Turkey needs Russian cash, gas and business as Erdogan looks to a dicey election and a new incursion in Syria, while Moscow needs friends to try to evade Western sanctions.
Published date: 1 March 2021 10:38 UTC | Last update: 2 weeks 1 day ago
Behind a heavily armoured Turkish military vehicle on patrol near the Syrian border, mountain gazelles give chase in a spectacular display, reaching speeds as fast as 80km per hour.
Among the spectators is the Turkish scientist and conservationist Professor Yasar Ergun - a man largely responsible for the survival of the species in Turkey’s southern Hatay province.
“The males are trying to outrun each other in order to claim victory and become the alpha this season,” he says, sticking his hand out in the direction of a herd of around 20 females, 50 metres away, some grazing, some watching the performance.
In early 2011, as she watched the removal of the graffiti that had been scrawled around Tahrir Square in the heady days of the popular uprising, followed by a “cleansing” of that space of revolt, Dina Heshmat realized she was witnessing the deliberate rewriting of history, a deletion of the people’s spontaneous discourse, to be replaced by a more elitist narrative.
Guided by this awareness, Heshmat sets out, in
Egypt 1919: The Revolution in Literature and Film, (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) to re-examine the Egyptian revolution of the previous century, looking into the country’s archives to find unpublished novels and out-of-print articles that reflect the people’s mood during what she argues was the early 20th century’s equivalent of Egypt’s Arab Spring: a popular uprising against an oppressive regime by society’s poorest and most downtrodden classes, that was later claimed by the nationalist bourgeoisie.