It had been arranged about two weeks ago that I would have Easter lunch at my mum’s—my parents are divorced—but on Wednesday I called my mum to ask her for a favor. Said favor was whether she could buy a book I needed for school downtown, which is a two-hour bus ride from where I live. She said she would try. So Thursday I called her to check on that, to which she responded with tons of excuses and told me she thought I was calling to go visit her. I said I had tons of stuff to do for school, reading that book for the next class being part of it. She got mad at me. I get a bit scared of my mum when she gets mad at me and avoid confrontation even if it’s just on the phone. So I didn’t call her and decided that if lunch plans were still on, she would call me. She never did. Sunday morning arrived after a hideous food poisoning on Saturday and I woke up to my dad’s “goodbye.” I didn’t understand. I assumed we were spending Easter together since my mum hadn’t called. He assumed I was still going to my mum’s. He left to his girlfriend’s house so he wouldn’t spend Easter alone. I was then left alone. My mum called at 2pm and asked whether I had eaten with my dad. I told her my dad wasn’t home. She sounded off but I didn’t want to ask why as I usually would. She told me she went to the Fire Ceremony and whether I remembered when we used to go together. I said I did not. She felt sad at that response and told me that I used to love it and that I always wanted to stay near the bonfire. I said I bet I did because it sounds lovely. She didn’t say a thing about lunch nor tea but she did say my sister was going to study and have tea at a friend’s. So no Easter plans, I thought. I then Facebook chatted with my sister. Me: No plans for Easter?—Sister: Mum’s husband’s offspring are coming at 5 for tea. You should come.—Me: Mum didn’t say anything about it and I’ll be late because I haven’t eaten yet and it is a 2 hour bus ride there. She said you were going to a friend’s.—Sister: Haha yeah. I won’t be there. You should go. mum thought you were coming for lunch.—Me: But you didn’t have Easter lunch and mum said nothing about the tea and I didn’t call because she was mad at me about the book. And you won’t be around, which sucks.—Sister: That’s because mum and her husband were arguing so they didn’t know what they would do. Dad then sent me a text around 7pm asking if I was home or went to mum’s, saying he was visiting granny at the nursery home. I answered: “Home”. He answered: “OK. I’ll be back soon”. He got back two hours ago. Didn’t come to my room or say a word to me since he arrived. I remember Easter when I was a child. My grandma would order a huge beautiful open Easter egg, with colorful lovely decorations, and a stuffed bunny inside waiting for me or my sister to hold it once it was time to crack open the eggs. I remember my mum preparing a nice lunch. My grandpa would come from Uruguay (where my mum is from), my other grandparents would come over too and also my aunt. We would eat pasta or chicken or both, we would celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ like a family was supposed to in the 50s. Together, portraying happiness and unity even in if my parents were arguing about whatever silly stuff they would argue about before everybody arrived. Then we would all enjoy the warmth of the autumn sun and maybe play some ball in the garden. Today I found myself eating homemade pasta leftovers I made for Friday night dinner and watching Mad Men, trying to catch some of that sometimes necessary make-belief hypocrisy thinking we are happier than we are as a family; staying together through thick and thin—and also spending Easter with Don Draper, because he is as lonely as I felt today due to miscommunication, individualism, Ayn Rand, and the loss of family values.

(Or, how to commit Beamtenbeleidigung – insulting a civil servant – without paying a fine.)

Yesterday, at the finance department in Berlin, I asked the official processing my tax forms if she knew why Mohammed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor of self-immolation fame, had set himself on fire. “No,” she replied, her red pen scratching the boxes I’d failed to fill in on my application. She, like many state employees whose misfortune it is to interact with hapless citizens, didn’t display a particular fondness for questions; and I, I had already given in to bureaucratic fatalism and was planning my life on the run, as a low-income accidental tax evader. “Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire,” I said, “because of the infinite arbitrary cruelty of petty bureaucrats.”

She hadn’t yet heard that version of the “Arab Spring.”

Now she knows.

“When you are coming from a war zone, you can’t tolerate dead time. The most important thing is to start rebuilding something,” says Bashar Tamawi, a 33-year old urologist from Syria, who is currently holed up at an asylum center in Berlin-Gatow, pending his second court date. It took Tamawi three months to get to Berlin from Deir Ez-Zorr, where he performed over a thousand surgeries in a field hospital, only a stone’s throw away from the front line and often without electric power and sufficient medical supplies. The German authorities, some of whom may themselves in future require Tamawi’s services, e.g. for a prostate exam, should allow him to begin rebuilding a new life without further delay. And I should stop making references to prostate exams when talking to German asylum bureaucrats.

