Amberin Zaman is a Turkish journalist and a chief correspondent for Al-Monitor based in London covers major stories on the MENA . [1] Having started as a journalist in the early 1990s in Turkey, Zaman contributes to various newspapers throughout the world. Her reporting focuses on geopolitical trends, conflicts, diplomacy and human rights. She studied political science at Franklin College in Lugano Switzerland, speaks fluent English, French, Turkish and Bengali. [2]
Amberin Zaman is the daughter of Arshad-uz Zaman a former Bangladeshi Ambassador and member of parliament. Her mother is a Turk from Istanbul. [3] [4] She was born in New York City and studied in Switzerland. [5] Prior to joining Al-Monitor as a full time reporter in 2018, Zaman was The Economist’s Turkey correspondent for 16 years. She was also a regular contributor to The Washington Post, The Daily Telegraph, The Los Angeles Times and Voice of America and penned weekly columns in the Turkish language media. [5] After being sacked from Habertürk , Zaman was employed with the liberal newspaper Taraf. She also specialises in Kurdish issues and was a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC from January 2016 to June 2017. She is a columnist for Al Monitor since December 2018. [3]
Amberin Zaman has been a supporter of minority rights in Turkey. [3] [6] She is a proponent of normalization of Turkish-Armenian relations and regularly discusses the Armenian genocide in her columns. In 2014, she participated in a conference by the Hrant Dink Foundation that was dedicated to Armenian-Turkish reconciliation. [7] Zaman, who recognizes the Armenian genocide as fact, believes that the Turkish government must reconcile with its history concerning the Armenians. [8] [9] In response to the Turkish government's letter of condolences to Armenians on 24 April 2014, Zaman declared: [9]
As a citizen who believes that the Armenian genocide must be recognized, apologized for, and whose victims be properly compensated, even if these expectations may be far from occurring, I officially stand with the state's first written letter to the Armenian victims.
Zaman states that she is a target of a vilification campaign by pro-government media. [10] In 2013, Amberin Zaman was sacked as a journalist for HaberTurk because of columns that were considered unacceptable by the government. [10]
Zaman was attacked on Twitter for reporting the Gezi Park protests. She described the attacks as "abusive, violent and sexual". [11]
In 2014, the Prime Minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, called Amberin Zaman "A militant in the guise of a journalist, a shameless woman... Know your place!" [10] and "scum" at two successive election rallies. In a response to the accusations by the Prime Minister, Zaman wrote a column in the newspaper Taraf entitled "First be a human!" (Turkish: Önce insan ol!). [12] A public apology campaign had started with numerous human rights groups and journalist associations throughout the world. [13] Erdogan's rhetoric was condemned by a representative of the Organization for Security and Cooperation, The Economist, and the Turkish Journalists' Association. [13] The Equality Monitoring Women's Group of Turkey collected 130 signatures demanding that Erdogan apologize for his language. [13]
Zaman "experienced a mass attack on Twitter" for her reporting on the Charlie Hebdo shooting in January 2015. Zaman stated: "It's like a public lynching. It has made me frightened for my physical safety when I am out in the streets." [11] Zaman has not returned to Turkey since 2016. The Metropolitan Police have installed a panic button in her home in London. [14]
In November 2022 she experienced a smear campaign launched against her by pro-Turkish-government media outlets and social media users after she met with Turkey’s main opposition leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu in London. [15]
She is married to Joseph Pennington, the US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Iraq. [5]
Akdamar Island, also known as Aghtamar or Akhtamar, is the second largest of the four islands in Lake Van, in eastern Turkey. About 0.7 km² in size, it is situated approximately 3 km from the shoreline. At the western end of the island, a hard, grey, limestone cliff rises 80 m above the lake's level. The island declines to the east to a level site where a spring provides ample water.
Article 301 is an article of the Turkish Penal Code making it illegal to insult Turkey, the Turkish nation, Turkish government institutions, or Turkish national heroes such as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. It took effect on June 1, 2005, and was introduced as part of a package of penal law reform in the process preceding the opening of negotiations for Turkish membership of the European Union (EU), in order to bring Turkey up to EU standards. The original version of the article made it a crime to "insult Turkishness"; on April 30, 2008, the article was amended to change "Turkishness" into "the Turkish nation". Since this article became law, charges have been brought in more than 60 cases, some of which are high-profile.
Perihan Mağden is a Turkish writer. She was a columnist for the newspaper Taraf. She was tried and acquitted for calling for opening the possibility of conscientious objection to mandatory military service in Turkey.
Diplomatic relations between Armenia and Turkey are officially non-existent and have historically been hostile. Whilst Turkey recognised Armenia shortly after the latter proclaimed independence in September 1991, the two countries have failed to establish diplomatic relations. In 1993, Turkey reacted to the war in Nagorno-Karabakh by closing its border with Armenia out of support for Azerbaijan.
Hrant Dink was a Turkish-Armenian intellectual, editor-in-chief of Agos, journalist, and columnist. As editor-in-chief of the bilingual Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos, Dink was a prominent member of the Armenian minority in Turkey best known for advocating Turkish–Armenian reconciliation and human and minority rights in Turkey. He was often critical of both Turkey's denial of the Armenian genocide and of the Armenian diaspora's campaign for its international recognition. Dink was prosecuted three times for denigrating Turkishness, while receiving numerous death threats from Turkish nationalists.
