Birgul Isik had not expected to find her oldest son waiting for her at the bus station when she and four of her children returned from Istanbul to the central Anatolian province of Elazigon on Tuesday.
She certainly wasn't expecting the 14-year-old to pull out a gun as she moved to embrace him."You've disgraced the family," he said, and shot her five times in the head and chest.
She is still in a coma.
For the police who charged the boy with attempted murder, and arrested his father and uncle on suspicion of incitement, it is just another example of the "honor" crimes that result in the deaths of scores if not hundreds of Turkish women each year. Most die for breaking the rules of propriety: they talk to men in the street, they wear the wrong clothes, they insist on education rather than an early arranged marriage.
Isik's crime was to appear on television. It was the fifth time she had fled her violent, bigamous husband. Ignored by the authorities, abandoned by her own parents, who reportedly told her "a woman's place is with her husband," she finally agreed last Friday to appear on a show many have described as Turkey's equivalent of Oprah Winfrey.
You only have to glance at Yasemin Bozkurt's daily program Woman's Voice to see why. There's the live studio audience, the frequent angry exchanges. The themes are familiar too: match-making, runaway children, violent husbands.
A radical break from Turkish TV's traditional mix of local sitcoms and Hollywood fare, the show, like its half-a-dozen competitors, has proved a hit. Despite the early afternoon slot, it regularly rates among the country's top 10. It has also courted controversy from the start.
The presenters see themselves as defenders of women's rights, confronting issues that had previously been hidden away in the silence of family homes. For their critics, they are purveyors of "victimization TV," using people's suffering to improve ratings and advertising revenue.
According to RTUK, the state body that monitors -- and censors -- broadcasts, 3,600 viewers complained about the shows in the first three months of this year.
"I'm fed up with watching women fight on TV," said one. Another complained that his wife was so engrossed she no longer got up to get her children a glass of milk.
Nedim Hazar, a columnist for the conservative daily Zaman, was blunter. If the presenters refuse to make changes, he wrote last month, "they should build a clinic, a prison and a morgue in their studios."
Events on April 16 seemed to prove the critics right.
A day after they appeared on Woman's Voice to talk about bride exchange, a custom particularly widespread among Turkey's Kurdish minority, two men were shot to death by a relative. A policeman was also killed trying to intervene.
Despite media outrage, the show escaped unscathed. This week's attempted murder in Elazig changed that. On Wednesday, Kanal D announced it was suspending Woman's Voice. Another private channel followed suit with its equivalent, You're Not Alone.
"These programs touch a raw nerve," said the RTUK's head, Fatih Karaca, in support of the closures."They discuss family, children, marital relations -- sensitive topics to Turks -- in an indecently open way."
Yasemin Bozkurt's peers rallied round her. Blaming the violence on the show is absurd, argued her Show TV rival Serap Ezgu.
"Let's ban Formula 1 -- it encourages speeding. Let's ban cartoons -- last month a kid jumped from the fourth floor because he thought he was Superman," Ezgu said.
For sociologist Ayse Oncu, the vilification of the shows has a lot to do with the audience they cultivate -- lower-middle-class housewives. It's not for nothing, she says, that critics condescendingly call the shows shanty-town TV.
A new online voting system aimed at boosting turnout among the Philippines’ millions of overseas workers ahead of Monday’s mid-term elections has been marked by confusion and fears of disenfranchisement. Thousands of overseas Filipino workers have already cast their ballots in the race dominated by a bitter feud between President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and his impeached vice president, Sara Duterte. While official turnout figures are not yet publicly available, data from the Philippine Commission on Elections (COMELEC) showed that at least 134,000 of the 1.22 million registered overseas voters have signed up for the new online system, which opened on April 13. However,
ALLIES: Calling Putin his ‘old friend,’ Xi said Beijing stood alongside Russia ‘in the face of the international counter-current of unilateralism and hegemonic bullying’ Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) yesterday was in Moscow for a state visit ahead of the Kremlin’s grand Victory Day celebrations, as Ukraine accused Russia’s army of launching air strikes just hours into a supposed truce. More than 20 foreign leaders were in Russia to attend a vast military parade today marking 80 years since the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II, taking place three years into Russia’s offensive in Ukraine. Putin ordered troops into Ukraine in February 2022 and has marshaled the memory of Soviet victory against Nazi Germany to justify his campaign and rally society behind the offensive,
CONFLICTING REPORTS: Beijing said it was ‘not familiar with the matter’ when asked if Chinese jets were used in the conflict, after Pakistan’s foreign minister said they were The Pakistan Army yesterday said it shot down 25 Indian drones, a day after the worst violence between the nuclear-armed rivals in two decades. Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif vowed to retaliate after India launched deadly missile strikes on Wednesday morning, escalating days of gunfire along their border. At least 45 deaths were reported from both sides following Wednesday’s violence, including children. Pakistan’s military said in a statement yesterday that it had “so far shot down 25 Israeli-made Harop drones” at multiple location across the country. “Last night, India showed another act of aggression by sending drones to multiple locations,” Pakistan military spokesman Ahmed
US President Donald Trump on Wednesday said that he would make a decision about how the US government would refer to the body of water commonly known as the Persian Gulf when he visits Arab states next week. Trump told reporters at the White House that he expects his hosts in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates will ask him about the US officially calling the waterway the Arabian Gulf or Gulf of Arabia. “They’re going to ask me about that when I get there, and I’ll have to make a decision,” Trump said. “I don’t want to hurt anybody’s
RSS