Medya News Audio Articles

Across the world, there is a ramping up of authoritarian oppression as ruling elites defend a political system that generates growing inequality and destroys the planet and that is facing a rising tide of resistance. Even here, in picturesque Strasbourg, I have got used to seeing riot police and tear gas, and while the situation in France is hardly of the same order as that in Turkey, both arise f...

Fréderike Geerdink explains why the suggestion that Turkish President Erdoğan's alliance with Hüda-Par is to win Kurdish votes is ludicrous in her latest article for Medya News.

The UN’s expanded guidelines for the protection of prisoners are known as the ‘Nelson Mandela laws’, in honour of the celebrated political prisoner. They enshrine crucial rights as to prisoners’ inherent dignity and value, prohibiting torture, ill-treatment, and various forms of degradation and restraint, notably restricting the use of solitary confinement, to Mandela “the most forbidding aspect o...

The question of democracy in Turkey has never been more important as it is now in 2023. Erdoǧan’s AKP government has been in power since 2002, but the elections this year bring hope of a change. Will that change, if there is one, simply be turning from one autocratic ruling party to another, or will democracy have a chance now?

On Monday, at the Turkish Parliament, the presidential candidate of the main opposition alliance, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) visited the leaders of the pro-Kurdish leftist Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) for a much-anticipated discussion; and on Wednesday, the Labour and Freedom Alliance, centred on the HDP, which has been described as the potential king-make...

In a particularly depressing article on their website, the HDP list the history of Kurdish political parties in Turkey. Turkey’s first pro-Kurdish party, the People’s Labour Party (HEP), was established in 1990 and managed to survive three years before being banned. Subsequent pro-Kurdish parties lasted even shorter, just six months in the case of HEP successor the Freedom and Democracy Party (OZD...

"The problem is not the fact that SDF fighters are in a chopper close to Duhok, the problem is that Kurds can’t move easily in their own lands anymore while trying to defend it against assorted aggressors," says Fréderike Geerdink.

The statement concludes with a clear call for revolution: “We are at a point in history where if we want our society to be a bit better than the day before, we have only one solution and that is "revolution". We need this nationwide unity in order to be triumphant in our revolution for "women, life and freedom"! No to forced headscarf, no to oppression! Yes to freedom and equality!”

Apparently the violently sexist, and terror approach of the Islamic state are more compatible with the Turkish government than NES’ principles of direct democracy and women’s rights. Think back to what the Turkish prison system did to Garibe Gezer, and what ISIS did to their own captives. 

For Erdoğan needs the Kurds – or, more precisely, needs a perpetual war against their democratic political project to distract voters from domestic economic woes and increasing securitization which has decimated both civil society and legitimate political opposition in the country. What is less often recalled is that Erdoğan also benefits from his love-hate relationship with the US political admin...

Releasing Nedim Türfent and others is not enough. What is needed, is for them to be recognised as political prisoners and their names to be cleared. The communities where they come from already recognise that, but the state has to acknowledge that too. Eventually, that is what the struggle is all about: Getting people out of jail, and celebrating their contribution to bringing down fascism.

On Monday 28 November , Medya News convened an online panel via Twitter Spaces to bring together expert voices to analys the latest development whether now is the time that president Erdoğan will make his next move to seize and occupy swathes of land in Kurdish-Led north and East Syria (NES,and How he is benefiting from shits in the region geopolitical reality.

Now it seems this ugly, recent history is repeating itself. A Turkish invasion will not only mean the chaos of air strikes and subsequent opportunities for ISIS cell members to spread further havoc. It will mean creating new swathes of territory for ISIS to operate in. It will mean humanitarian disaster as Turkey strikes power stations, hospitals and other vital infrastructure, creating the perfec...

The false image that the Turkish president Erdoğan paints of Turkey as a victim of terrorism works incredibly well. The international community seems to be swallowing whole the bait laid at their feet. Turkey must be stopped. Someone must reverse the current developments affecting the Kurds. Ethnic cleansing is underway.

That’s how Erdoğan re-enforced the power he was about to lose: he cooperated with ISIS to incite a spiral of violence, mainly against Kurds because Kurds and their political demands and well-organized and undestroyable opposition are the nightmare of every Turkish nationalist. If anybody would have predicted that in the summer of 2015 to somebody not following Turkey closely, they possibly would h...

The NGO does call on international actors such as the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS and states with residents still in the camp to provide more resources, training and support to the authorities in North and East Syria. But the solution to the crisis in Hol cannot be solely technical. Along with more direct aid and support, political steps must be taken to improve the situation of the region as...

From an analyst’s perspective, it is not difficult to understand the threat that Erdoğan's regime perceives. Kurdish women have proven that they can successfully resist under the harshest conditions and unite women across ethnic and religious lines in the struggle for women’s freedom. In doing so, they have become a potent threat to autocrats and fundamentalists in the region.

In reality, ISIS remain a serious threat in Syria and Iraq despite their loss of territory. Moreover, Turkey’s attacks against Kurdish-led autonomous regions in northern Syria serve exactly the same ends as ISIS’ attempts to establish their caliphate. We should not draw a distinction between those who oppose ISIS, those who oppose Turkey’s autocratic Islamist project, and those who support the Kur...

It will come as no surprise to Medya News readers to learn that Turkey has seemingly blocked access to our website. Any coverage of the Kurdish struggle for rights, self-determination and democracy is likely to incur a swift and aggressive response from the Erdoğan government. But Turkey’s programme of censorship and liquidation of free expression and open criticism is not limited to the Kurdish m...

Kurds are once again feeling that they were abandoned in the face of yet another manifestation of tyranny. These young Kurds were running from front to front to counter the barbarity of ISIS, for the sake of all of humanity. Today, they fell victim to a similar barbarity. Relations among states necessitate the world be disinterested in the matter, but civilian bodies outside of state structures ar...

"Now that the ones who do call for respect for human rights are being targeted, it has become even more urgent for international organisations and governments to dust off their morals, strengthen their spines, act in the spirit of the convention and ask Turkey some serious questions. Lives of both guerrilla fighters fighting for a just cause and lives of civilians are at stake." Fréderike Geerdink...

The shocking video released by Kurdish freedom fighters of their friends killed with chemical weapons used by the Turkish military -- in open sight -- in the mountains of south Kurdistan has been met with a deathly silence from Western “democratic” states and the international organisations that are charged with monitoring such crimes against humanity.

If the public in Turkey was well informed, if the public in Turkey would let it sink in that they have been fooled by state-produced actual fake news for decades, for even a century, would that instill fear and disturb public order? Definitely, but fear is what the state thrives on. What they are actually afraid of, is not that it instills fear, but that it breaks the fear. Just as the murder of J...

Sunday 9 October marked the third anniversary of Operation Peace Spring, Turkey’s 2019 cross-border incursion into northeast Syria. With the operation, Turkey occupied the cities of Serê Kaniyê (Ras al-Ayn) and Tell Abyad (Girê Spî), and caused disastrous humanitarian consequences. According to the Rojava Information Centre (RIC), the occupied territory is 130 km long and 25 km deep, and over 200,...

"It would have great importance if an investigation concluded that that the destruction of the agricultural bank in Zirgan in the spring of 2022 was a war crime. Even if the outcome does not include a case in court, such a conclusion would be stating that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was directly responsible for war crimes. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg would be left indirectly...