Press Roundup

Sabah: “The light of the disabled went out,” was the headline of the lead story, reporting on the suicide of Ahmet Faruk Öztimur, who was the head of the Turkish Confederation of Disabled People and who campaigned hard to publicize the problems of the disabled living in Turkey. Öztimur drowned after he drove his car into the Bosporus in İstanbul on Wednesday night. His relatives said he had fallen into depression because of the cancer he was suffering from and the treatments he had recently been receiving.

Star: “I was jailed under the orders of Feb. 28 coup,” quoted the headline of the top story from Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s statements delivered at Tuesday’s parliamentary group speech. Erdoğan said the actors behind the Feb. 28, 1997 coup were responsible for his imprisonment in 1999 after he recited a poem at a party rally. “I was jailed on those orders. How else can a mayor be jailed for a poem that has been approved by the [Ministry of Education’s] Board of Education and Discipline? This happened because of orders coming from there [the military],” he said. In 1999, Erdoğan served four months in jail after being convicted of Islamist sedition after reading a poem at a political rally in Siirt when he was mayor of İstanbul.

Vatan: “Stop your husband, Asma,” read the headline of the paper’s main story, reporting that the wives of some international diplomats have written an open letter to Asma Assad, the wife of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who has been conducting a bloody crackdown against the Syrian uprising. The letter, whose writers include Lale Apakan, the wife of the Turkish UN Ambassador, says: “Hundreds of Syrian children have been killed. Some day our children will ask us about it. How will you answer them, Asma?”