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Today, for the first time ever, Turkey’s official broadcaster, TRT, broadcast a television program in the main Kurdish dialect. This program is part of a series in minority languages, including Arabic and Bosnian. The Kurdish language broadcasting is the most important because the Kurds are by far the largest minority and ‘the Kurdish issue’ is arguably the biggest issue in modern Turkey. In 1998, if someone had claimed there would be Kurdish programming on Turkey’s national broadcaster they would’ve been laughed at (or thrown in prison for subversion).

It is yet to be seen whether this weekly broadcast will remain a token 30-minute effort to please the European Union or if it is the start of a major philosophical change.

Personally, I would like to see all Turkish people learn Kurdish, Arabic or another minority language as a second language at school, similar to the system in Switzerland. Every school student learning Kurdish (or another second language) would help demystify ‘the issue’, give greater recognition to all people in Turkey and assist in removing any basis for the PKK or similar terrorist groups. This would be a revolutionary change and I doubt it will happen for many years.

Some news reports concerning the Kurdish broadcast on TRT:

Associated Press

BBC

BBC again

Al Jazeera

AFP via EU Business

Addendum [12 June 2004]: An interesting Economist article on the broader Kurdish debate is here.

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We are into the 2nd week of June and the summer weather has not yet arrived!

The children are on school holidays but the maximum temperature each day is still in the late 20’s to early 30’s centigrade. Many afternoons the stiff sea breeze often pushes open the door at work. With the high humidity the comfort factor is not a perfect 10, but I’m very happy to accept 8+1/2 every day!

Summer, with its 35-40 degree centigrade days, has usually reared its ugly head by now. Hooray for good weather!

Don’t worry, I will write when summer does come!

Click on the “Mersin’s Weather” link on the right hand side to find out the latest forecast.

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On Friday night I bought my first ice cream from Ali’s and Derya’ shop. Every summer they set up in the same location. A cone topped by 6 different flavours of ice cream (vanilla, chocolate, melon, pistachio, strawberry + 1 other) and dipped in desiccated coconut is still 500,000 TL. This is the same price as 2003, possibly even 2002, amazing for Turkey, given the country’s tradition of rising prices. As well as devouring an ice cream myself, I gave one to Huseyin abi, my shopkeeper friend.

Saturday evening I spent at Hanifi amca’s place. Along with my neighbour was his nephew from Nizip, Gaziantep and two other visitors. It was a good night of meze and accompanying alcoholic beverages. One of the visitors had spent 8 years in Chechnya. To shoe for tis time, he spoke Russian and had two bullet-hole scars- one on his inner forearm, the other on his torso.

Yesterday, after a Turkish breakfast, again at Hanifi’s, I walked upstream along the river. To my joy, I ‘discovered’ another weekly bazaar. At a few places along the river boys were playing in the water. I guess the boys have a good immune system. The river water at the start of summer (when the level is low) and this far downstream can’t be very healthy.

I brought my bazaar-purchased plastic containers, tea holder, tomatoes, eggplant, strawberries and melon back along the river home. By the time I came home I was thirsty. I made a delicious soda-ayran yoghurt drink in my 1 litre Efes Pilsen beer mug. Directions: Shake up 400 gm yoghurt, water, ice and a few shakes of salt. Pour into the glass. Add 300 ml soda water. Enjoy! The soda water creates frothy bubbles and gives the ayran a zing.

Yesterday evening I strolled to the yacht harbour in the beautiful late afternoon light. Near ‘Luna Park’ there are three tea gardens: the Luna Park cafe and two further gardens. I drank tea and wrote about my aims and goals for the present and future. This is something I should do more often. When almost home, I smelt marijuana in the night breeze. It probbaly came from a nearby tea house. Unless my memory is hazy, this is the first ever time I have smelt (or noticed) marijuana in Turkey. I know it exists, but I never want to get mixed up in it.

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Today I received a non-spam email sent to my previous Yahoo! account. It was from Mattias, a Swede I met in Dogubeyazit, far Eastern Turkey in December 2002 and coincidentally, again in Damascus 1 month later.

In Dogubeyazit, Mattias was coming from Iran on his way through Syria to meet up with a group in Jordan for a tour of Iraq. Prior to Dogubeyazit he travelled through Russia to China and back west through the Central Asian Republics. By the time I met him he was sick of travel and required something special to excite him. The Iraq tour, only 4 months before the US/UK (plus token allies) invasion, was that something special. When I bumped into him again, after the tour, in Damascus, his friend showed me photos of Iraq.

Pre-invasion photos of Iraq and many, many other countries are displayed on his fantastic photography website: www.mattiasgustafsson.com. I hope you enjoy them!

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If you are ever bored with my blog, impossible that this maybe, and want a bit more randomality in your blog surfing click on the link below. The link will direct you to another Blogger blog. Click on the link again and you will visit a different blog.

http://www.blogger.com/redirect/next_blog.pyra

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Recently work had a problem involving the Lexmark X125 fax/copier/printer/scanner/telephone.

We mainly use it for faxing and it replaced an old fax-paper fax. A few years ago I suggested getting a plain-paper fax machine. Before this my boss had never heard of a plain-paper fax.

Anyway, the interface started displaying “ADD RIGHT CART.“. We could receive faxes but they could not print. We changed the current black & white cartridge with another one. The problem remained. I remembered a similar problem we experienced previously. On that occasion I followed the instructions from the support website and the machine fixed itself. This time, the problem remained, even after the 3rd and 4th attempts to fix it. For a short time we even resorted to using an ancient, last resort, fax machine.

Sevil telephoned Lexmark support in Istanbul. They suggested we should try with a new cartridge. The next morning Serkan brings a new cartridge and, wham, bam, thank you mam, the fax printer is operational again!

You may ask, where is the conspiracy in this?

The conspiracy is a new, genuine Lexmark X125 cartridge costs 50,000,000 TL whereas an unofficial cartridge refill is 5 times cheaper. What a fraud! I do not know how the fax machine differentiates between the cartridges. I do bet Lexmark spent time and $$$ ensuring the machine did differentiate.

The conclusion: printers and other ink consumers are not designed to be sold at great profit. It is the ink cartridges where the money comes from!

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After the latest posts from Jen, Tom Gara, Christopher, Deniz and Ebru (thank you all) this is how the GuestMap currently looks. As one can see, there are 21 smiling cuties from 13 different countries.

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In this article, Irshad Manji’s perspective on Islam is very interesting. If ever her ideas were implemented properly there could be many positive effects including reducing the violence detailed in the previous post by better empowering women. I have not read the book yet so I can’t make a proper judgement and I doubt her ideas would be widely implemented by the Muslim world in my lifetime anyway.

Irshad’s official website is here.