you may access all covers of our magazine Perspectives-Political analysis and commentary, starting with the first issue of 2012

For Europe, the current refugee crisis presents a two-fold challenge: Will we uphold our humanitarian values, that is, do we view the refugees as people in need and with a right to a safe haven? And will the EU, in the face of this challenge, act as one?

The discourse over the right path to development started way before even the notion of official development assistance (ODA) was conceived in the speech of the then U.S. president Harry S. Truman in 1949. Already then his so called four-point plan was aimed at winning “the hearts and minds” of people in the developing world, but this notion mixed clearly with the idea that other than in the centuries before democratic and humanitarian ideals and not imperial ambitions should be at the heart of such development. 

When I was five years old, I learned how to read and write, and also noticed that a lot of women were illiterate while the great majority of men were literate. I thought that women of the same age as my mother should know how to read and write.I ventured to teach them and tired out the aunts who embraced me with love. I do not remember if any one of them learned how to read and write. However, now when I look back, I see that I enjoyed challenges—if there was problem, I wanted to help solve it.

An important center of the Armenian genocide was Diyarbakır. Both the urban Armenian population and the convoys passing through the city were massacred. In their study One Hundred Years of Sorrow - On the Track of Social Memory: 1915 Diyarbakır, (“Yüzyıllık Ah! – Toplumsal Hafızanın İzinde: 1915 Diyarbekir”) published by the İsmail Beşikçi Foundation, Adnan Çelik and Namık Kemal Dinç searched for the specter of genocide haunting the city by drawing on intergenerational transmissions, political facts and the reflections of the genocide in Kurdish literature.

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 election of Mustafa Akıncı as the new president of Northern Cyprus clearly marks the beginning a new era for Turkey-Northern Cyprus relations, as well as a new era for reconciliation in Cyprus.

First, let’s address some misconceptions, a few figures and a few claims such as: “Agriculture is a backward and primitive activity. If it has to be done, it should be done intensively and without manpower.” “Air, water and soil are infinite. They can be exploited unconditionally.”

Camp Armen was founded in Üç Çınar in the province of Tuzla by the Gedikpaşa Armenian Church Foundation in 1962. Its purpose was to provide summer education to Armenian children; it educated 1500 children in the 21 years during which it was in service. Most of these children were orphans and nearly 95 percent of them live abroad today. The situation of the Camp is no different from its children who were raised here but could not live in their own country.

Political parties have run their course as well; their representative function works in a roundabout way, with various mediators and subcontractors. People’s demands and representation are not able to be dealt with directly. People and NGOs went out on the street and cried out their demands but it stopped there. Ministries constitute the heart of the state; the bureaucracy has become so bloated that it is about to burst. The cumbersome state is collapsing. There is discontent and violence.