Caucasus Journey IX: Getting Settled in Tbilisi

April 16, 2009 It’s been a busy few days. After working all day at the Kutaisi archive on Monday, I went out to dinner with Nino, a professor at Kutaisi State University that I had met at the archive that day. Then, the next morning, I had to return to the archive in order to pay my 20 tetri  [about 13 cent] per document fee for using archival materials. The process was pretty straightforward. I went to the bank, waited in two lines, signed my name to four sheets of paper, had each of them stamped twice, then took them back to the archive to prove that I’d paid. Couldn't have been any simpler, really. After paying my debt to the archive, I headed back to the apartment where I was staying and picked up my things. The family I was staying with was friendly, as was their little dog. We bid our farewells and I took a taxi to the bus station. The trip from Kutaisi to Tbilisi took about three and a half hours, and was gorgeous. For much of the journey, there were long rows of snow-capped mountains on either side of us. The regions we passed through were pretty populated, with one small town our village pretty much blending into the next. Traveling from the second largest city in the country to the capital, the road was two-lane and badly potholed until about twenty miles outside of Tbilisi.

Ergenekon, and on and on

April 15, 2009 I don't have much time, so I'm going to quickly post a excerpt from Hurriyet newspaper's English-language site relating to the most recent arrests in Turkey's ongoing Ergenekon investigation. Pay particular attention to the last three lines of this passage, beginning with "Things that the professors had in common." Police detained 29 people, including three former and two incumbent university rectors, in the 12th wave of the Ergenekon probe. Police searched 83 different places, including the offices of the Association for Supporting Contemporary Life, or CYDD, in the operations that were held simultaneously in 18 provinces. Professor Mehmet Haberal (Baskent University in Ankara), Professor Osman Metin Ozturk (Giresun University in the northern province of Giresun), and former rectors Professor Fatih Hilmioglu (Inonu University in eastern province of Malatya), Professor Ferit Bernay (Samsun University in northern province of Samsun), Professor Mustafa Yurtkan (Uludag University in northwestern province of Bursa), who is also the deputy chairman of the Kemalist Thought Association, were taken to Istanbul for interrogation. Things that the professors had in common: They were all against freedom of headscarf at universities, they were all appointed by former president Ahmet Necdet Sezer, and they are all known for their Kemalist thoughts.

Caucasus Journey VIII: Leaving Kutaisi

April 13, 2009 I woke up on Sunday to beautiful clear weather. It was so clear, in fact, that on my way into town in the morning I realized that Kutaisi was surrounded by snow-capped mountains I hadn’t seen the previous two days. Since I hadn’t been able to see the mountains during the course of Saturday’s excursion to the Bagrati Cathedral on the bluff overlooking Kutaisi, I decided to hike up there again in order to get some better photographs. In the afternoon, I went out to Vani, about 25 miles southwest of Kutaisi. Vani is an ancient city, established in the 6th century BC. I took a marshrutka out there, with the hour-long ride taking me through some really gorgeous scenery.   Vani and the Mountains

Caucasus Journey VII: Cruisin' Kutaisi and Environs

April 12, 2009 Today (Saturday) was a lot of fun. It was raining and nasty out in the morning, so until about one o’clock I just screwed around with my computer, working on my photo album for this trip. In the early afternoon, however, the sun came out and I decided to check out the sites. I’m really glad I did.  The first place I went was Bagrati Cathedral, which dates to the eleventh century. The cathedral is located on a hill overlooking the city, and the views of Kutaisi are really great from there. Most of the cathedral itself is undergoing heavy restoration so isn’t too much to look at right now.

