Apart from anything else, what really strikes me about Istanbul is its glorious  buildings, and how you can find traces of history in every one of them. On November 28th, a beautiful historic building, acknowledged to be the symbol of Istanbul, caught fire due to a “restoration” process taking place.

Five years ago, the government announced an architectural transformation project that would renovate Haydarpaşa station and the surrounding region. The project included transforming the Haydarpaşa station building into a hotel, making the area become a “World Trade Center”, and replacing the Haydarpaşa port with seven skyscrapers. These will surely make the historical feel of the district disappear. It’s not hard to see why the ruling party wanted to come up with such renovation plans in the first place, to make income out of it. The plan is very serious, although it is not reflected much by the Turkish media (which is not surprising under such oppression): You can click here to see the details of architectural project, led by an architecture company from France.

Arson, yes, it is indeed the favourite tool of Istanbul “developers” impatient for their big projects to begin. Perhaps in the future, it will be decided repairs will be too costly, so a new station will have to be built elsewhere, and as the building will have lost its primary purpose it will be transformed into a new showcase development.

It is such a shame to see historical monuments being wasted so that some political party will reap monetary benefits. I, like any other sane person from Turkey, do not want this area to be transformed into a shopping/entertainment hell, the city is already invaded by buildings of such sort. I hope I really am getting too far-fetched by accusing the ruling party with arson, I deeply wish to be proven wrong. I really wish Haydarpaşa is not, and will never be, the victim of some architectural project so that certain people make income out of it.

Iran has agreed to donate $25 million (£16 million) to Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in a move that will increase fears that Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan is preparing to abandon the country’s secular constitution.

Western diplomats say they are alarmed by reports that Mr Erdogan has negotiated a deal with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for Tehran to make a substantial contribution to the campaign funds of Turkey’s leading Islamic party.

Under the terms of the deal Iran has agreed to transfer $12 million to the AKP, with further payments of up to $25 million to be made later in the year. The money is said to be meant to help support Mr Erdogan’s campaign for re-election for a third term in next year’s general election.

(click on the first paragraph for more)

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Hurriyet Daily News

15.09.2010

Turkey denies Daily Telegraph claim of Iran donation to AKP

Iranian and Turkish officials have vigorously denied claims by the British Daily Telegraph that Iran recently donated $25 million to Turkey’s ruling party ahead of next year’s general election.

“This incident has never happened and those allegations in the news story have no evidence,” Ömer Çelik, vice president of the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, said Tuesday in a written statement.

Çelik also threatened to sue the daily unless it corrected the story.

….Despite the denials, author Con Coughlin defended his article Wednesday to online Turkish newspaper Gazeteport, saying the money had been transferred from the Iranian Ahl-Beit Institution to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan through the İHH, a Turkish aid organization some have accused of links with radical Islam.

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Commentary: I’m totally positive that AKP will never sue Daily Telegraph for this story is true. How do I know? Well, I live in Turkey and I’m not among the blinded masses. We already knew that AKP has always “borrowed” money to show the public that they have done a great job healing the economy, to pay for their campaigns and for numerous other reasons- except, we now know the source of the money.

Looking at the reader comments of this story, I agree with the reader who said “Money has not been an issue for the Prime Minister as money had always somehow appeared. Someone pointed out the charity fraud in Germany and The $25 Billion that came into Turkey which Erdoğan used as an investment fund during a speech. All laundered and brought into the possession of the AKP illegally. How on earth does a man own several luxury villas on the Bosphorus with the salary of a MP and PM?”.

It is also ironic that right after the referendum, Obama hailed “vibrancy of Turkish democracy” (he should have used the word “so-called” instead of “vibrancy”!)- and now the economic and political “pact” between his friend Erdoğan and his number one enemy Ahmadinejad is exposed. I wonder whether Obama knew about this… I guess we can never know since transparency in politics nowadays is nonexistent.

