Although Turkey late last year indicated its concern about the threat of ballistic missiles by agreeing to host part of NATO's new missile defense shield, Ankara now appears to be moving past this defensive posture towards something more robust.
As Today's Zaman recently reported, officials in Ankara have said that Turkey will soon start developing its own ballistic missiles. From TZ's article:
According to information acquired by Today’s Zaman from sources within the Defense Ministry, Ankara will produce its own ballistic missile system to avert any threat directed against Turkish national security. The decision was taken in a recent meeting of the Defense Industry Executive Committee led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on July 17....
....Officials underlined that it is an imperative and necessity for Turkey to produce and develop such missiles to maintain its deterrent capability and to feel safe in an insecure environment. The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) is now developing a missile called an SOM with a range of 300 kilometers. This will be a first step towards developing a ballistic missile with a range of 2,500 kilometers. Unlike other types of missiles, ballistic missiles can fly beyond the Earth’s atmosphere as they don’t burn oxygen, meeting no air resistance. A ballistic missile spends most of its flight in space. After the lunch, the missile arches up from one point and lands at another point. It is difficult to detect a ballistic missile on radar and harder to intercept a ballistic missile than a conventional one.
The title of being the birthplace of wine is a contested one, with Georgia, Armenia, Turkey and even Azerbaijan all vying for it. But now Georgia can at least claim that it is officially the "cradle of wine."
As the all-things-Georgian-wine blog Hvino News reports, the European Union has just awarded Georgia the exclusive right to sell wine within its territory with the tagline "Georgia - the Cradle of Wine." From Hvino's dispatch:
According to "Sakstat" (Georgia's statistical institution), until 2011 this brand has belonged to a British company. The new registration allows Georgia to ban any other company using the name without permission. Use of the brand "Cradle of Wine" is supposed to help promote Georgia as the oldest wine-producing country.
But even before Georgians had a chance to raise a celebratory glass, the Financial Times weighed in on the question of Tbilisi's plan to label every bottle of wine with the now exclusive slogan, calling the victory in Brussels a "mixed blessing":
Emphasising its rich heritage is the obvious way for Georgian wine to make its mark in a highly competitive global market. But some consumers may more readily associate cradles with babies or bottle racks than the history of the Alazani Valley.
The continuing violence and bloodshed in Syria may be troubling, but for Ankara, the real worry right now is actually about what's happening in the place where things are quiet, across the border in Syria's Kurdish region, where the Assad regime has now ceded control to local militias as it tries to consolidate its forces in order to protect Aleppo and Damascus from rebel forces.
With a Kurdish autonomous region already well established in northern Iraq, a nascent Kurdish autonomous region now in Syria and with its own Kurds increasingly making autonomy part of their demands, Turkey is now confronting what has long been one of the country's biggest fears: the rise of, as columnist Mehmet Ali Birand recently put it, the "mega Kurdish state."
While ramen instant noodle might be an ubiquitous presence on supermarket shelves around the world, there's one country that has yet to discover the budget dish's delights: Turkey. But that is about to change. As the Wall Street Journal's Japan edition reports, Nissin Foods, the Japanese maker of the instant noodles that have been a lifesaver for students around the world, is preparing to invade the Turkish market. From the WSJ:
On Tuesday, Nissin said it will spend $23.5 million to buy a 50% stake in pasta maker Bellini Gida Sanayi A.S. from Turkey’s biggest consumer product maker Yildiz Holdings A.S.
In Turkey, homemade dishes are popular and there’s no market for instant noodles. But Nissin is banking that Turkey’s rapid economic growth will start pushing busy workers to simplify their meals.
One of the attractive points of the Turkish market is that its population is expected to grow 1 million per year by the year 2030 from the current 75 million. The nation’s per capita gross domestic product also exceeds $10,000, suggesting it has high growth potential.
Another promising factor is that the market’s average age is 28 compared with Nissin’s home market of Japan where the largest segment of the population is in their 60s.
Nissin expects annual demand in Turkey will quickly grow to more than 1 billion instant noodle bowls within five to ten years, compared with 5.5 billion bowls in Japan.
