conflict resolution

The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is supporting and encouraging Trump’s confrontational stance towards Iran. However, a military escalation would be extremely dangerous for Israel.

While the world keeps on talking about rhetorical disagreements between Turkish and European politicians, about Nazi-comparisons and cows the situation in southeast Turkey has been drifting out of the international focus. 

Bakur, a feature-length documentary produced in 2015, was to be screened as part of the non-competing category in the Istanbul Film Festival organized annually by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV). However, neither this documentary nor many of the films and documentaries which were to participate in the film festival were able to be screened. The apparent reason was that Bakur: A Guerilla Documentary did not have the registration document required by the Ministry of Culture.1 The fact that the registration document was not demanded until the date of the documentary’s screening caused public indignation and 21 filmmakers whose films were to be screened in the festival withdrew their films from the festival to support the producer and directors of Bakur.2

The so-called “settlement process” which began with PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party) leader Abdullah Öcalan’s letter dated Mart 21, 2013 triggered debates in Kurdish organizations other than PKK. Kurdish movements small or big, which are a distant to PKK, initially approached Öcalan’s letter “with a prudent optimism”.

Clearly, the most important trigger issue for Turkey had been the Kurdish question. In a Syria undergoing regime change, Turkey wanted to be on the good side of the potential new rulers from the start. Through first the Foreign Ministry , and later all its units, it started taking into its ambit all Syrian opposition, first the Muslim Brotherhood and the National Council, and then the pro-Al Qaida Al Nusra Front and Iraq Damascus Islamic State.