Caucasus Journey VI: From Batumi to Kutaisi

April 11, 2009 Despite all my plans to leave Batumi on Thursday, I ended up staying an extra day. There were two main reasons for this. First, there were anti-government demonstrations taking place all over the country on Thursday, and a number of people had warned me that the roads between cities might get closed if the protests got too large or unruly (after all, it’s been just five years since street demonstrations overthrew Georgia’s last president), and in any case I didn’t feel like getting caught up in the middle of a protest while trying to find a hotel and get into town from the bus station. Secondly, it had been pouring rain in Batumi for two solid days, and most of my clothes were soaked. I decided to stay in (the archive was closed anyway because of the state holiday). I rigged a clothesline by tying the six-foot long electrical cord from the spanking-new television (mounted near the ceiling in a corner of the room) to the wardrobe by using a small portion of dental floss. I had to do it this way, because the only heat in the room came via a small electrical fan on the wall, which only warmed things directly in its path. While my clothes dried, I worked for several hours on an article of mine that I’ve been meaning to send out for publication. I spent the whole day indoors, listening to the rain pour down incessantly. Finally, in the evening, it let up a little bit and I decided to go out and get some dinner. The plan was to just grab something light, then head back to the hotel and get some sleep. Of course, it didn’t work out that way. Sitting alone at dinner, I was adopted by the group sitting at the table next to mine. We spent the next several hours talking and pounding shots of homemade vodka. This was followed (stupidly) by more drinking of homemade wine. By the time I got up to leave and looked at my watch, it was almost two o’clock.

Caucasus Journey V: Batumi Marathon

April 9, 2009 Wednesday was another long day in Batumi. Actually, I’d planned on being out of town by Tuesday morning, but my research detained me. Even though the folks at the archive had declared two of the files I wanted to look at [from the 1880s] “top secret,” there was still a lot for me to look at. As is usually the case with archives, once I thought I was out, I got dragged back in. So, to make a long story short, I ended up working there not only on Tuesday, but also all day Wednesday. At your service: the staff of the archive reading room

Caucasus Journey IV: Batumi by Day, Batumi by Archive

April 7, 2009 So far, I’ve been having a really super time in Georgia. Frankly, I feel rather coarse saying this, because so many people here are obviously hurting. All the same,  I’m really glad I came here. After crossing the border on Saturday afternoon I had the taxi driver take me to a hotel I’d found in Lonely Planet. The rooms looked pretty good and I took one quickly, since I was jonesing pretty bad to get out and see the sites.

Caucasus Journey III: Crossing the Border

April 5, 2009 I woke up Saturday morning in Trabzon at about eight o’clock. After grabbing a couple of poğaças and some morning tea from the local pastane, I returned to the Nur Hotel, packed up my stuff, and headed off to the train station. It was time to head to Georgia. Black Sea on my left en route to Hopa

Caucasus Journey II: The Long Road to Trabzon

April 3, 2009 Thursday started early, with the alarm clock at 5am. I had an 8:30 flight from Sebiha Gökçen airport on the Asian side of the city, and needed plenty of time to get there. From Arnavutköy I took a taxi to Taksim, where I caught the 6 am Havas airport bus to Sebiha Gökçen. I made it in plenty of time, arriving at the airport at about 6:45.

I'd never been to Sebiha Gökçen before. Istanbul’s main airport, Atatürk airport, is on the European side, and that’s still where all of the international and most of the domestic flights leave from and arrive into. But Sebiha Gökçen opened in 2001, and has gradually been picking up more and more domestic flights. They’ve got an international terminal as well, but it appears to still be under construction.

Caucasus Journey: Getting Started

April 2, 2009 On Thursday, April 2, I'm beginning my Caucasian odyssey with a flight from Istanbul to Trabzon, a city on the Black sea coast of Turkey. After spending a day or so in Trabzon, I'll travel by bus to Hopa, just across the border from Batumi and about three and a half hours from Trabzon. From Hopa I'll take a minibus to the border, and from there plan on walking across the border and then taking a taxi into Batumi. Batumi, I think, will be pretty cool. Despite my years of education in Russian and Ottoman history, I really don't know much more about the city than what is written in its wikipedia entry. I'd known, for example, that Batumi had been part of the Ottoman Empire (indeed, the city has been an important part of my research here in Istanbul), but I hadn't known that Batumi, which I've been looking at mostly in the context of the late nineteenth century, had been part of the Ottoman Empire for so long (1627-1878). Since I've been spending a lot of time looking at issues like smuggling, illegal immigration, and other forms of cross-border travel, I really hope to get the chance to do some archival work when I'm in Batumi.

