{"id":4478,"date":"2016-07-21T12:13:41","date_gmt":"2016-07-21T10:13:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/astroblastro.com\/?p=4478"},"modified":"2016-07-23T20:03:11","modified_gmt":"2016-07-23T18:03:11","slug":"turkey-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/astroblastro.com\/?p=4478","title":{"rendered":"Turkey Today"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0What is going on in Turkey?<\/h1>\n

The answer is not entirely clear. But the stakes are high. Watching the attempted coup unfold from my laptop in Ljubljana last Friday was unsettling.\u00a0I lived in Istanbul for about two years\u00a0and\u00a0never felt directly threatened by anybody. But as the frequency of violent news increased\u00a0I had a harder and harder time being able to call home and honestly say that I\u00a0felt\u00a0safe. The time came to leave for a few reasons, one of the main ones was the rising level of background stress just got to be too much.<\/p>\n

\"coup\"<\/p>\n

During\u00a0my time in\u00a0Istanbul I never tried to shrug off my\u00a0yabanc\u0131 <\/em>status. I never learned the language, never stopped dressing a little funny, never got asked directions. I always felt like an\u00a0outsider,\u00a0protected as a\u00a0foreigner. Ilgaz warned me about this from time to time,\u00a0she could see what I couldn’t. She saw that there were good reasons to avoid this or that neighborhood and worried about my walking home alone after midnight.<\/p>\n

So reading about this coup attempt gave me some mixed feelings: relief, that I’m not there to feel the rising tension in the air generated by chants of protestors, sirens and a rare whiff of tear gas. But also some kind of masochistic nostalgia, I should be\u00a0in Istanbul talking with friends about what it feels like to be in the midst of a nation in transition.<\/p>\n

\"coup_02\"<\/p>\n

So what do I make of what’s going on?<\/h1>\n

As the days pass, the\u00a0English language news channels have been covering the changes that have been taking place post coup attempt. I should say that I don’t trust anything being said about the source of the coup. It’s all too speculative, fingers pointing one way and another: it’s the parallel state, it’s the CIA, he did it to himself!\u00a0Maybe in 10 or 15 years the victors will write the history of the events of the past week. But that’s all\u00a0too hard to parse out\u00a0for now so I suspend my desire to know.<\/p>\n

Something that is clear is that the response to the coup was swift and powerful, reaching not just into\u00a0the military but all aspects of civil life in Turkey. As I said there are a lot of English language news sources reporting on this, but the scale of the changes didn’t hit home for me until I saw all those headlines rounded up and organized into the table below. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of any of the items below, I got it from Reddit after all<\/a>, but\u00a0it\u00a0is a compelling list of “measures taken after the coup: dismissals, suspensions, media closures, travel bans.”<\/p>\n

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Travel Bans<\/strong><\/p>\n