Murat Belge is editor of Iletisim Publishing House and Yeni Gündem, a weekly political magazine, and is now Head of the Department of Comparative Literature at Bilgi University, Istanbul. He was a founder of the Helsinki Citizens' Assembly and taught at Istanbul University for fifteen years.

Recent articles

Murat Belge, one of the Turkish journalists facing trial in Istanbul over public discussion of the 1915 Armenian massacres, sees his case as an emblem of Turkey's struggle against the country's anti-democratic "deep state".

Orhan Pamuk, the renowned Turkish writer, was charged in September 2005 for “publicly humiliating” Turkey and is currently awaiting trial. His compatriot Murat Belge explains how this son of Istanbul has become a scapegoat for a paranoid press, and looks at the wider implications for Turkish national identity.

Turkey’s possible admission to the European Union is often framed in terms of what’s good for Europe. But what do Europeans know of Turkey and what of Europe is good for Turkey? Surveying more than fifty years of transformation, one of Turkey’s leading journalists charts how the military, reformists, business, leftists, Islamists and others have struggled to define Turkey’s future, and asks how it is that social conservatives now find themselves in a leading role for integration to the progressive European project. For Turkey to succeed, he says, foreign NGOs must help their counterparts in Turkish civil society.

The primary target of the suicide bombings of Jewish and British institutions in Istanbul was Turkey itself. Will the assaults explode the delicate political balance of forces in this “secularist Muslim” country?

Turkey’s triple role in the Iraq war confounded many experts. While its neo-Islamist government supported the US invasion of Iraq, and its military refrained from major incursion into the Kurdish-controlled north, its parliament refused help to American forces. Turkey’s relations with the US were strained, yet without any diplomatic benefit from the EU to compensate. The crisis has shifted the political ground under Turkey’s feet. Who will design the new maps?