A few comments on the Turkish election results

March 31, 2009 On March 29, nationwide elections were held in Turkey for various offices in provincial, municipal, and neighborhood government. I'm sure many of you have already seen the headlines regarding the election results, so I'll jump quickly to a few points that interested me. This was the first time since the AK Party was founded in 2002 that the party has lost votes from one election to the next. In the last local elections, held in 2004, the AK Party received 41.7% of the vote for city mayors. In the last parliamentary elections in 2007, the AK Party won 47% of the vote. This year, the party won a little less than 39% of the vote--a disappointment, but still more than the 34% than the party one the first time it picked up a parliamentary majority in 2002.

Eurasia and Steve Kotkin's "Ab Imperio," Part deux

March 30, 2009 In my previous post, I summarized Princeton historian Steve Kotkin's important article, "Mongol Commonwealth? Exchange and Governance across the Post-Mongol Space."  As someone who works primarily with Turkic and Russian documents with respect to issues spanning Central Asia, Russia, the Caucasus, the Ottoman center and the Turkish Republic, the question of what to call the region I work on is something that I've put a lot of thought into over the years. Originally, I tried to get out of the question altogether by simply describing myself as a "modernist historian," but people always wanted me to be more specific than this. In just about every job interview I had, someone from the hiring committee asked me to describe the region that I work on.

Eurasia and Steve Kotkin's "Ab Imperio," Part I

March 28, 2009 As some of you may have noticed, I've recently been playing around with the name of this blog, switching from something that was totally generic to something using the name 'Eurasia' to something else. And ruminating about what to call my blog [I ultimately decided to switch away from "Eurasia" but not because I think it's a bad name for an academic subfield] got me thinking again about Steve Kotkin's 2007 piece "Mongol Commonwealth? Exchange and Governance across the Post-Mongol Space," which I first read closely when I was in Ufa last summer.  In this piece, which was published in the journal Kritika (which is itself devoted to "Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History"), Kotkin takes on the concept of "Eurasia" and its use by North American academics to describe what once was called "Russian and East European Studies" (or variations thereof). "Suddenly," writes Kotkin, "Eurasia is everywhere."

Decision 2009: The Race for Muhtar

March 25, 2009 A fair bit of attention is being paid in the international media these days to the upcoming municipal elections in Turkey. On March 29, cities across Turkey (and “boroughs” inside major cities like Istanbul) will vote for mayor. One of the major questions of the day is whether or not the AK Party, which also holds power nationally in Ankara, will be able to receive more than fifty percent of the vote nationwide. While reaching fifty percent will have no practical impact on the status of the ruling AK Party in Turkey (except, of course, with respect to election returns), given the dominant position of the party in Turkish politics these days the "fifty percent or more" question is one of the only mysteries left. What can Terzi Hikmet do for you?

Azeri referenda

March 21, 2009 A constitutional referendum proposal was officially approved this week in Azerbaijan lifting presidential term limits. According to official tabulations, over 71 percent of the country's 4.9 legal voters turned out to vote in the referendum, which was held on March 18. According to Azeri law, there must be at least a 25 percent turn out for referendum results to be considered valid. The Central Election Commission, a state-based organization, claims that 91.7 percent of voters supported ending term limits, which will allow Azeri president Ilham Aliyev to extend his term beyond 2013.

