YES or NO (Turkish referendum)

“What is a referendum?” asked my little sister, on which a friend of ours replied “when the government ask you to choose black or white”. This same black/white question was asked by Erdoğan, the current president of Turkey. He asked all those with a Turkish identity (in- and outside of Turkey) to vote. A YES-vote would give him more power and change the current republic system into a presidential one. A NO-vote means that you are against these changes and want the political institution to stay like it was before. What I’d like to do today, is analyzing the propaganda used by the current government. This propaganda was meant to make the Turkish people aware of the referendum and their ability to vote.

Our choice is yes, for Turkey’s future. Brave nation, for a strong government, a million of yesses. Say yes, the choice is from the nation. Our vote is yes. We have made an oath for this country, this is indispensable without a yes. The people say yes, the republic gains strength. For the government, for the republic, for Turkey, say yes. …

Months before the actual referendum people everywhere were talking about it. In the Belgian journals it was presented as something very bad and in the Turkish journals as something incredibly good. In Turkey the YES-camp hang big posters to show their contribution. The posters are mainly found nearby the roads, where almost no NO-poster was to be seen (actually there were almost no NO-posters to be seen anywhere else either). If already a NO-poster hang, it would usually be quite small or would be located next to another bigger YES-poster. Protests against the referendum were banished and Turkish citizens outing their NO-opinion would be rare. Maybe because there is a scare of loosing one’s job, go to prison or have family members to get in trouble? By the way, the YES-camp was referring to everybody who would vote NO to be “Gülenists”, “terrorists”, “the ones who want to make a coup”, “PKK supporters”…

No for our rally in Alanya. No. No. No. No. When you type in “the ones who say no” in Google these are the results: “terrorists”, “homeland betrayers”, “satan/devil”. Since there aren’t many No-posters some citizens attacked or tried to erase the Yes-posters.

 

After the votes had been counted, it looked like Turkey was split into two parts since the result almost reached 50-50. The eventual results being 48,59 – 51,41 % weighted more on the YES-camp (1.379.934 more votes for YES were counted) and so Erdoğan won. This is something what most of Turkish people expected to happen from the beginning on. I’d like to analyze these results too. Multiple video’s have been posted online showing that some Turkish citizens made extra YES-votes (so there would be more votes than people who actually voted). Some Turkish people didn’t use their votes; they thought that it wouldn’t make a difference, they didn’t want to decide, they would be students… Students mostly out themselves as NO-voters. Since most of them study in a city far away from their hometown, where the vote had to be taken, not all of them could come to vote. They either have tests that week or don’t have the money to travel. They claim that there was no other option to make your vote count than go vote yourself.

Many Turkish people now say that Turkey died because of this referendum. They mean that this “new Turkey” is not anymore the Turkey that their founder, Atatürk, created. Meanwhile, in Belgium, 77% out of the votes went to the YES-camp (with 40% of the Turks not using their votes). This is the country with the highest YES-score. Even in the cities where most of them come from: Emirdağ (in Afyon) and in Konya more Turkish citizens voted NO. In Emirdağ only 57,79% said YES, in Konya 72,88%.

I’d like every one who reads this or is interested in this referendum to think about the following:

– Would the votes be different if the NO-camp was allowed to make there voice heard and hang posters as much as the YES-camp could?

– Would it make a difference if all Turkish citizens would have been able to vote (inclusive Kurds who don’t own a Turkish identity, the students who couldn’t go use their vote…)?

– Is it okay to make such a big decision happen if almost half of the citizens are against it?

– What impact did the Turkish people outside of Turkey have on the referendum and what do the Turkish citizens themselves think about this?

(some of these questions are easy to answer for one person, but wouldn’t make sense to another)

 

Thank you for reading!

 

Clara

Turkey Vs. Freedom (of press)

When I think about Turkey, I get so many beautiful thoughts. I will never forget all these warm and hospitable people, my amazing Turkish friends, the beautiful sun, the tea and sweets, the relaxed way of life, how safe I felt when I lived there 2 years ago… This list could go on endlessly. Though in today’s life it has become clearer to every one that there are some troubles in this country.

