A referendum was held on 1 October 2017 to decide whether Catalonia, an autonomous region of northeastern Spain, should declare itself an independent country. This was declared illegal and incompatible by the Spanish Constitution. An extensive police report delivered to the Court on December 15 concluded that the independence movement had systematically encouraged “hatred” of…
Catalonia accounts for about 16 percent of the Spain’s population, and more than 20 percent of gross domestic product. About a quarter of Spanish exports are Catalan products. The region accounts for a fifth of Spain’s economy producing 25% of the country’s exports. It contributes in taxes for 21% of the country’s total. Catalonia has…
‘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…
