A tattooed pop star banned for her slinky dresses and support for women’s rights. Kurdish artists blacklisted and concerts canceled out of concern for alcohol-fueled frolicking between boys and girls.
Turkey’s summer festival season is off to a politically charged start that foreshadows the cultural battles brewing in the polarized country in the run-up to next year’s election — the toughest of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s two-decade rule.
Artists fear that the fun is being drained out of Turkey to flatter the conservative Islamic core of Erdogan’s eroding support.
Photo: AFP
Guitar-strumming folk singer Abdurrahman Lermi — known as Apolas Lermi on stage — offers a case in point.
Lermi saw two of his concerts canceled and social media light up in anger after he refused to take the stage in solidarity with a Greek violinist banned from performing in the traditionally conservative northern port city of Trabzon.
Lermi’s decision to back a fellow artist from a country Turkey has spent much of its history fighting appeared too much for organizers in a municipality run by Erdogan’s ruling party.
“I was accused of being the enemy of Turkey, the enemy of the Turks and a separatist,” Lermi said.
Turkey’s main musicians’ association is understandably upset.
“These bans are unacceptable,” Musical Work Owners’ Society of Turkey president Recep Ergul told reporters.
Musicians and other performers have often felt unfairly singled out by Erdogan’s government for their socially liberal views.
A sweeping crackdown that followed a failed 2016 coup attempt saw numerous independent theaters closed. Music venues reopened during the COVID-19 pandemic long after almost everything else.
Many now worry that their concerts might be sacrificed in the months to come as a show of strength aimed at burnishing Erdogan’s image before his nationalist and conservative voters.
Musicians who sing in minority languages, such as Kurdish, appear to have been affected the most.
Popular ethnically Kurdish singer Aynur Dogan was last month banned from taking the stage in a ruling party-run municipality after organizers deemed her concerts “inappropriate.”
Dogan had previously been targeted by pro-government circles on social media for defending big protests against Erdogan when he was still prime minister in 2013.
Other minorities banned in the past few months include Niyazi Koyuncu — whose repertoire includes songs in dialects of Armenian and ancient Black Sea region tongues — as well as the ethnically Kurdish but German-based Metin and Kemal Kahraman brothers.
“These arbitrary and political decisions amount to discrimination against languages, cultures, lifestyles and genders,” the bar associations of 57 Turkish cities said in a joint statement.
The conservatives’ resurgent cultural influence under Erdogan is perhaps most vividly visible on the Turkish music scene.
One Islamic group managed to successfully pressure the governor of the northwestern city of Eskisehir to ban a festival because “girls and boys who camp together” engage in “inappropriate scenes because of alcohol.”
Another group managed to get pop star Melek Mosso’s shows canceled in the western city of Isparta because of her “immoral” low-cut dresses.
The tattooed star is a strong proponent of the Istanbul Convention combating violence against women that Erdogan — under pressure from the most conservative elements of his ruling coalition — pulled Turkey out of last year.
Turkey’s Supreme Court is due to rule in the coming weeks whether Erdogan had the authority to annul the treaty in an overnight decree.
The European convention was ratified by parliament and would theoretically need its approval for Turkey to leave.
Mosso pushed back against those who “question” her morality and vowed to sing in Isparta “one day.”
She then drew a large crowd at a public concert in the more liberal Istanbul organized by the Turkish Ministry of Culture.
Turkish Minister of Culture Mehmet Nuri Ersoy denies the existence of a government policy targeting minorities and embracing conservative values.
“Let’s try to look at the wider picture,” the minister told a private broadcaster. “We support art and culture. This is our government policy.”
The performers do not agree. More than 1,000 artists and composers have published a joint declaration proclaiming that “music and musicians cannot be silenced.”
Many of the younger women attending Mosso’s Istanbul performance said they felt victimized by Erdogan’s government.
These bans “are a blow to women’s presence in social and working life,” concertgoer Ezgi Aslan said.
“Values such as women’s rights are not being defended by the ruling party,” fellow audience member Selin Cenkoglu added.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the