Turkish dancing

@Izmir

Last year the closure of the journal Zaman was a hot topic.

In Belgium 2016, Zaman Vandaag’s editor in chief said: “Zaman was the only mainstream journal that deared to be critical. Only very few small journals like this remain in Turkey”. The AKP (Erdoğan’s party) made sure Zaman became a government-minded journal. Yet on the day of the closure itself, a new journal was born: Yarına Bakış.

This new journal was thought to last, but after the putsch (where soldiers tried, but failed to take over the power in Turkey) this journal and many other institutes got forced to close. Teachers lost their jobs, schools subsidized by Gülen had to close, Erdoğan gained power and supporters…

Turkey manages to stay in the head news, because of the referendum happening on April 16. Every one with a Turkish nationality can vote YES –evet– or NO –hayır–. A YES-vote would give more power to Erdoğan, while a NO-vote would leave the situation like it is now. I believe everybody, and certainly the potential voters, should think critical about what is happening.
Here are some interesting questions to think about:

– Why are Turkish people all over the world able to vote for a referendum that can massively change the situation in a country in which they don’t live themselves?

– Why is Erdoğan saying that everybody should vote YES, with one big reason that the PKK (referred to as a terrorist organisation), FETÖ (Gülen-movement) and HDP (referred to as the Kurdish party) will vote NO?

– Why is a Turkish newspaper publishing the following: “In Turkey there cannot be a dictator, because dictator is not a Turkish word”?

– Why are so many Turks in Turkey afraid about the results of the referendum?

– Not everybody who can vote knows what they will vote for, why is that? Why are some of them not voting at all?

– Is everybody who can vote informed well enough about what the referendum represents?

– …

My captions would be: #fakenews #thinkbeforeyouspeak . The journal Güneş apparently doesn’t mind spreading news like this.

I would like to end this blog post with some results I found about the Freedom of the Press in Turkey. A research (Dutta & Roy, 2011) found that freedom of the press has an influence on the culture. This influence has been found significantly in Turkey, which means that if the freedom of press lowers, the global freedom in Turkey lowers with it. Like you can see on the site of FreedomHouse.org Turkey got a “not free”-status with a score of 71/100 (0=best and 100=worst).

I’d like to ask everybody who can vote, to vote and to vote thoughtfully.

Thank you.

Update: we know why the Panorama Gent newspaper is written in 3 languages

I wanted to find out more about Panorama Gent, the newspaper I wrote about in my previous blogpost. This is a journal that translates Dutch articles to Turkish and Bulgarian. I sent an email to the news editors and asked about the purpose of the newspaper and why they decided to write in 3 specific languages.

Chantal Dezuttere and Cihan Col, the editors, replied that the mayor of Ghent (Daniel Termont) wanted a newspaper in these 3 languages for a while. He’d been asking to implement this idea because the Turks and Bulgarians are the largest group of immigrants in Ghent. Dezuttere let me know that  ±7.200 Turks in Ghent still have a Turkish nationality and that ±2.000 Bulgarians live in Ghent.

This is a list of the top 5 foreign nationalities in Belgium.

“Panorama”: to have an open and broad overview about what happens in the world.

The aim of this journal is to broaden the “panorama” of Turkish and Bulgarian people living in Ghent, keeping them up to date about the current events and important news in their city. It is believed that they often know more about what is happening in their home country than about what happens in Belgium. Dezuttere and Col would like to change this. If they succeed in doing this, they reached their goal.

“Gent”: Dezuttere and Col both live in Ghent (= Gent in Dutch).

This journal is distributed in other Belgian cities too, such as Brussels, Antwerp, Zele, Wetteren, Kortrijk, Beringen, Sint Niklaas… The editors can count on many volunteers to translate the texts to Dutch, Turkish or Bulgarian. The journalist volunteers writing for this journal, include students from Artevelde Hogeschool (Ghent) and others.

