the Turkish Daily Mail reader and a prison .....

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Today I went off and covered the opening of the court case against 86 senior Turkish nationalists accused variously of murder, membership of a terrorist organisation and plotting the overthrow of the current government……or, on the other side of the coin the government has used the arrest of a small number of extremists to then detain dozens of their political opponents and simultaneously deflect attention from the accusations against them of breaching the secular constitution by following an Islamist agenda. Take your pick, or go somewhere between……either way, hundreds of nationalist supporters turned up to a dusty, sun drenched car park to voice their support for the detainees on day 1 of the trial.

My favourite statistic so far is that the length of the indictment against them running at 2,455 pages, is 35 times longer than those for the Nuremburg trials. the trial is going to take between 2 months and 2 years; and in the meantime 70+ prominant nationalists spend their time in jail; are busy defending their cases and are out of the way......

One Turkish guy provided me with a 10 minute monologue in perfect English on how this was all a show trial; how anyone who was educated knew that and that the problem was that the people who voted in the AKP are all uneducated and that’s why they get into power. I asked him why it was that after decades of nationalist rule these people were “uneducated”; “because the immans want to control them”……ahhh, that’s it then……..and not because no one would spend money educating girls and Kurds in the East then?

“…….I know this because I used to have a market stall in Camden [London] for 10 years……I left because the country is going to the dogs. It’s full of bloody immigrants who don’t work and just claim the dole; the problem with Britain is that it’s full of people who don’t understand the culture. That’s why I came back to Turkey.....”. You just couldn’t make it up

Here's the link to the publication:
http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/insight/articles/eav102008.shtml