The head of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) was in Strasburg yesterday to deliver a speech at the Council of Europe.
Created in 1930, INTERPOL Ankara is one of the first and oldest INTERPOL National Central Bureaus (NCB), its official website says.
Ali Babacan, one of former President Abdullah Gül’s recruits, was among the founders of the Justice and Development Party (AK Party). Following the party’s electoral victory in 2002 he became a key figure in the government’s economic policies.
Just 24 hours after the failed coup attempt of July 15, 2016, some Western colleagues were convinced that it was all a charade staged by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
An urban legend throughout the 1990s was that “American helicopters have dropped arms to the PKK,” the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party.
“We have met with a dozen human rights activists from Turkey and not one of them asked to suspend the accession process. We cannot assume to know better than they do,” one official from the European Commission recently said.
Turkey’s ruling elites have to make a choice: Do they want to fight against the threat of the Gülen network, or do they want to silence all forms of legitimate dissenting voice in Turkey?
A move that Turkey had been expecting to come from Europe actually came from the U.S., catching Ankara by surprise.
Turkey’s ruling elites have an oxymoronic attitude in their outlook toward the United States administration. On the one hand, they think U.S. President Donald Trump is not part of the “establishment,” which is against Turkey, yet on the other, they pin their hopes on him to stop the deterioration in bilateral relations.
