Santralistanbul

I went to Bilgi University's Santral Istanbul campus today to meet with a professor. I'd been there once before, for a music festival a few years ago, and it is one of the coolest looking campuses anywhere. It was the Ottoman Empire's first power plant--the control station is now a museum--and has a steam punk industrial look to it.
Here's the main building is in better weather than today:

And here's my new roommate:

I'm in a fancy place in Cihangir because a friend of a friend is renting the room and willing to do so by the week. This is good for me because I may go to Diyarbakir in the next few weeks. But increasingly I think I'll just stay in Istanbul this trip because it has taken me the past month and a half just to make real progress in getting the right connections with journalists and fixers and many of the foreigners at least will have left by the time I return next spring and so I will have to start from scratch in some ways. The new (human) housemate is super nice but I may look for cheaper accommodations outside of the Foreigner Village as Cihangir is unaffectionately known, somewhere I can buy a newspaper and speak Turkish.

Protest, Gloom, Geopolitics

I happened upon a little demonstration in front of Galatasarayı High School on İstiklal Caddesi a few days ago, I think just before news started coming in that the Islamic State’s advance into Kobani had floundered. There were maybe a hundred people gathered around a core group that sat on the ground wearing Human Rights Organization vests and passed around a bullhorn to speakers. ON one side were about 50 police with a crowd control armored vehicle mounted with a water cannon—a common sight in that spot. What I found more remarkable that what the speakers, including a CHP parliamentarian, were saying was the presence of clumpy line of youngish men in leather jackets, many with beards, who gathered across the street and glowered at the demonstrators. I didn’t see any weapons but a couple did have walkie-talkies. This reminded my a bit of Iran 2009: if you have regular police there what do you need plainclothes thugs for plausible deniability when they attack? I stood to one side (I was waiting for a friend to finish up and the gym so had a bit of time to kill) and nothing happened; the demonstrators dispersed quietly after a while and then the thugs followed suit.

The friend I met that night, an Iranian polyglot who first fled to Turkey in 2009 for political reasons, and another friend, an American who has lived here since 2004, both seem thoroughly sick of living here. I’ve always though of Istanbul as a place I could live long-term but these friends are among the most integrated of expats I’ve met here–both married Turkish women and speak the language well and work outside the expat bubble—are both are constantly complaining about the constant struggle with bureaucracy and even more so with petty cheating and short-term thinking—e.g. the greengrocer one buys from regularly always trying to slip him one rotten tomato to add extra weight to the package even if it means: it’s like prison, rape or be raped, the American told me half-seriously. His landlord is constantly trying to screw them over, raise rent, etc. instead of being happy that he found a good quiet couple in a not-so-good neighborhood. In Jenny White’s new book she mentions surveys including this one from OECD that Turks have extremely low levels of interpersonal trust. As far as bureaucracy, the Iranian friend has had enormous trouble with things like getting a bank account and credit card and residency despite working in IT for a big Turkish company and marrying a citizen.

Both friends are planning to move out of Turkey ASAP.

Despite all the editorials from the US and UK blasting Erdoğan for passively watching as Kobani was attacked, I’m fairly sympathetic to them not wanting to actually invade across the Syrian border. It was never really clear what they were expected to do once they had cleared the Islamic State out of the area and I think it certainly makes sense for Turkey to keep a trump card in reserve. IS could definitely start launching suicide attacks in Istanbul and ruin the country’s tourist economy—I suspect they have been hesitant to do anything beyond recruiting in Turkey because Turkey appears to still be on the fence and IS doesn’t want to provoke them further. I’m also sympathetic to the Turks’ demand that the US devote more resources to overthrowing Assad or at least preventing him from concentrating his forces on bombing other Syrian rebelgroups now that the US focus on IS has freed up resources for him. The CIA itself reports that the US has a miserable track when it comes to achieving its goals by arming rebels and it is unclear what, beside a continuation of the profitable (I don’t agree with a lot that Scahill says in that linked interview, but certainly IS is very good business for Lockhead et al) Forever War, the US sees as an actual end goal in Syria. After a glimmer with the ouster of Maliki in Iraq that the US would back those who governed inclusively rather than just anyone who helps them find and kill enemies, it seems like the US is just going back to the same old failed policies that helped the Taliban rise from the dead in Afghanistan by helping a still-brutally-sectartian government in Iraq. As long as the Free Syrian Army kills those it claims are IS, I suspect the US will turn a blind eye to whatever other nastiness it does. My point is, by insisting on tying the overthrow of Assad to anti-IS policy, it seems to me like Turkey is at least thinking more than one step ahead, unlike the US.

