25% Of Children Are Poor

Turks love to bluster about their country, the reality is that despite the alleged AKP economic miracle, Turkey and Turks are still desperately poor.

Bahcesehir University Center for Economic and Social Research (Betam): ONE IN EVERY FOUR CHILDREN IS POOR (PDF)

April 22, 2013

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We use[d] the Survey of Income and Living Conditions 2006 and 2010 to study material deprivation, as measured by access to basic needs of nutrition, heating and clothing, of children between the ages of 0 and 15. The variables used are the ability to “eat meat, chicken or fish every other day”, “keep home adequately warm” and “afford new (not second-hand) clothes” respectively. Children who live in households that do not have the ability to meet any of these basic needs are defined to be poor children. According to this definition, 4.6 million children, i.e. one in every four children, are materially deprived (Table 1).

When we look at the basic needs separately, we see that 40.3 percent of all children who live in Turkey live in households that cannot keep their homes adequately warm and 40.8 percent of children cannot afford new clothes. 12.5 million children are not able to consume meat, chicken or fish every other day, i.e. their nutritional needs are not met. Given that two out of three children do not have access to main sources of protein, we can conclude that these children cannot have a healthy diet.

There have been significant improvements from 2006 to 2010. Share of materially deprived children decreased from 34.7 percent to 24.4 percent. Looking at the components of material deprivation, it is clear that the improvement stems from the clothing item. The share of children who cannot afford new clothes fell from 60.2 percent to 40.8 percent. One can guess that this striking improvement is a result of the decrease in the relative price of textiles. There has been some improvement in heating and in nutrition, albeit smaller.

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Data points to stark regional differences. ... An overview reveals that child poverty deepens as we move from the western to the eastern regions. ...

One in every three children is materially deprived in East Black Sea and Northeast Anatolia. However, child poverty is more widespread in Southeast Anatolia. 42.1 percent of children who live in Southeast Anatolia are materially deprived. To reiterate, 1 million 200 thousand children in Southeast Anatolia cannot meet their basic needs as measured by nutrition, heating and clothing.

... 66.9 percent of children living in Turkey cannot eat meat, chicken or fish every other day. Even in the most privileged regions, such as Istanbul (57.4 percent) and Central Anatolia (55.6 percent), more than half of the children cannot satisfy their basic nutritional needs. In Southeast Anatolia, 80 percent of children cannot.

In Turkey, 40.3 percent of children live in households that cannot heat their homes adequately. Even though the share of children in such homes are lower in the western regions, in Istanbul, Central East and Southeast Anatolia, almost half of the children live in homes that are not adequately heated.

Moreover, 40 percent of children cannot replace their old clothes with new ones. This is more common in Mediterranean, East Black Sea and Central East Anatolia. In Northeast Anatolia and Southeast Anatolia, more than half of the children cannot afford new clothes.

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Kemalism: Legal And Media Engineering To Develop An Ultra-Nationalist Population

Turks with very few exceptions are proud ultra-nationalist lunatics. Their state is structured by their war criminal military regime who act as overseers of the state ideology of Kemalism, the Turkish equivalent to the ridiculous North Korean Juche Idea. This is changing slightly in the present as the success of the Islamic oriented AKP Party has allowed them to  route out the traditional Kemalist deep state, media and other organs and replace it with their plants. However, they just want those who are more oriented into Sunni Islamic bigotry to control the state ideology, not abandon it or reform. Turks are fanatic nationalists because Kemalist ideology structures them to be so. This relatively old source from 1995 still holds largely true in most aspects:

Official ideology: Turkey is the only European State to have, written into its Constitution, an official ideology. This is based on: "the concept of nationalism and the principles and reforms brought about by Ataturk, founder of the Turkish Republic, immortal guide and incomparable hero".

