An American Life in Istanbul

Current Mood: Alarmed

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is visiting Turkey today. She will be attending a conference on Iraq between Iraq’s neighbors, to talk about security in Iraq and many other issues. Her appearance visit here is to hopefully keep Turkey from invading Northern Iraq, where a large Kurdish population is believed to be protecting members of the international denounced terrorist organization called the PKK (Kurdish Workers Party). For those of you that do not know you can catch up by scanning of the few articles I have linked to here:

• Iraqi President off Summit List
• Kurdish Troops Move Towards Turkey
• Turkish Helicopters Pound Kurdish Rebels
• Rice Heads to Turkey
• Turkey Out of Patience
• Turkey Raises Heat on Iraq

I talked a bit about the PKK in an earlier blog post, Turmoil in Turkey.  Things have been getting worse day by day and people  feel confident that Turkey will move into Northern Iraq. After Rice’s visit here, the Prime Minister Erdogan will visit the US. It has gotten to the point though that the government here can not ignore the overwhelming pressure from the people to do something about the PKK. There have been massive demonstrations. The other night all the taxi drivers in Istanbul gathered in Taksim to demonstrate. Many young people using Facebook made their profile pictures a Turkish flag (including myself). Turkish flags have been hung in windows, on cars, outside of buildings. The country is bursting with nationalism.

What does this mean for me. It’s actually not too bad. There was some growing anti-American sentiment when the US was on the eve of voting to acknowledge the killing of Armenians in 1915 as a genocide (Delay requested in house ‘genocide’ vote). This however has been overshadowed by the growing problems with the PKK and now the people have turned their anger to the Turkish government for its inaction.

Several of my friends have not done their military service and their time is about to come. Here in Turkey, there is a mandatory 1 year military service (six months if you have a college education) for all male citizens. Many people put it off to study first. Now, several of my friends are about to run out of time and are going to have to go to the military service. A friend I play games with will be going in January. With Turkey on the brink of war, this is a terrifying prospect for young Turks like him.

A more direct impact on my life is that my meeting today at work was canceled. We have visitors here who were planning to meet with us this afternoon. With Secretary Rice in town, the traffic in Istanbul has apparently gone from really bad, to really really bad. They called us this morning and said the whole city is deadlocked and that they would have to come on Monday; I love Turkey. I cannot wait to drive to the city this evening.

My opinion on this whole situation is… well I don’t have one. The Turks feel so strongly about what’s going on, and I don’t really know very much of the history of this conflict. I have therefore decided just to keep my mouth shut when the topic comes up and to not have an opinion. It’s safer that way.

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