Turkey's upcoming elections

March 18, 2009 Howard Eissenstat has an interesting piece in Juan Cole's Informed Content re the upcoming nationwide municipal elections in Turkey. In this piece, Eissenstat predicts a big victory for the ruling AK Party, and gives several reasons for backing up his argument. I agree with Howard--in my opinion, the AK Party might even outdo their mandate of 2007, when the party won nearly 47% of the nationwide vote in parliamentary elections. One point that I would add to Howard's analysis is the benefit that AK Party municipal candidates will reap from the fact that the AK Party has controlled a solid parliamentary majority in Ankara since 2003. Indeed, while it might not show up in ideologically-based formulations set up to explain the popularity of the AK Party, it's generally understood in Turkey that if you want your city to receive money from Ankara in order to pay for mass transit, a new university, or infrastructure maintenance, you'd better vote in an AK Party mayor. Not only does the AK Party have enough seats in parliament to approve spending bills for AK Party-friendly cities, but the government has now been in power long enough to have filled much of the permanent bureaucracy of the country with political supporters.  Turkish PM Erdogan In Izmir, where the AK Party is fighting hard to finally capture the mayoralty, Erdogan has given a series of speeches lately where he has emphasized the kind of service that municipal AK Party administration can give.  Universities, schools, roads, metros, and other forms of municipal improvement take place in AK Party controlled cities. For whatever reason, cities that don't elect AK Party mayors have more trouble getting money from Ankara to finance such projects.

America, Turkey and the 'Moderate Islamic Republic'

March 9, 2009 In a post from this past Saturday on Hillary Clinton's appearance on an evening talk show in Turkey, I mentioned that the first query posed to the American Secretary of State had been a bit of a trick question: does America see Turkey as a "moderate Islamic republic?" Clinton visiting Ataturk mausoleum

Cumhuriyet Ankara Bureau Chief Re-Arrested in Ergenekon Case

March 7, 2009 Mustafa Balbay, who is the Ankara Bureau Chief for the Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet, was arrested at his house at seven o'clock in the morning on Thursday, then was transported to Istanbul as part of the ongoing Ergenekon investigation. Last July 1--just weeks before a decision was to be made on the AK Party's closure in Turkey--Balbay had been arrested along with three other journalists and interrogated for four days in connection with police suspicions that the four journalists had been involved in the plotting of a coup against the AK Party government of Tayyip Erdogan.    Mustafa Balbay was arrested again on Thursday morning

Hillary in Turkey

March 7, 2009 Hillary Clinton is visiting Turkey for one day during the course of her eight day trip through the Middle East. Visiting Ankara, Clinton met with Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and Foreign Minister Ali Babacan. During the course of the visit, Clinton announced that President Obama would be visiting Turkey in April of this year. In the evening, the television network NTV broadcast a thirty-minute interview Secretary Clinton conducted with the panel and studio audience from "Haydi Gel Bizimle Ol" ("Come and Join Us"), an evening current events show hosted by four Turkish women representing different generations.

Cumhuriyet asks: if we go silent, who will speak out?

March 5, 2009 On Sunday the front page of Cumhuriyet was left almost entirely blank in order to protest growing government interference in the free press in Turkey. As I wrote in my posting yesterday as well as in an earlier posting, the largest media group in Turkey, the Dogan Group--which is considered unfriendly to the AK Party government in Turkey--has recently been targeted by the Turkish Ministry of Finance for an investigation looking into non-payment back taxes. This comes on the heels of the suspicious takeover of the second-largest media group, ATV-Sabah, by a group headed by the son-in-law of Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan in November of 2007.

Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan: I'm no Maganda

March 3, 2009 In a recent post, I talked a little bit about the numerous lawsuits that Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has filed in recent years against journalists and cartoonists. Today it was reported that Turkey's litigious leader is suing the leader of the political opposition, Deniz Baykal, for character assassination. According to the newspaper Vatan, Erdogan is suing Baykal 100,000 Turkish Liras (about $57,000 US) becasue Baykal criticized Erdogan's "maganda style" (maganda üslubu) at a rally in the Black Sea city of Sinop on February 28. Erdogan is also suing Republican People's Party spokesman Mustafa Ozyurek for 20,000 Turkish Liras. In Turkish, the term 'maganda' is a very offensive word which is used to evoke hot-headed macho gold-wearing men lacking in general culture. That Baykal would even use the word at all is representative of his generally tin ear when it comes to addressing anyone outside his educated urban base. Don't call this guy a maganda, either This marks the fifth time that Erdogan has sued Baykal for character defamation. On two occasions, Erdogan sued for 25 thousand liras, and a third time for 20 thousand, losing on all three occasions. There has not yet been a ruling on a fourth lawsuit, in which Erdogan is demanding 40,000 liras. Last month, Erdogan won an award of 4,000 liras from the Turkish humor magazine Leman, after Leman published a photomontage of Erdogan flipping his middle finger. Erdogan had originally sought 20,000 in the case. I've written about this before but I'll say it again: Erdogan's frequent lawsuits against journalists and political rivals (thought to total over fifty lawsuits since Erdogan's AK Party took power in 2003) amount to an intimidation tactic unbecoming to Turkey. These lawsuits, moreover, need to be placed in the context of other events which have taken place in recent years. In late 2007, the second largest media company in Turkey, ATV-Sabah, was put into government receivership after its owner went bankrupt. Emerging out of nowhere to buy the company was an outfit called Calik Holding, which obtained loans from state-controlled banks in order to purchase the media firm. And who is Calik Holding's general manager? Tayyip Erdogan's son-in-law, Berat Albayrak. Now the Turkish government is going after the largest media holding company in the country, the Dogan Group. In late February, the Ministry of Finance announced that it was fining the Dogan Group--whose owner, Aydin Dogan, has been sharply critical of Erdogan over the past six months--a record 826 million Turkish Liras ($490 million). This amount is larger than the value of the entire company, which would most likely send it into government receivership if the Dogan Group fails in its bid to appeal the ruling. While there have always been certain issues (mostly relating to Kurds, Armenians, Islam, and--once upon a time--communism) that could get people in trouble if they wrote about them, within such boundaries the media has generally been free in Turkey. Since I first began living here in 1992, I have never seen anything like the concerted and multi-faceted effort that is currently taking place to silence or buy out government critics. When this happened in Russia several years ago, the editorial staff at the Washington Post and other American media outlets routinely (and rightly) denounced Vladimir Putin for quashing democracy and the free press. In the case of Turkey, however, it's really a non-story. Indeed, while Turkish journalists have to defend themselves from lawsuits filed by their own Prime Minister, American journalists who are paid to report the news from Turkey are largely ignoring this story.

Turkish Politics and the News I: A Putinesque Muzzling of the Media

February 23, 2009 Last week, the Turkish ministry of Finance fined the Doğan media group 826 million Turkish Liras ($490 million), the result of the state's investigation into the company's taxes. The fine, which is the largest ever assessed a company in Turkey, is larger than the company's entire estimated value. The company has vowed to appeal the ruling, which will cripple the media group if allowed to stand. This news comes in the wake of a series of events taking place in Turkey which, in some ways, are reminiscent of efforts undertaken by the Kremlin in recent years to bring independent media in Russia under state control. Whereas in the case of Russia such efforts have been roundly (and justifiably) criticized in the western media, the increasingly interventionist approach of Turkey's AK Party (whose Turkish initials stand for Justice and Development, or Adalet and Kalkınma) government vis-a-vis the country's independent media has been largely ignored.

Turkish Politics and the News II: the Ergenekon investigation

February 23, 2009 At the end of my post yesterday, I wrote that western media correspondents covering Turkey are failing to look closely enough at the efforts of the AK Party to silence media criticism. Indeed, Western (and particularly American) correspondents continue to see the Turkish military as the main threat to democracy and press freedom in Turkey--and the military is, of course, an important threat in this respect. But the AK Party itself, as I discussed yesterday, is also showing a troubling tendency to silence its press critics. As has been the case in Russia in recent years, this is being done through state-sponsored purchases of media companies whose media outlets criticize the state, and through seemingly targeted investigations into their tax payments. Unlike Russia, however, the AK Party government tends to receive generally good press in the American media, which continues to view the party as an important counterweight to the anti-democratic impulses of the military. Nowhere has this tendency to focus on the military and ignore the AK Party been more pronounced than in American coverage of the Ergenekon trial.