According to the Preamble to the Constitution "no opinion or thought can expect to receive any protection as against Turkish National interests, the principle of the indivisibility of the Turkish national entity, its State and its territory, the historical and spiritual values, inherent in the Turkish people or the nationalism, principles reforms and modernism of Ataturk".[1]

THE MEDIA:
On the Official State Ideology's Service

Foreigners passing through Turkey or observers critical of certain political aspects of the country, are often shocked by the ultra-nationalist and militarist content of the principle Turkish media and the virulence of the press campaigns they orchestrate. At the same time they notice that certain media don't hesitate to criticise on or other of the Ministers or even the Prime Minister. To understand the Turkish system one must bear in mind that, apart from some publications of the Left or islamic opposition, the principle Turkish media are at the disposal of the State and its official nationalist ideology (Ataturkism).

The political police (MIT) and the General Staff, who have a whole network of influential "honourable correspondents" constantly keep watch over what they consider "the superior interests of the State" and launch orchestrated press campaigns against "the internal and external enemies of the country". Amongst the more famous victims of their campaigns: Nelson Mandela, "guilty" of having refused an Ataturk Peace Prize, which seemed to him rather out of place in a country that was martyrising its Kurdish population; Mrs Mitterrand, Senator Kennedy, the German Social-Democratic Party leader R. Scharping etc... Their network covering the media is sufficiently subtle to allow each paper to have some liberal editorial writers who criticise official policy from the standpoint of another idea of "patriotism". Those who cross the thin red line(criticism of Ataturk or of nationalism, defense of the Kurds) are promptly sacked, like Koray Düzgören from Hurriyet, Ahmet Altan from Milliyet or Ismet Imset of the Turkish Daily News — often following a simple phone call from an official of the Joint Forces General Staff.

Concentration of ownership also helps ensure a more efficient control of the media. Two groups share the bulk of the market. The Dogan Group, with the two mass circulation dailies Hurriyet and Milliyet, each of which has its own television network, and the Ding Group whose main standard bearers are the two dailies Sabah and Yeni Yuzyil as well as the ATV television network. The industrialists who control these two groups also have large interests in sectors which depend heavily on State and Army contracts. The General Staff, also regularly calls the Managing Directors of the newspapers and television stations for "briefings" in which they are told how to treat matters affecting national interests and defense. It is, for example, "inadvisable" to publish anything on "events in the South-East" (Kurdistan) apart from official Army communiques.

Finally, by a very generous policy of subsidies and loans on advantageous terms, the Government has been able to ensure the support of these media and their huge audience. The police and the courts can be left to stifle the few dissident voices, like the pro-Kurdish Ozgur Grundem, which was banned after the assassination of ten of its journalists and the blowing up of its premises by the police.

Despite the diversity of papers, publications, radios and televisions, those that really form public opinion are, with a few rare exceptions at the disposal of the State, its security organs and its official ideology. The "organs" only have to whistle and this powerful brain-washing machine gets under way to denigrate or vilify any opponent judged too iconoclastic, or to present as an enemy of the Turkish nation any foreign personality who dares to criticise excess of the Turkish Army or Courts or express a wish for an improvement in the fate of the Kurds in Turkey.[2]

Sources:
[1.]The International Committee for the Liberation of the Kurdish Parliamentarians Imprisoned in Turkey(CILOEKT). Which Turkey for Which Europe(PDF). (December 1995) p.  8.
[2.] Ibid., p. 10.

The main difference is that in the present those who are against the AKP regime are complained against over the phone, fined, jailed, taken to court and otherwise silenced by the AKP regime, and not the militarists of the Turkish General Staff as in the past.

5.6 Million Illiterates, More Than The Total Population of Denmark

Bianet: 4.7 Million Illiterate Women in Turkey
Burçin BELGE
25 August 2010, Wednesday 11:34

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According to data compiled by the Turkish Statistical Institute (TUIK) based on the 2008 Household Workforce Inquiry, a total of 5.647 million people older than 15 years are illiterate. There are 4.742 million women and 932,000 men who are not able to read or write. Thus, the percentage of illiterate women amounts to 84 percent within this group.