It was interesting for me to find out more about this newspaper and I was surprised by their enthusiastic and friendly answer! I have high hopes for Panorama Gent and wish them all the best.

1 journal, 3 languages (Dutch-Turkish-Bulgarian)

A couple of weeks ago a journal, called “Panorama Gent”, caught my attention. It’s a monthly journal I’ve never seen before, I had never even considered that something like this existed.  Its concept: writing every news item / article in 3 different languages (Dutch-Turkish-Bulgarian).

In Belgium we speak 3 different languages (French-Dutch-German), yet I never heard about a journal that specifically wrote every article in these 3 official languages. Some decades after the foundation of Belgium some publications of journals translated the French articles to Dutch ones, since Dutch originally wasn’t recognized . But times changed fast and today we don’t have these kind of journals any more. Each language has its own journals.

So why Dutch and Turkish? That’s a quite easy question to answer. There are a lot of Turks in Belgium who originally came to work here in the 1960s, but later settled. These Turkish people started new families here and/or let their family members come to join them. Same story goes for the Bulgarian people, but in another period of time.

Still, I didn’t see a link between the Turkish and Bulgarian language. But after some research I found out that a lot of Bulgarian people are ethnically Turkish. The Ottoman Turks started conquering Bulgaria in the 14^th century. Centuries later, in the 1980s, Bulgaria’s government closed mosques, wanted the ethnical Turks to use Slavic names… This way Bulgaria could leave their Turkish history behind. This started a big emigration process.

With this article I want to show that there is always a solution to ones curious question.

What I did: since I first thought the Cyrillic text was written in Russian, I asked a Russian friend of mine for information. She let me know that the articles were written in Bulgarian. Later a Bulgarian friend told me that there are lots of Bulgarians who are ethnically Turkish. Based on that I looked further on the internet.

This to conclude that our world is so big yet so small.

I hope you enjoyed reading and learned something new through this!

Thank you,

Clara

Communication Science

Hey!

I would like to talk to you guys about what I’m studying: Communication Science. The word ‘science’ could be misleading, actually it refers to my study field and main subject: communication. Another subject that gets a lot of attention in this field is the media (television, radio, internet, newspaper, journals…). Both communication as media walk hand in hand.

Communication Science is a very large subject which makes it possible for me to follow many different directions. For example, in my school (Ghent University), I have 4 options to graduate in (4 master-options) after I finished my 3 years of bachelor: Master in Journalism, in Film and Television, in Communication Management and in New Media and Society. At this moment my interest goes the most towards Film and Television, since I would love to work in that sector after my studies (eg. making documentaries for a living would be a dream coming through, so is filming music videos…).

Today it has become extremely difficult for us to ignore the big impact of media or even to stop communicating through these media. I believe that my view on this has already become more critical than before. Thanks to this study I’m also more able to look further than what we get to see first, to look further than what mainstream media show us.

This post is also an introduction to my coming posts who will be more about the communication field. This will appear next to the other subjects about which I’m writing and making videos.

Thank you for reading!

Kisses,

Clara

Throwback to Christmas

Dear friends who are so lovely to read this post,

 

Last year I was in Turkey trying to celebrate Christmas, two years ago I celebrated it with my family in Thailand and this year I celebrated it the same day as I studied for my exams.

Christmas for me is an opportunity to be together with your family or friends to enjoy your time and celebrate your relation. We have the tradition to invite my grandparents every year, have a nice dinner and open our Christmas gifts one at a time.

This year the “children” (lets say my 2 little sisters and me 😉 ) also gave presents to each other and to our family, which we didn’t really do before. I realised that christmas shopping is terrible and so hard. I don’t like spending money at all so I continued looking around in the stores for cheap and good stuff. Finally I bought shot glasses and a necklace for my sisters. So still nothing for my parents and grandparents… Looking around on last minute gift youtube videos I find out that you can make beautiful plates with coloured clay. I worked 3-4 hours to make them, put them in the oven like they said in the video (15minutes at 270degrees) and went taking a quick shower. When I got back to the kitchen I something smelt really terrible, I ran to the oven and saw that my clay was on fire. I turned it off, waited the flames to faint and called the anti-poison number (antigifcentrum). They said it was no problem, which I was more than happy to hear. You have to know, all of this happened at 1am… Meaning I was very tired, meaning I didn’t realise it should have been 270Fahrenheit and not 270°C. Long story short, I gave a lava stone to my family for Christmas.

