Word: ankara
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...issue, Turkey has been increasingly edgy over the past few months, with the country's secularist establishment - mainly the military and the courts - locked in a struggle for power with the Islamic-rooted ruling party. On Monday, the 11 judges of the Constitutional Court began deliberating in the capital, Ankara, on whether to ban the AKP for anti-secularist activities. Separately, a court last week agreed to take up an indictment against 86 people - including military officers, journalists and senior businessmen - accused of high-profile political killings, extortion and violence designed to foment unrest and justify a military coup...
...Aykan Erdemir, assistant professor of sociology at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, argues that the treatment of the Alevi is a crucial litmus test that Turkey is failing. "The [Alevi] are not only offering an alternative, more Western-ready version of Islam," he says. "They also show that Sunni conservatives in power in Turkey are in fact extremely bigoted and spreading hate language...
Falling trade barriers with the West have also reinvigorated some of Turkey's ancient trade centers. In the old Silk Road city of Kayseri, formerly Caesarea, 150 miles (240 km) southeast of Ankara, some 400 factories producing everything from electric cables to blue jeans have sprung up in the past several years. Exports from that city and its sister "Anatolian tigers," as Turks call the industrial hubs of the central part of the country, have doubled since 2002. "We will take care of Europe in its old age," jokes Mustafa Boydak, head of Kayseri's Chamber of Commerce, citing Turkey...
...mindful of upsetting Iraq's only fairly peaceful region, is urging Turkey for a quick end to the invasion targeting separatist Kurdish rebels based in the mountains of north Iraq. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in Ankara today, called for the operation to be over shortly and for the government to address the economic and social concerns of its Kurdish minority, which complains of cultural and other restrictions as well as deep poverty...
Since November, the U.S. has been providing military intelligence to the Turkish army, helping target air strikes. Now that the Turkish army is engaged on the field in north Iraq, it may not want to pull back quickly. Ankara is deeply suspicious of the regional Kurdish government there, which it accuses of supporting the PKK. It is also concerned that the largely autonomous region may seek independence, in turn fomenting similar demands by its own restive Kurdish population. In response to Gates' remarks, the Turkish military did not set a timetable for withdrawal. "Short-term is a relative notion. Sometimes...