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The report was prepared by researchers Assoc. Prof. Gökçe Uysal Kolaşin and Duygu Güner from the Bahçeşehir University Economic and Social Research Centre (Istanbul).

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Gender discrimination persists in education

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- ... The disadvantages situation of women is not confined to a specific age group. 79 percent of all illiterate women are aged between 15 and 24 years. ...

- Illiteracy is a huge obstacle for the integration into social life. ...

- The number of illiterate women amounts to almost one tenth of the Turkish population. ...

- ... The vast majority of these women are being pushed out of economic life. Only a small minority is employed and 97 percent of these women work off the record.

- Most illiterate women cannot benefit from a stronger integration into economic life since they work as unpaid family workers.

- The situation of illiterate men looks better in comparison. Still, one third of them are self-employed and the remaining male illiterates are facing high rates of unemployment. (BB/VK)

For reference of comparison, in the third quarter of 2013, Denmark, had a population of 5,608,784. Thus the number of illiterates in Turkey is greater than the entire population of Denmark.

Here is the more detailed abstract by the Bahcesehir University Center for Economic and Social Research(Betam):
4 Million 742 Thousand Women Are Illiterate (PDF)

Related blog post:
Turks don't read: only 1 out of 10,000 are regular readers

Violent Nation: Almost Half Of Doctors & Hospital Staff Attacked By Patients' Families

Turks are massively violent even towards members of their own Islamic society whom they perceive as being there to help them. Just try to imagine how much quicker and even more prone to violence they are to those outside of their group, whom they do not consider as Turkish or Mahometan.

Hürriyet: Biggest hospital health threat: patient families

3/15/2011

Medicine is a dangerous profession in Turkey, where half of all doctors and more than a third of nurses working at polyclinics and emergency services say they have been exposed to physical and verbal abuse on the job. Patients’ families are often the perpetrators of violence, hospital personnel report in a survey, saying such incidents are on the rise, statements seemingly corroborated by a recent beating assault in Mardin and a stabbing case in Kars

When Erdal Aydoğan’s wife fell ill Sunday night, he took her to Kızıltepe State Hospital in Southeast Turkey’s Mardin province for treatment. But when he found out that treatment included a male nurse giving his wife an injection, Aydoğan reportedly exploded.

“How could a man give an injection to my wife,” Aydoğan yelled before allegedly beating and punching male nurse Cafer Cengiz, 25, in the hospital’s emergency services area. ...

Cengiz’s experience is not unusual in Turkey, where a recent poll by the Istanbul Medical Chamber showed that nearly half of all doctors working at polyclinics and emergency services in hospitals, and more than a third of nurses, are exposed to physical and verbal violence – often by family members of the patients.

Seventy-two percent of participants in the survey agreed with the statement, “Violent incidents have increased within the last year,” while 51 percent agreed that, “Violent incidents have gone up at the institution where I work.”

Another such incident occurred Saturday, when Bülent Öcal, a doctor at Kars State Hospital in Eastern Turkey, was stabbed in the hospital’s polyclinic by a patient and his two relatives for not taking good enough care of the patient, whose nose was bleeding.

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Medical staff working in emergency services reported the most mistreatment, the Istanbul Medical Chamber poll said. Overall, 45 percent of doctors, 35 percent of nurses, 11 percent of administrative clerks and 7 percent of security guards said they had been exposed to violence at work. Twenty-nine percent of all health employees said they encounter physical and verbal abuse almost every day.

Following such incidents, 40 percent inform the police and 33 percent file a case.

A separate poll conducted by the Isparta and Burdur Medical Chambers showed that 45 percent of health employees have been exposed to physical violence in the last year.