Censorship in Turkey is regulated by domestic and international legislation, the latter taking precedence over domestic law, according to Article 90 of the Constitution of Turkey.
Hakan Coşkun is a Turkish journalist and columnist, currently working at Hürriyet, CNN Türk and Kanal D. He studied at Bursa Religious High School and then Bursa Divinity Faculty. He used to be anchor-man for the television channel Kanal 7 founded by Necmettin Erbakan the founder/leader of Welfare Party. He was appointed editor of Hürriyet in 2019.
Events from the year 2007 in Armenia
Altuğ Taner Akçam is a Turkish-German historian and sociologist. During the 1990s, he was the first Turkish scholar to acknowledge the Armenian genocide, and has written several books on the genocide, such as A Shameful Act (1999), From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide (2004), The Young Turks' Crime Against Humanity (2012), and Killing Orders (2018). He is recognized as a "leading international authority" on the subject. Akçam's frequent participation in public debates on the legacy of the genocide have been compared to Theodor Adorno's role in postwar Germany.
The prominent Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was assassinated in Istanbul on 19 January 2007. Dink was a newspaper editor who had written and spoken about the Armenian genocide and was well known for his efforts for reconciliation between Turks and Armenians and his advocacy of human and minority rights in Turkey. At the time of his death, he was on trial for violating Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code and "denigrating Turkishness". His murder sparked both massive national protests in Turkey itself as well as widespread international outrage.
A rally commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the 1992 massacre of Azerbaijani civilians and armed troops by local irregular Armenian forces and the 366th Commonwealth of Independent States Guards Motor Rifle Regiment took place in Istanbul on 26 February 2012. It was the largest campaign within "Justice for Khojaly" framework. The demonstration with slogan "We are all from Khojaly" started in front of Galatasaray High School and lasted several hours in Taksim Square with around 200,000 participants.
The confiscation of Armenian properties by the Ottoman and Turkish governments involved seizure of the assets, properties and land of the country's Armenian community. Starting with the Hamidian massacres and peaking during the Armenian genocide, the confiscation of the Armenian property lasted continuously until 1974. Much of the confiscations during the Armenian genocide were made after the Armenians were deported into the Syrian Desert with the government declaring their goods and assets left behind as "abandoned". Virtually all properties owned by Armenians living in their ancestral homeland in Western Armenia were confiscated and later distributed among the local Muslim population.
In Turkey, xenophobia and discrimination are present in its society and throughout its history, including ethnic discrimination, religious discrimination and institutional racism against non-Muslim and non-Sunni minorities. This appears mainly in the form of negative attitudes and actions by some people towards people who are not considered ethnically Turkish, notably Kurds, Armenians, Arabs, Assyrians, Greeks, Jews, and peripatetic groups like Romani people, Domari, Abdals and Lom.
"I Apologize" is an online campaign launched in December 2008 in Turkey by numerous journalists, politicians, and professors, calling for a collective apology for the Armenian genocide, which the campaign calls "the Great Catastrophe that Ottoman Armenians were subjected to in 1915." The campaign was launched by Prof. Ahmet İnsel, politician Baskın Oran, Dr. Cengiz Aktar, and journalist Ali Bayramoğlu. The campaign emphasizes regret on behalf of Turkey that Armenian requests for recognition of the 1915 genocide have been actively suppressed within Turkey. The campaign was signed by 5,000 people within the first 24 hours, and had collected over 30,000 signatories by January 2009. The campaign created widespread outrage in Turkish society.
Hasan Cemal is a Turkish journalist and writer. He was the editor of Cumhuriyet from 1981 to 1992, and of Sabah from 1992 to 1998. In 2013 he resigned from the Milliyet newspaper after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had criticised his article supporting Milliyet's publication of minutes of a parliamentary visit to Abdullah Öcalan, and Milliyet suspended him and refused to publish his returning column.
The 2013 Gezi Park protests in Turkey saw massive amounts of censorship and disinformation by the mainstream media, especially by those supporting Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP). A poll done by Istanbul Bilgi University in the first week of the protests showed that 84% of the demonstrators cited the lack of media coverage as a reason to join the protests, higher than the 56% of protesters who referred to the destruction of Gezi Park.
Cengiz Aktar is a Turkish political scientist, essayist and columnist. He has published numerous books on the European Union and its relations with Turkey. He was a director at the UNHCR and worked extensively with the European Commission. He initiated a campaign calling for an apology of the Turkish citizens towards the Armenians for the Armenian genocide.
Anti-Armenian sentiment or Armenophobia in Turkey has a long history dating back to the Ottoman Empire, something that eventually culminated in the Armenian genocide. Today, anti-Armenian sentiment is widespread in Turkish society. In a 2011 survey in Turkey, 73.9% of respondents admitted having unfavorable views toward Armenians. According to Minority Rights Group, while the government recognizes Armenians as a minority group, as used in Turkey this term denotes second-class status. The word "Armenian" is widely used as an insult in Turkey by both civilians and by politicians.
Markar Esayan was an Armenian author, journalist, and politician of Turkey. He was a member of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey for the Justice and Development Party representing Istanbul since 2015 and a member of his party's Central Decision-Making and Executive Board. He was one of the first Armenian members of Turkey's parliament in decades alongside Garo Paylan (HDP) and Selina Özuzun Doğan (CHP).
Yasemin Çongar is a Turkish journalist, writer, and translator.