The basics don’t change. The basics are: people are born with rights. That’s what we, many nations of the world, have agreed upon and have put down on paper in international treaties and declarations. The right to self-determination, the right to express yourself in your...
Fréderike Geerdink was in a short holiday in Greece and wrote this article for yournalistinturkey.com They earn some €30 a day, Greek youngsters working in tourism during the summer. While their country is going through hard economic times, they are happy they found a...
Fréderike Geerdink Turkey’s wanna be bedroom coach, that’s how I saw Prime Minister Erdogan being described on Twitter this weekend. Fresh in the mind is Erdogan’s call on Turkish couples some years ago to have no less than three children, now he has taken a strong...
Fréderike Geerdink Esra wants to take me to the local shop. I’m not sure why, but she insists and takes me by the hand. In the shop I want to buy her and her sister a notebook because they want to practice their writing all the time. But she doesn’t like it. She wants a...
Fréderike Geerdink “Abdullah Gül has no right to speak”, I hear all the time as a reaction to President Gül resisting the ideology of Dutch politician Geert Wilders, which discriminates against people and marginalises them. That’s because Gül has a problem handling...
Fréderike Geerdink I have not been blogging for over a week. I have been uncertain what to blog about. Recently I have written a lot about oppression of Kurds, and I felt I needed more variety in my subjects. So I was pondering what to write about. But today, I decided to...
So much for the world wide attention for press freedom in Turkey. The two most famous Turkish journalists in jail, Ahmet Şık and Nedim Şener, were set free on Monday night, pending trial. Joy all over the place and I’m happy for them too; but in a way it also makes me...
Fréderike Geerdink ‘You can’t go there’, two police officers in a car tell us. I pretend to be a tourist and say: ‘But I know the view from there is so nice, why can’t we go and see it, I was here before with no problem’. ‘Maybe so’, they reply, ‘but now...
The verdict is there: RojTV, the Kurdish TVchannel broadcasting from Belgium with a Danish license, will not be closed. Good news! A victory for the freedom of speech. Having said that, I deeply wish for RojTV to disappear naturally, or at least to radically change. I have...
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