Here I made a little time line to compare my Christmas celebrating this year to the one last year back in Turkey:

24th

• 2pm
  
  

  
• group picture
  

  
• beginning of the evening
  

  
• selfie with a new top
  

  

25th:

• evening
  

  
• night
  

  

With this I want to show you that it is not because you’re in a country where they normally don’t celebrate christmas as a tradition, that you cannot celebrate it. I had a bigger celebration over there than here because of my exams, but I will always remember the night of 24 December 2014 like it was yesterday just as I remember Christmas Eve last night.

 

Thanks for reading babes,

Clara (aka Kilara)

Returning after an exchange year | Turkey-Belgium

Hey guys !!

Exactly one year and two days ago I came to Turkey, not knowing I would experience the best year of my life…

I’d like to describe through the time how it felt to go back to Belgium.

The last weeks in Turkey I was very melancholic, wanted to do all the stuff I didn’t have time for yet, met with my friends (a selection of the most important ones to enjoy my last days with and stopped making time to meet too many other new people again), slept late and woke up early , talked about life, choices, families and friendships…

So after those intense last weeks the day of going home arrived. My Katzo-Manu-crew (like we liked to call ourselves) wanted to join me to the airplane. But a friend, Manu couldn’t join so we met earland sat all together nostalgically on Kordon, a famous place to drink something in Izmir.

Saying goodbye was the first unbelievable part.. We told each other our last words and then waited till his bus was out of sight to move on. Time went on and my friends went home. That same night I went with my Turkish friend (and boyfriend at the time) Ismail to the airplane. There, another AFS friend, named Benny and her family came to bring me my suitcase that I let in there house since I slept there. She thought she could stay in the airport until my departure, but she couldn’t and had to go home with her family.

So I was alone with Ismail again when I heard my name being called in the speakers: “Clara Francken, come to the information office, Clara Francken”. My mind was all wazy and I go to the office without understanding what was happening. When I got there I saw my other Italian friend, Nata in tears. She thought she just missed me and I was already gone on my plane.

The last hour in the airport was without a lot of words, we didn’t know what to say anymore, we all knew each other so well. There was no reason to speak anymore to understand each other. At the moment of my departure I felt helpless because there was no way to go back and to stay in Turkey.

My friends in Turkey were the people I loved, saw and talked to every day of my “TurkishLife”. They know me like no one else. Everything just made it impossible to leave each other saying: “no problem we will see each other again some day”.

That same night I arrived in Istanbul. There a friend of mine picked me up. We went to his friends house and we talked Turkish until I got to tired to stay awake, because I didn’t want to go and be in a room alone. The next day he dropped me of at the airport.

This time I felt okay to go home; so no tears, only disbelieve. Once on the airplane I started reading in the book in which my friends wrote me there thoughts, feelings and hopes. Reading their ideas about me, their funny sayings, their deep thoughts… it all made me cry, laugh and cry again. So on my way home I took my last Turkish beer to enjoy and not to forget.

Once in Belgium I started crying again, everything was so small, there were no high buildings like you had in Izmir or in Istanbul and for some reason I couldn’t handle that. In the airport I heard people speaking Flemish, I didn’t want to hear it, I only wanted to hear Turkish. But everything happened so fast and I needed to get my suitcase. So the slowest possible I go to the Izmir-Zaventem suitcase department, I didn’t get why my suitcase didn’t arrive. So I asked a girl who works there, I asked her a question in French, then to make sure I repeated it then in Flemish with some hesitation (because those are the 2 languages they speak in Brussels.) But the girl answered me in English which got me even more confused. Apparently I was waiting at the wrong suitcase department… My plane came from Istanbul and not from Izmir as which I thought. Once I got everything with me and freshened myself up, I went to the exit. There I saw my family waiting for me.

