Özgün Özçer

It was meant to be a massive show of support for peace and democracy. It is remembered as the deadliest terror attack in Turkey’s history. It was our darkest hour and, three years later, we are still waiting for dawn.

It was meant to be a show of might, a showcase of Turkey’s economic status under the rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP). The size and capacity of Istanbul’s new airport were designed to make Heathrow look small, Charles de Gaulle blush with embarrassment and O’Hare turn green with envy. From groundbreaking ceremony […]

When asked what was more difficult, being a Turkish football player in Germany or a Kurdish player in Turkey, Deniz Naki didn’t hesitate. “Of course, being a Kurd and Alevi [a dissident branch of Islam whose members tend to social liberals] in Turkey,” said the footballer who played both for St Pauli in Hamburg and […]

The preparations were complete. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was about to be sworn as the country’s first president invested with super-executive powers. Erdoğan had triumphed over the chaos and mayhem of an aborted coup two years earlier to fulfil a career-long ambition. However like the protagonist of a Shakespeare play, this victory was to have a […]

Regress is progress. This could be one of the doublethink slogans of Ingsoc omitted by George Orwell in his magnum opus 1984. But under Tayyip Erdoğan and his ultra-right allies who helped him be reelected for a second term, albeit this time with full presidential powers, doublethink is far from being fiction – and dystopia […]

Urban Dictionary defines “dangerous” as “cool and sexy” but in “a James Dean rebel sort of way.” Turkish prosecutors define “cool and sexy” as the sort of thing which should get you arrested. As for hip hop, if the experience of Ezhel – by common consent Turkey’s most creative rapper – is anything to go […]

Turkish leaders are furious after more than 60 Palestinian protesters were killed on the Gaza border, but opposition cries hypocrisy.

When Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s president, called for snap election on June 24, more than a year ahead of schedule, he was hoping to catch the country’s already fragmented opposition even further off guard. There was no magic formula to make secularists, Turkish nationalists, Kurds, leftists and pious conservative malcontents all unite and time was already […]

It takes a brave bureaucrat to contradict Bertolt Brecht but Turkey’s top broadcasting watchdog did just that when it issued a million Turkish lira fine (€200k) for a simple kiss.

Students, academics, and a young teacher have been jailed or sentenced to prison for the most innocent of all charges: Publicly calling for peace.