Turkish Politics and the News III: A Newspaper Called Taraf and its Many Foreign Fans

February 23, 2009 This is the third and final post in my "Turkish Politics and the News" trilogy. I hope it's been as fun for you as it has been for me. In my first post from a couple of days ago, I wrote about the machinations which had brought ATV-Sabah, the second largest media group in Turkey, under the control of Turkish Prime Minister Tayyıp Erdoğan's son-in-law, and the attacks that the largest media holding company in Turkey, the Doğan Media Group, is now facing from Turkey's finance ministry.  In my post yesterday, I discuss the Ergenekon trial, and my concerns that it is being used to not only unearth secrets from Turkey's "Deep State," but also to attack the opposition. Today I'm going to talk about American coverage of Turkish politics, as well as discuss a newspaper, Taraf, which is becoming increasingly influential among foreign observers of Turkey.

Seeing Islam in the Violence

February 22, 2009 In the Washington Post this morning there were two stories which caught my eye. Both of them, unfortunately, related to murder. The first related to the efforts of Muslim organizations in the United States to speak out against domestic violence in the United States. These efforts were spurred, in part, as a response to the beheading of Aasiya Zubair Hassan in Orchard Park, NY, a suburb of Buffalo. Hassan's husband, Muzzammil, has been charged in the murder. The second story I noticed was about the arrest of an 11 year-old boy in Wampun, Pennsylvania. Authorities there say that the child had been charged, as an adult, in the murder of his father's 26 year-old girlfriend, who was eight months pregnant. The 11 year-old who was charged with the murder is believed to have shot the woman with a "youth model 20-guage shotgun." The gun, which apparently belonged to the boy, "is designed for children, and such weapons do not have to be registered."

Kurdish protests mark 18th anniversary of Ocalan's arrest

February 15, 2009 Protests took place today across Turkey to mark the tenth anniversary of the arrest of PKK leader Abdullah Ӧcalan in Kenya. Ӧcalan was later brought to trial and imprisoned on the island of İmralı in the Marmara Sea, where he is the only prisoner in residence. Pictures taken of demonstrations taking place in Batman, a city in southeastern Turkey, can be seen here.  Abdullah Ocalan in the 1990s

