‘April is the cruelest month’ is the first line of T S Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land – his searing indictment of the global desolation that followed the end of World War I. April 2017 shows every sign of following in its path. On Easter Sunday, Turkey voted by a narrow majority (51%) to…
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the current president of Turkey, began his political career in the ’70s. He founded the Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (AKP) party, of Sunni Islamic inspiration, and held the position of mayor of Istanbul. Conservative since the very beginning, in 1998 he was arrested for inciting religious hatred. In 2003 he became prime…
