Saturday, November 25, 2006

All About Turkey

Like the good journalist that he is, Anderson Cooper has probably been prepping for his visit to Turkey for quite some time now. Here at FreakSpeakers, we thought we'd give you the condensed version. The great part of Anderson's travels is that whenever he goes somewhere, we are bound to learn something new!


Below are images of the capital city of Ankara...





Location: Southeastern Europe and Southwestern Asia (that portion of Turkey west of the Bosporus is geographically part of Europe), bordering the Black Sea, between Bulgaria and Georgia, and bordering the Aegean Sea and the Mediterranean Sea, between Greece and Syria. Slightly larger than the state of Texas.

Population: 70,413,958 (July 2006 est.)

Background
: Modern Turkey was founded in 1923 from the Anatolian remnants of the defeated Ottoman Empire by national hero Mustafa KEMAL, who was later honored with the title Ataturk, or "Father of the Turks." Under his authoritarian leadership, the country adopted wide-ranging social, legal, and political reforms. After a period of one-party rule, an experiment with multi-party politics led to the 1950 election victory of the opposition Democratic Party and the peaceful transfer of power.

Since then, Turkish political parties have multiplied, but democracy has been fractured by periods of instability and intermittent military coups (1960, 1971, 1980), which in each case eventually resulted in a return of political power to civilians. In 1997, the military again helped engineer the ouster - popularly dubbed a "post-modern coup" - of the then Islamic-oriented government. Turkey intervened militarily on Cyprus in 1974 to prevent a Greek takeover of the island and has since acted as patron state to the "Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus," which only Turkey recognizes. A separatist insurgency begun in 1984 by the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) - now known as the People's Congress of Kurdistan or Kongra-Gel (KGK) - has dominated the Turkish military's attention and claimed more than 30,000 lives. After the capture of the group's leader in 1999, the insurgents largely withdrew from Turkey, mainly to northern Iraq. In 2004, KGK announced an end to its ceasefire and attacks attributed to the KGK increased.

Turkey joined the UN in 1945 and in 1952 it became a member of NATO. In 1964, Turkey became an associate member of the European Community; over the past decade, it has undertaken many reforms to strengthen its democracy and economy, enabling it to begin accession membership talks with the European Union.

Chief of State: President Ahmet Necdet SEZER (since 16 May 2000)

Religion: Muslim 99.8% (mostly Sunni), other 0.2% (mostly Christians and Jews)

6 comentarios:

Jennifer said...

Nic is a busy guy again. He currently is in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia this morning reporting live for CNN as Cheney visits his friends for the Mideast talks.

Lee said...

This should be an interesting week. I lived in Turkey for a year so I'm really looking forward to next week's shows.

Hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving.

Jennifer said...

@lee...I bet that must have been an interesting year! We're you stationed in Turkey in the military?

courtney01 said...

Hi, Lee. I hope you had a nice Thanksgiving as well.

And thank you to Jade for the great info on Turkey. I'm looking forward to Anderson's visit and hoping he does a Reporter's Notebook...

Lee said...

@Jade. Yes, I was in the military. I was assigned to Incirlik AB and lived in Adana. It was really interesting. It was my first overseas assignment and I really had no idea what to expect. I was there part of two winters. The first winter, the apartment building only had heat from 7-9 pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays and we only had hot water on the days we had heat. The second year we had heat every evening but still only had hot water on Tuesdays and Thursdays. You'd lie in bed at night and listen to explosions around town but those stopped after the 1980 coup you mentioned. I think Turkey was probably the most interesting assignment I had.

Hi, Courtney.

MediaDoc said...

Hi Everyone!

MANIFESTO

Don't think for me. Don't assume what I want to hear or read. Give me facts. Give me reasons. But not yours. Bring me debate. Enlighten me. Today, accountability is masked behind anonymity; bylines are hidden by zeros and ones. Everyone publishes; everyone is "in the know." Ethics are non-existent. Speculation is king. The truth is masked and a hostage. Empowered by our minds, WE ARE THE FREAKSPEAKERS!

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