Turkey and the Armenian Genocide Issue

January 16, 2009 Yigal Schleifer, writing for Eurasianet.org, has recently posted an interesting piece regarding  a Turkish website set up last December which apologizes for "the insensitivity showed to and the denial of the Great Catastrophe that the Ottoman Armenians were subjected to in 1915." The site, which was set up by 300 Turkish academics and intellectuals, invites Turks to sign their names below a statement reading: My conscience does not accept the insensitivity showed to and the denial of the Great Catastrophe that the Ottoman Armenians were subjected to in 1915. I reject this injustice and for my share, I empathize with the feelings and pain of my Armenian brothers and sisters. I apologize to them. As of January 17, more than 27,000 individuals are listed as having signed the petition. The petition campaign hasn't received a lot of attention in the Turkish media, but it has attracted numerous retorts and counter-allegations from within the Turkish blogosphere.  When I first started living in Turkey in 1992, I was often surprised by the degree to which almost all of the people I met here seemed to feel personally invested in the issue of whether or not the Ottoman government committed a "genocide" against Ottoman Armenians in 1915. Not only did I find the near uniformity of opinion on this matter to be striking, but it also seemed interesting that Turkish people would feel their national honor to be so closely bound up in events which occurred eight years prior to the creation of the Turkish Republic in 1923.  I often had trouble understanding why, having traditionally rejected so much of their Ottoman past in favor of the Turkish Republic, Turkish people would feel so defensive with regard to this issue. Yet there are a number of reasons, of course, why Turkish people would feel so defensive about this issue. Many Turks feel that their history is being compared to that of Nazi Germany, which strikes them as particularly galling when so much of Turkey's current population is made up of the descendents of Muslims who fled genocidal conditions in the Balkans, the Crimea, and the Caucasus. Why, it is asked, does no one ever seem to raise the question of genocide with regard to the French in Algeria, or the United States and the native Americans, the Russians in the Crimea and Chechnya, or the Armenians themselves in Nagorno-Karabakh? Additionally, many people are concerned that, since Turkey is the legally recognized successor state to the Ottoman Empire, any acceptance of culpability to genocide could lead to claims for reparations, even demands for territory. Indeed, many of the postings I've read on Turkish blogs in relation to the online petition campaign raise these questions. There is a lot of finger-pointing, and a lot of effort to distinguish the events of 1915 from the Holocaust or from various definitions of the term "genocide." Clearly, the Armenian genocide issue is something which is still extremely difficult for people in this country to talk about. After all, the Republic of Turkey was founded at the conclusion of over a solid decade of war which witnessed an incredibly brutal series of events befalling both the Muslim and the Christian populations of the region. Talking about these events outside of the traditional "forging of a nation" narrative surrounding the triumphs of Ataturk is not something that many people in this country are accustomed to, and doing so opens up a very painful chapter in Ottoman/Turkish history. But I think that undertakings like the petition campaign are an indication that people here are growing more comfortable bringing up these issues.  It is worth noting that the online petition does not mention the word "genocide" anywhere. I think that's probably a good idea. Discussion of this issue has all too often concentrated on the suitability of the term "genocide" for describing the events of 1915. While I think that such a debate is definitely worth having, I also feel that arguments over terminology have too often become a distraction from what should be the most important issue here: the recognition of the incredible suffering that befell innocent civilians of a variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds during a very dark period in this region's history. Perhaps by starting with such a recognition, both Turks and Armenians can begin to move towards a healthier discussion of these events.

Turkish Money Talk

January 11, 2009 "That'll be one million seven hundred thousand" said the man in the shop, charging me an amount which, if calculated literally, would come out to a little more than one million US dollars. I was purchasing a small box of band-aids. On January 1st of this year, the government of Turkey replaced the currency, which previously had been called the New Turkish Lira. The new currency is just called the Turkish Lira, minus the 'new.' So: the old currency is called the New Lira, and the new currency is just called the Lira. This is because, in the bad old days of 100% annual inflation the (old) Turkish Lira (not the old New Turkish Lira) was devalued so much against the dollar that it had to be replaced by the New Turkish Lira, which is now old. Now, they're dropping the 'New' and going back to the old. This of course is not the old Lira, but a new Lira entirely. But not, mind you, the New Lira.

Film Review: Mustafa

November 9, 2008 Earlier this week I went to see "Mustafa," Can Dündar's controversial new documentary about Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey. I have always considered Dündar a rather bland figure, well-known for his vaguely liberal left-of-center and very uncontroversial views. Dündar is a newspaper columnist who has written a number of books on contemporary affairs, but he'd always struck me as someone who was more interested in asking questions than in staking out an opinion. Fifteen years ago he came out with an earlier documentary of Atatürk which I have never seen, but which was tame enough to have served as standard fare for Turkish elementary school classrooms every since. It was therefore surprising to hear that many people had found his latest endeavor insulting to Atatürk, even in a country where hagiography often passes for history when it comes to Turkey's first president. I found the first half of 'Mustafa' much less interesting than the second. Indeed, Dündar is mainly concerned with the Turkish War of Independence and subsequent years, so the parts of the film detailing Mustafa Kemal's childhood and early career offer little excitement. Indeed, Dündar seems to be in a bit of a hurry to get on to the War of Independence, skipping over major events like the Unionist takeover in 1908 and Kemal's activities in Libya. There is, in fact, much about Kemal's life during these years that I think audiences would find interesting, but Dündar doesn't stray far from the general outlines of Kemal's life that are already of general knowledge in Turkey. As a result, the film feels like it is simply going through the motions at this stage while Dündar looks ahead to the second half of the film.