In Turkey and other predominantly-Muslim countries, iftar -- the nightly meal that breaks the Ramadan fast -- has gone from being a humble affair based around dates, soup and some freshly baked bread to something much more elaborate (at least for those who can afford it). These days, hosting lavish iftar dinners has become a way for people to make a statement, either social, economic or -- as in the case when Israel's ambassador was pointedly not invited to a 2010 iftar hosted by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan -- political. (Update - This year its appears both the Israeli and Syrian envoys were not invited to Erdogan's iftar.) Here's how I described this trend in an article I wrote for the Christian Science Monitor in 2008, when I visited a large iftar dinner that was being hosted at a ballroom in Istanbul's swank Bosphorus-side Ciragan Palace hotel:
On a recent night, some 700 guests of a discount supermarket chain were seated at candlelit tables as a five-piece band played traditional Turkish music and a swarm of waiters in crimson-colored tuxedo jackets brought them plates of roast lamb.
"For a company to have iftar here is a kind of statement," says Ulku Karadaglilar, an executive at the Ciragan. "It's like 'Where did you have your wedding or your gala event?' They only have one chance to do it all year, so they want the best."
It's been a given for quite some time now in Turkey that charismatic Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's next political act will be that of serving as the country's president, albeit only after influencing the legislative process so that the office becomes a more powerful one, akin to that of the American or French executive.
Short of retirement, moving over to the presidential palace is the only move Erdogan could make, since the bylaws of his Justice and Development Party (AKP) prevent members from being elected to parliament for more than three terms and the PM is currently serving his third. With what will be Turkey's first direct presidential elections (up until now the choice has been made by parliamentary vote) set for 2014, there are indications that Erdogan's plans are becoming clearer. From a recent report in The National:
Mr Erdogan has not said publicly whether he wants to become president, but Huseyin Besli, one of his closest advisers, told a television interviewer last month that "Erdogan will be president in 2014".
The fact that Mr Erdogan has called on a parliamentary committee working on a new constitution to give the president new executive powers is also seen by political observers as an indication that he will seek the position.
Although Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan brought his energy minister along on a one-day visit July 18 to Moscow, it’s safe to assume that rather than oil and gas prices, the question of how to resolve the crisis in Syria dominated the discussion between Erdogan and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin.
In a previous post, Kebabistan reported on how in order to protest rising food prices in Iran (the result of the western-led sanctions against the country), shoppers recently participated in a "spontaneous" three-day boycott of grocery stores and bakeries.
The issue of the cost of food has clearly caught the attention of the Iranian authorities, particularly, it appears, regarding chicken, a staple of Persian cuisine whose price has skyrocketed in recent months, making it unaffordable for many average Iranians. The solution being offered by one official? Not to make more chickens available, but to make them invisible. Reports RFE/RL's Golnaz Esfandiari:
Chickens and their rising cost could soon join the list of censored topics in Iran.
Over the weekend, police chief Esmail Ahmadi Moghadam criticized state-controlled television for broadcasting images of people eating chicken. He suggested such footage could spur the underprivileged to revolt against affluent Iranians.
“Films are now the vitrine of the society, and some individuals witnessing this class gap might say, ‘We will take knives and take our rights from the rich,'” Ahmadi Moghadam warned during a July 14 press conference by law-enforcement officials.
In Iran, the government fixes the price of chicken at a point lower than the market rate, which has risen by some 60 percent since last year, presumably as a result of inflation and unprecedented tough Western sanctions imposed on Tehran for its controversial nuclear program. Nowadays Iranians pay as much as $5 for a kilogram of chicken. Pre-sanctions prices hovered around $2.
Ankara's already strained relations with Baghdad have taken yet another turn for the worse thanks to a recent deal signed between the Turkish government and the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq to export oil and gas from that region to Turkey. Reports the Associated Press:
The agreement envisions the Kurdish region exporting not only oil but natural gas through a web of pipelines through Turkish territory to the international market.
"Exporting oil from the Kurdistan region to Turkey is illegal and illegitimate," Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said in a statement. "The oil and gas are the property of all Iraqis and those exports and revenues must be managed by the federal government which represents all Iraqis," al-Dabbagh added.
He accused Ankara of "participating in the smuggling of Iraqi oil ... and this issue will affect the relations between the two countries, especially the economic ones."
Metropolitan Timotheos Samuel Aktas of the Tur Abdin region
A court ruling that allows the state treasury to seize a large chunk of the land belonging to an ancient Assyrian monastery in southeastern Turkey is being described by critics of the decision as a major setback for Ankara's efforts to reform the way non-Muslims and their property are treated in the country.
The ruling, by the Supreme Court of Appeals in Ankara, allows for close to sixty percent of the land belong to the centuries-old Mor Gabriel monastery to be expropriated by the state, on the grounds that the property belongs to the treasury rather than to the monastery, which has been in existence since the year 397 and has been a major center for Assyrian Christians since that time. The Bianet website has a quick rundown of the case: