everybody is writing about turkey, part 2

The Washington Post has a good piece on the memory September 1955 anti-minority riots in İstanbul that I wrote about previously. The article uses the exhibit at Karşı Sanat as a jumping-off point for a wider discussion about nationalism and identity in Turkey today. There seems to be an outpouring of surprisingly good journalism on Turkey in the US and UK press of late; it's surely driven by the forthcoming EU showdown on Monday, but the actual reportage has touched on a much broader range of subjects--and has done so with much more nuance and care than usual. Here's a nice opinion column from the Guardian on "EU-style regime change" and politial reform, and an unsparing NYT piece on the horrific abuse of patients in state mental hospitals in Turkey. (If you read Turkish, the organization I'm working for also has a report on the latter subject here.)

On a slightly more cheerful note, the verbal drubbing that a group of Turkish women's rights activists gave Karen Hughes on the Ankara stop of her recent "public diplomacy" tour of the Middle East has been the subject of extensive press coverage (including a little piece I wrote, which, alas, seems to have acquired some interesting typos in the publishing process).