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Turkish Press Review |
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This does not suit us
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My column that began with the sentence “My father read the Cumhuriyet newspaper for 40 years and voted for the Republican People’s Party [CHP] his whole life” had the headline “This does not suit us.”
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It was my father who used to say, “This does not suit us.” As a supporter of not only the CHP but, of course, also the modern Turkish Republic, my father used to talk about why even when Alevis are liberal, they don’t vote for a rightist party. Alevis, who have grown up listening to stories of massacres, tend to see politics as a matter of life and death and can thus move only incrementally towards the center, if at all. But as the Alevis find themselves tied more and more faithfully to the same republic and the CHP that once massacred them, what exactly is it they find there? Perhaps they believe that the republic offers them an arena for living that the Ottomans denied them. But this subconscious sort of distrust will persist for as long as cultural codes continue.
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21 November 2009, Saturday
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ZAMAN BEJAN MATUR
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Benzer Haberler 