 

I hugged my mom and my sister first and by crying they made me cry again. It was strange, but amazing at the same time to be able to feel and see my family, especially to talk to them in real life. That day I didn’t want anything special and we went home to have dinner.

These days are far behind me though.. And time keeps going on and on. Today I’m in Italy, with the best AFS friends one could imagine…

But the months before where filled with up and downs. My second day back in Belgium I started my work as a camp teacher for kids. The next week there was a festival (Gentse Fieste) in my city and I was out all day and all night. But then the holidays started, to the beautiful destination of Mallorca. After filling all my days as much as possible two weeks of being alone with my family (which included some days on which we didn’t do anything and sat next to the pool) got me thinking a lot, I think it got me thinking too much. I had the low point of my experience on these holidays, but I am very pleased that my family was there to help me and leave me alone on the moments I needed it.

I felt locked up on an island with nothing specific to do, but the last days I felt acceptance again and my mood got better.

I enjoyed myself and made lots of plans (sadly some where cancelled) to make sure I would do anything but to think more about the fact that I am back in Belgium without my friends from all over the world.

So until today I get bored of doing nothing and I feel silly when I remind myself that last year I planned days of doing nothing in my agenda.

Thank you very much for reading this, it means a lot to me. And as a Belgian friend said in her blog I want to mention this too; we all change on AFS years, friends and family often say that I didn’t change, but I pay more importance to different things then I did last year and I feel that I became a stronger woman. I care way less about what people will think if I do this or that and feel like I know myself better then I ever did. (@debbiedenolf)

I love you all babes ❤

My vine channel – Clara.Kilara

Hey guys, 

I started making vines a while ago and I really love and enjoy making them. Because of this I thought about posting them here.
I started making vines when I was in Turkey. The first vines are made with my Turkish friends.

Some vines are in Turkish but the most of them are English and I even have one that I made in Flemish (but again we were in Turkey at that moment).

I made vines who include animals, culture differences between Turkey and Belgium, mistaken translations, some funny vines and even one where I played Ken and my friend played Barbie.

Have fun watching them, I hope you like them as much as I do!

Lots of love,

Clara ( aka Kilara )

This is my vine channel: Clara.Kilara

Summer Nail disigns

Hey!!!

I will show you guys 3 nail disigns that are great for the upcoming summer 🙂

I ranked them from the easiest to the hardest design. Although the hardest isn’t even that hard, you just need to take your time :*

1- simple dots

  
For this look I took a light green coulour to make the base. On top of this I put black dots to make my nails look more out. I draw a line with small dots on every finger, but on my ringfinger I filled my nails with dots. These dots aren’t just random. I started in the middle, then made one more dotting line at its left side and one more on the right side.

2- grass on fire

  
I started painting my nails green, this is also the same light green coulour I had been using before (in 1-). To make this look you simple draw with a pink liner (that came out red) from somewhere a bit above the middle of the nail until the top. The lines you draw next to each other should always be started on another height to get this effect. 

3- coloured stripes

 

This one is a little bit more outgoing but fun to make and will definitely grab the attention. I think these nails are just good for any occasion , I’d go to school with these as much as I would go to a party with this same disign.

It is not difficult to make it either. You start off with a base colour of your choice. Once completely dried you draw a thick line with another coulour of your choice. I choose to outline this coulour with a silver liner but you can use whatever you feel like.
Don’t forget to take care of your nails. Try to always start with a base coat and end with a top coat. Change the coulours up if you want and see for yourself how it looks. I hope you will enjoy trying some of these looks out ❤

Lots of love!!

What to do if there is no electricity | mygapyearinturkey

Hey guys!!!!

After 4 months of thinking about posting something new on my YouTube channel or blog, I finally arrived at the point to do it!! This is about the electricity that turned off in Turkey a month ago and actually turns off in yah period I am in Turkey for a couple of 5 times…
I hope you enjoy this video 😉😘😘

What to do if there is no electricity