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The Lunatic Followers of the Kemalist State Religion in Photos

At a recent 2013 graduation at Ege University in Izmir, Turkey[1], 720 Atatürkist, fascist graduates, sending a message to the Islamist oriented AKP after their pathetic Gezi revolt, all put up portraits of Ataturk that covered their faces. The symbolism was obvious, they are an ultra-nationalist mob worshiping their state religion and not individuals. A photo:

Turkish columnist Mustafa Akyol observed that in Turkey the most racist, intolerant group in his country are the university grads who receive the most indoctrination into the Turkish state ideology-religion known as Kemalism:

Hurriyet: Beware of 'educated' Turks

9/3/2010

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This week, Turkey’s Education Personnel Labor Union, or Eğitim Bir-Sen, revealed a survey that mapped out the political attitudes in Turkish society. ...

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The more interesting part of the survey was the political categories that people identified with. The most popular tags were “democrat” and “nationalist,” which were equally shared by 22 percent of the population. After that, 17 percent defined themselves as “Atatürkist” and 10 percent preferred to be called “Islamist.”

Interestingly, the “Atatürkists” turned out to be the least supportive of the reforms to broaden Kurdish rights. They, for example, gave the lowest support to the 24-hour official Kurdish-language television channel TRT 6 that the government opened two years ago.

Similarly, the “Atatürkists” outperformed every other political category, including the self-declared “Turkish nationalists,” in their opposition to “teaching of mother tongues in schools.” Only 38 percent of the “Atatürkists” supported this right, in contrast to 75 percent of the “leftists,” 70 percent of the “democrats” and 63 percent of the “Islamists.”

The “Atatürkists,” in other words, were the least tolerant group in Turkey when it comes to cultural diversity.

But this was a surprising result (at least for the uninitiated foreigner) because the “Atatürkists” were also the more educated part of society. The survey underlined this paradoxical relation between “the level of education” and “the support for the democratic opening” for Kurdish rights: “As the level of education falls, the number of those who see the democratic opening as a positive step increases. Conversely, as the level of education rises, the number of those who see the democratic opening as positive declines.”

As I said, this might be surprising to foreigners, particularly Westerners, who tend to presume that “education” and “liberal values” go hand in hand. ...

So, one wonders, why Turkey is so exceptional?

The answer might be in the education system. In the West, education is designed mainly to raise critical and democratic-minded individuals. But Turkish education, from primary school to universities (yes, even the universities), is designed to raise generations “loyal to the principles and revolutions of Atatürk.”

Unfortunately, those “principles and revolutions” don’t include concepts such as individual freedom, cultural diversity, and, alas, even democracy. (In case you haven’t noticed, Atatürk has a zillion sayings about nationalism, secularism or “republicanism,” but hardly anything on democracy.)

That’s why a mind shaped by the Turkish education system, unless tainted by some other factor, will be a staunch nationalist, secularist, and “republicanist” — but hardly a liberal or democrat.

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The education system is really the key. From age 7 to 18, a Turkish student hears the word “Kurdish” only once: When he learns about the “The Society for Kurdish Advancement,” as one of the “treacherous organizations” that arose in the final years of the Ottoman Empire. (The take-away message is that “Kurd” is something treacherous.)

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Furthermore, the same “educated” Turks also believe that their co-nationals who question such national myths are either paid agents of the “imperialists” who want to destroy Turkey or wild-eyed Islamists who yearn for “the darkness of the middle ages.”

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Again in Izmir in 2013, one of the strongholds of Kemalist fascists, a lunatic mob of Kemalists Turks wasted their time recreating a potrait of Ataturk[2] like the North Koreans of the Mideast they are:

Due to all the Kemalist brainwashing in Turkey, Kemalist Turks see the long-dead dictator and militarist, Ataturk, as an immortal father figure. Here are some photos of the North Koreans of the Mideast kissing the statue of the immortal father and seeing if his statue will whisper them advice[3]:

Finally from the 2007 Republic protests of the Kemalist fascists against the Islamic oriented AKP party, here are some North Koreans again showing they are not self regulating individuals but part of the homogeneous ultra-nationalist, Kemalist mob[4]:



[1.] Most of the photos in this blog post where gathered from the The World's Armed Forces Forum, Greece & Turkey subforum posted by North Koreanesque Turks themselves to actually gloat about their blind, slavish obedience to the symbol of a long-dead man. The forum is like a Wild West environment, but the Turks there are very open and proud of their national fascism, barbarism and atrocities so it is a good source on the North Korea of the Mideast. Instead of hiding or denying their crimes or dirty laundry they most often gloat over it!
This particular graduation is from this thread:
Greece & Turkey Forum: Ege University graduation July 16 2013

[2.] Greece & Turkey Forum Thread: This is why I love Izmir April 1 2013

[3.] Greece & Turkey Forum Thread: And they say Kemalists are like North Koreans, I've never seen a North Korean do this June 13 2013

[4.] The Pasha and the Gypsy Blog: The Second Anniversary of Disgust January 18, 2009

UK Parliament: Turkish military and legislators involved in aiding migrant traffickers

The UK government released this soft spoken, understated report that nevertheless slams the Turkish bandit state and its role in migrant trafficking.

UK Parliament: Home Affairs Select Committee: Implications for the Justice and Home Affairs area of the accession of Turkey to the European Union

Prepared 1 August 2011

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In 2010, more than 100,000 illegal migrants were arrested at the Greek borders, including the border with Albania. Prior to the Frontex Rapid Border Intervention Team operation at the Greek-Turkish land border, up to 300 illegal migrants were entering Greece every day by this route; the number has since fallen to 100-120. 

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In terms of people smugglers, out of 93 facilitators identified in 2009, the highest proportion were Bulgarian (30), Greek (19) or Turkish (15). In 2010, there were 28 Turkish facilitators out of a total of 73. The overall reduction in the number of people smugglers arrested in 2010 was partly because the modus operandi of the traffickers has changed. In 2010, the Evros authorities observed the development of a new route of irregular migration, whereby migrants make use of cheap flights from North Africa to Istanbul, then travel on to Greece. ...

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Since November 2010, there has been a marked improvement in interventions from the Turkish authorities before migrants cross the border. The Frontex operation is not doing anything significantly different from the role performed by the Greek authorities, apart from providing increased personnel and provision of technical assistance in the form of cameras, helicopters and so forth. However, its presence has put pressure on Turkey to act. The Greek authorities have noticed a military presence on the Turkish border which was not there prior to the Frontex operation, Turkish border stations are now manned continuously, and new informal cooperation has started between the Greek and Turkish military. They have also noticed a reduction in corrupt dealings between Turkish officers and people smugglers.

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It is very muted criticism and too diplomatic, as Western imperialist states like the United Kingdom have always abetted and enabled the second class imperialism of Turkey. However, the report acknowledges that the presence of Frontex has almost cut down by a third the number of migrants crossing from Turkey to Greece via the Evros river, from 300 a day to 100-120. It also admits that the corrupt Turkish military has dealings with smugglers and they have noticed a reduction in these double deals, now that Frontex is present to witness it. It also acknowledges that migrants from North Africa actually  prefer to transit to Istanbul to cross into Europe instead of plying the closer and more porous Mediterranean coastline of France, Spain or Italy. Turkish legislators legally and carefully engineered their country becoming an illegal immigrant hub, to fill Europe with Mahometans and earn black funds:

NYTimes: For Illegal Immigrants, Greek Border Offers a Back Door to Europe

July 14, 2012

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But the last staging area for most immigrants is really Istanbul, the teeming Turkish city that is a magnet for those who have often walked for months through the wilds of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. 

Turkey has come under criticism because of its liberal visa requirements, which make it easy for immigrants to legally enter the country and then move on. Citizens of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Syria and Iran, among many other nations, do not need a visa to enter the country. 

Once in Turkey, they share crowded apartments and try to find work and save enough to pay smugglers for false papers and passage across the border. 

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