Tamawi’s asylum hearing is next week. The case worker who questioned Tamawi in Berlin promised him (and me) that it would not affect his asylum application if he detailed how he entered Germany. This is untrue. According to the Dublin convention, asylum seekers can be deported to their first point of entry in Europe.

Here is a wonderful profile of Tamawi from Wednesday’s Die Taz.

As Murat proceeded me and named his first and excellent post on 60pages ‘Crisis what Crisis’ ( after a superbe Supertramp Album btw), I couldn’t help but had to find another title for my first post in ‘Countries in Crisis’ about Turkey. See above. Istanbul is where I reside right now besides Berlin and I went through the weeks proceeding the local elections and am now going through the aftermath of the outcome. The title popped up my mind immediately and of course I wanted it to name the same because this title is so gripping and befitting for the actual situation in Turkey, post elections. In a nutshell: the ruling AK Parti with Prime Minister Erdogan won the local elections and manifested their status quo with a raise in percentage of votes. Erdogan declared these elections not as the communal elections which they were supposed to be but as the elections in which the country decided whether he is going to stay in power after last year’s Gezi protests and the huge corruption scandal which evolved within the ruling party. Well, he is staying in power and his revenge is bitter! Some people are beyond happy with and are very responsible for the outcome because they voted relentlessly for Erdogan. Some are saying that this period is the worst nightmare that this country is going through  (sooo wrong!) and some are saying ‘Crisis what Crisis!’ because it has never been different and will never change, they say. Thinking that elections will make radical changes in democratic societies is the underlying misapprehension. Elections may shift power structures but they are not changing them. Either they are there or they are not. If the past months since the Gezi protests in Istanbul showed something it is anything but the predominant power structures occupying turkish politics. The young folks and majority of people who occupied the Gezi park for a couple of weeks and took their anger to the streets in order to be met with disproportionate violence by the police don’t have a party as their voice. Most of them (but not all of them) were either a-political or weren’t interested in participating in extra-parliamentary aka alternative movements or were involved but got frustrated because of the belief that nothing will ever change. This has many reasons which I can comprehend and retrace but for me it causes a lot of questions and concerns when I want to show my solidarity wholeheartedly. For me especially one reason always bothered and will always bother me: A lot of people were oblivious to the fact that there is an ongoing political and military ‘confrontation’ (to put in an euphemism) for almost 30 years in the east anatolian pre-dominantly kurdish region of Turkey. To explain this conflict would exceed these pages but to name one fact: more than 30.000 people were killed in the conflict and only recently a supposed appeasement strategy has started. For a very long time this didn’t bother too many secular or religiously conservative young or old people in this country who weren’t kurdish. Kurdish-turkish people weren’t allowed to speak their language, listen to their music, express their political opinions, assemble in associations and so on for ages. Only recently the situation is changing and kurdish people are granted more rights and self-determinative power. Only recently means: since the ‘evil’ AKP is in power and opened the peace negotiations. To stand up and take your discontent to the streets is something I support wholeheartedly because I did it for the majority of my life in Kohl and post-Kohl Germany as a leftist person. Leftist organization and opposing the conservative governments also has a history in Turkey but this history is soaked with blood by three military coups. Following these coups people got estranged of taking sides, showing their political viewpoints upfront and got a-politicized to the fact that they couldn’t care less when an inner war is going on in their country and thousands were killed. It were always the ‘others’ never themselves and now that the wind has changed the urge to change something emerges. Yes, something has to change but is not the fact that Party A has to go in order that Party B has to come. My viewpoint post-electorial is this: The country was ruled by secular conservative militarist bozos for the majority of time since the founding of the republic. The kemalist republican doctrine was used a political and strategic instrument in order to enslave the citizens and make them forget the loss of their civic power in a democratic society. It screwed people’s minds severely and the effects are still prevailing. The oppression, prosecution and killing of thousands and thousands of political and religious dissidents in the name of Atatürk and the kemalist doctrine for the entirety of the republic has left a severe trauma and mutual mistrust among the people. I am nothing but a critical thinking person but in my opinion this is the root of a majority of problems which are encountered right now. Anything else is make believe. This got already too long as my first post but will elaborate soonish.