not come in a vacuum. Indeed, they were protesting in response to the events leading up to the student's miscarriage, among other things.

While it's true that a number of protesters might be looking for trouble, they're also looking for the right to protest without there necessarily being any trouble.  

Of course, Turkey isn't the only country in the world where police brutality is an issue—it's an issue in the United States, too—but there seems to be an expectation of police violence in Turkey that, unless something like this happens, a lot of people seem to be pretty blasé about, or even approve of in some cases.

I'm not bringing this up as a means of demonstrating the existing of some kind of uniquely Turkish form of brutality. I think different cultures can become blasé to different types of things that people from other cultures would find shocking. In the eyes of people from other cultures, Americans can, for example, be very blasé about the loneliness and poverty of old people, who are generally treated with a lot more hand-on attention by children in other countries. Or about the fact that we're fighting two wars overseas (oh sorry, the Iraq war is over—tell that to the 50,000 US soldiers who are still there).

One of the great things, I think, about learning about another country is using an opportunity like this—seeing an issue that seems important to us but in some ways seems to be taken less seriously in another culture—to investigate our own blind spots more closely.

I think of stuff like this when I read Turkey described as "the country of no," or, more commonly, in other writings that seem to present Turkey (or other countries I'm interested in) as unique in their mayhem, chaos, or general wretchedness. When you think of it, any country can be a "country of no," depending on the question, no? And any country can be wretched, though it is also true that we can all be wretched in our own ways.

At least I always try to be.
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Speaking of (at least potentially) wretched behavior, here's a relatively detailed update to the story I discussed a couple of days ago in relation to the FBI using a "Muslim" impostor as an aggressive recruiter for "global jihad."

On Monday, we told you about Craig Monteilh, the rogue FBI informant so enthusiastic about finding terrorists in a California mosque that community members reported him to the FBI. Monteilh went public and sued the FBI after the fiasco, and, more recently, terror-related charges were dropped against mosque member Ahmadullah Sais Niazi, who was indicted apparently in large part because of information supplied by Monteilh.

But there's another twist. Niazi claims he was charged only after refusing to become an informer himself.

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The Jamestown Spooks appear to have gone dark. 
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Georgia arrests six people in connections with several explosions that have gone off in recent months, blames Russia.

Police said one of the key suspects was acting under the instructions of Abkhaz-based Russian military officer. The Interior Ministry said that the arrest were carried out on December 4. 

Two explosions in separate locations of the capital city left one woman dead overnight on November 28.

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This story's a couple of weeks old, but I liked it. It's about Allen Iverson, of course, and involved a local reporter from Philadelphia traveling to Istanbul, which also piqued my interest.

Iverson is not a sensation here, but rather an exciting curiosity for small pockets of basketball fans, playing for a club that doesn't even compete in Euroleague, Europe's most prestigious.

The 76ers' former all-everything guard is broke - by all accounts except his own - and playing here in Istanbul for a number of reasons, none of which is to become an ambassador for Turkey's solid, but often overlooked, professional league.

Iverson, by the way, is averaging 9.6 points and 3.6 assists after five games. Just keep in mind, please, that the European game is shorter than that of the NBA—just forty minutes, rather than forty-eight.


Hopefully Allen ends up enjoying his experiences in Turkey
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And now, just because I feel like it, here's a song from Mr. Sweet Voice himself, my old friend Mr. Ibrahim Tatlises.

While I began admiring Ibrahim Tatlises' music early on in the 1990s, I didn't see him in concert until he came to St. Petersburg, Russia in the early winter months of 2004. I was over there doing dissertation research, having fled the frozen temperatures of Kazan for the relative warmth of the humid capital.

As part of the Fulbright grant I'd received, I was able to spend up to $3000 for language study. This was a great opportunity: in Kazan I read first printed, then various types of handwritten documents written in Arabic-script Tatar from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In St. Petersburg, I worked with a Persianist from St. Petersburg State University who was by nationality Azeri. She was the chairwoman of the Azeri Society of St. Petersburg, and they were somehow involved in the organization of the concert.

Ibo, as Ibrahim Tatlises is known, appeared in tandem with a forgettable Azeri singer named "Azeri Kizi." Apparently she'd had a couple of hits in Turkey.

Ibo completely undermined her. Apparently she hadn't been singing, but rather was using a CD. Ibo, with a mischievous glance to the audience, went over to a corner of the stage and started messing with her CD, then announced "CD bozuldu" ("the CD is messed up"). He went up to her and offered to sing a duet with her—one of her own songs—but Azeri Kizi refused.

Ibo then came out and performed for three hours. No CDs were used. A very hardworking man—he put on a hell of a show.

Here is an older song of his—back in the 1970s, he acted in a lot of films where he plays a poor boy who can sing well. This must be from one of them.

And that, in case you hadn't noticed, was your N & P