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

“…In a country where half the population is illiterate, you can not unite the people around Marx. The only thing that can really unite them is nationalism or a religious ethic…”

We can always read newspapers, watch the television, skim through online sources and conduct researches to learn further about a certain political event; however, none of these would be as interesting and as insightful as reading the ideas and memories of a person who has experienced the political event first-hand. To me, the human side of history has always had so much more meaning. Persepolis is a comic book which depicts the author Marjane Satrapi’s childhood up to her teenage years in Iran during and after the Islamic revolution (which evokes one of Stalin-like purges). What makes this book remarkable is that the story is told through the eyes of a child, so after reading this book the dull “facts” that you would generally come across in newspapers gained a vibrance and color for me. The book deals with themes such as, but not limited to, nationalism, childhood innocence, change, social class, education, oppression, gender, war, religion and ethics. I could connect to it on so many levels.

Hrant Dink talks about the relations of Turkish and Armenian communities and what should and shouldn’t be done in order to bring a peaceful end to the ongoing issues.

People who are prejudiced towards this humanitarian person should watch this video and understand the magnitude of Turkey’s loss.

(click on the title for the video in Turkish)

Yesterday, I read a column about democracy and how some governments fail to uphold democracy in practice. The columnist wrote that it is very normal for democracy to fail in states where the education level of people is low, to which I agreed. This is not hard to understand, uneducated masses lack the ability to grill and criticize, so deceiving them with fictitious promises is not a tall order. When the majority is ignorant, democracy is not in safe hands- just like John F. Kennedy once said, “the ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.”

On September 12, 2010, the proposition to amend the constitution passed with 21,874,192 votes for, and 15,878,206 votes against. %57.94 of the public voted for the amendments.

Talking about the relation between education and democracy, we should perhaps take a closer look at the vote distribution of the Turkish constitutional referendum according to the educational status of the voters:

From top to bottom: university, upper school, high school, middle school, elementary school, not educated. From left to right: yes, no.

The statistics say that %65.1 percent of people with no degree in education voted “yes”, whereas %58.3 of university graduates voted “no”.

(Now, readers reading this who are not familiar to the constitutional referendum might think that voters who have voted for the amendments have their own opinion and we might as well respect that. Firstly, the statistics above speak for themselves. Also, I can’t respect the ruling party whose leader previously declared that their aim was not democracy, democracy was just a tool. A tool for what? Surely, it is a tool to carve Turkey so that they will reach their aims to transform Turkey into a tyranny. No wonder why he is among my favorite authors, Aldous Huxley once said “All democracies are based on the proposition that power is very dangerous and that it is extremely important not to let any one person or small group have too much power for too long a time.” The party has been the ruling party for seven years now, and the referendum results show that they will continue to rule in the for a long time in the future, having such bigoted supporters.)

The date “September 12, 2010” has a particular significance to me now, it is the day I came to realize that democracy is a way of ruling that has lots of flaws in it- particularly in states where education is not efficient and the society in general is ignorant. I have been a liberal person to extreme levels, I value everyone’s opinion and I love the idea of equality the ballot box offers- however, this does not apply to Turkey. In Turkey, democracy is no longer democracy, it has become majority-rule.

Realizing these flaws is pushing me to have an elitist or even conservative approach in the fashion of Plato and Socrates, who were worried that the Agora (an open “place of assembly” in ancient Greek city-states where politicians would address the public – eventually the Agora became a place for merchants and their stalls, it turned to be both a political and a commercial place) merged the uneducated people’s everyday activities with “noble” matters such as law, philosophy and politics.

I have come to realize that when the majority is formed by uneducated people, the ones who are aware and educated are in great danger.Thomas Jefferson put it this way, “A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine”. It drives me crazy when votes of ignorant and unconscious people take away my rights, shape my civil liberties and shape my way of living. 

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“September 12, 2010” is now an important date for Turkey, to a level it is a turning point for Turkey- it is the date when the Turkish constitution got changed, certainly this referendum was more significant than general elections. The change is within the internal dynamics of Turkey, the change is within the substructure. Once the substructure is shook, the whole structure will eventually collapse.

Of course whether the change will lead to “brighter days” or back to the “dark age” depends on which side you are on, but one thing both sides do agree on is that things will never be the same again. Yet, one must keep in mind that after every turning point, there is a falling action.

I couldn’t take any photos myself in the rally, but here are some professional ones.

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Tomorrow I will be at CHP’s referendum rally in Izmir. I will post photos if I can take any.