That said, I think that all the little stories about the Turkish military intentionally but inconsistently inhibiting the transit of Kurdish fighters across their border, letting some YPG and PYD fighters die waiting to cross, preventing PKK fighters from crossing into Syria while sending some non-combatants back there, show stupidity in sticking to old failed ways on Turkey’s part. Not at least stepping back to allow Kurds to go in and defend Kobani hurt the peace process with the PKK (which of course many in Turkey’s military and state are happy to see undermined) and led the bloody protests in the region. And anyway, why not let the PKK go into Syria with their weapons and die fighting IS instead of attacking Turkish gendarmerie posts? Turkey got very lucky that, despite gloomy predictions from everyone I talked to as recently as a week ago, Kobani did not fall, that US airstrikes seem to be enough help for them to push back IS. Kurds in Turkey would certainly have blamed and retaliated against the state if the city had fallen.

errr

Most of the journalists I had ridiculous dinner with last night thought the Islamic State fuss is overblown. Kobane is just an excuse for the Kurds to bail on the peace process and go back to their violent ways, they said. Americans criticizing Turkey for not saving Kobane don't understand that it's in a different country where Turkey has no business--that was interesting I don't think there's any confusion about Kobane being on the Syrian side of the border but that was their claim. Another was that whenever there's a revolution there's a radical phase when lots of people are killed violently but the Islamic State isn't really that different from Saddam or especially Khomeini--things will settle down. This of course ignores that they are anti-nationalist with inherently irredentist territorial claims and are doing their very best, e.g. by blowing up and bulldozing ancient ruins, to completely erase any non-Islamic forms of identity for their subjects, quite unlike Saddam or the Islamic Republic of Iran. One made a silly argument that the US had come up with the label ISIL to scare the region because Levant suggests that they are expansionist when really the project is limited just the a chunk of Iraq and Syria (Sham is probably indeed better translated as Syria than Levant but the Islamic State has since dropped the IL/2nd IS from its name in a pretty clear signal that it claims the whole Muslim world). I don't think I got my points across as the two main talkers were incredibly arrogant and much more interested in talking then listening. Whatever I said the one whose English was worse (I spoke mostly English both to better express myself and because red wine was crippling my Turkish) kept doing a masturbation motion with his hand and saying Oh yeah baby sure -- that was his response to several people on a wide range of topics and I wasn't sure if he actually understood what I was saying (fair enough, I'm in his country speaking my language, but the constant jerking off motion was a bit weird and distracting).
There were other conversations/arguments too, mostly about progressive politics and rich people deserving their money and I don't think I convinced anybody of anything. Anyway I woke up annoyed this morning.

Jesus fuck I just spent more than $100 on a bullshit foo foo dinner with a group of Doğan Media journalists. These are not your classic frumpy working class ambulance chasers.
Although the American filmmaker I had a few teas with before the dinner was telling me that film people here always invited him to the fanciest Nişantaşı cafes for $12 cappuccinos but after a while he realized they were mostly living hand to mouth but still spending big money to maintain the appearance of success e.g. when pitching a foreign filmmaker on a project. I don't think this is going on though as I don't really have anything these journalists was such they they need to impress me. This seems just to be their lifestyle.
I need sleep this is second time I've been drunk here on this trip. First time last week was much more comfortable not red wine but moonshine "boğma" ("strangulation") fig and grape moonshine that a photographer's friend had brought from Antakya.

Kurban Bayramı

The feast of sacrifice/Eid al-Adha begins tomorrow, so everyone will be off with family and businesses closed. A good time to sit down and write my dissertation proposal I suppose. 

I’ve been reading Jenny White’s book “Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks” and was thinking how her portrayal of incredibly polarized identity markers and claims about Others and “enemies within” the country that paper over actual variety in ways of being Turkish and Muslim is a bit alarmist. It’s not unusual to see mixed groups, especially of young people, with “conflicting” identity markers—headscarves, bleached blonde hair, che guevara shirts, etc.—walking laughing arm in arm. Then I fell into a first political conversation with my landlady and she was checking off boxes on White’s list of ridiculous claims and taxonomies sentence by sentence. Claim that the AKP pays girls to wear headscarves, check. Claim that the US are actually behind the AKP, check (she was a Gezi park protester so Erdogan has implied the same about her and her ilk [there was an amazing headline in a nationalist tabloid the other day proclaiming Ivan Something, a CNN reporter, was “messing with Hong Kong too”; suspicious no, how American journalists are always there when “local” protests are being stirred up? Like how there are always firemen hanging around fires—put two and two together, people!]). Likening the AKP to the Islamic Republic of Iran, check. We actually got to talking about politics because I had mentioned noticing a lot of Iranian tourists around and she said Yes they have been coming a lot in the last few years, paused for a second, and then launched into a diatribe about the AKP without any segue. I guess the obvious connection is that the Islamist AKP invited Islamist Iranians to Turkey as part of their plot—never mind that the Iranians who come to Turkey tend to be middle class and secular-minded or that their version of Islam has very little to do with the AKPs. There were others but I’ve forgotten—I should ask if she thinks the AKP are crypto-Jews. UPDATE: Another one: she prefers to speak English with me but during this conversation she was having difficulty and I was translating words for her and sometimes repeating myself in Turkish. Ugh, she grimaced, I can't do this. Speaking part English and part Turkish is wrong. It doesn't feel good, she said. Abhorrence of hybrid cultural forms (she has no problem with English when it is purely foreign, only when it is polluting Turkish), check.

I’ve been sitting in a fancy cafe in a cafe neighborhood writing this and three fancy women were the only other customers here on the upper floor. A cat (the waiters seem to know her, though she may well be feral) came over and pooped on a shelf right next to them at face level. The ladies squawked and the waiter simply moved them to another table and clean the poo and sprayed a little Lysol. The cat went on climbing around and making mischief with impunity. I really really like the way the ferals and pets here.
UPDATE: Today 10/4 sitting reading on a bench near fisherman at the edge of the Bosphorus, I saw a cat dart forward and grabbed a fish about a third its own size from one the the fishermen's buckets. They all just laughed as it escaped and one threw a sardine to another cat that had watched the abduction jealously.