News archive of December 2016

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım has described the truce reached between the Syrian regime and the opposition groups as a "base for negotiations on a lasting peace" in the war-torn country, reiterating Ankara's call for other prominent actors to join the Turkish-Russian efforts. 

Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Şimşek said last week that companies had a substantial foreign currency deficit and that they were working on curbing these. He said the current problem was managing the foreign currency gaps and that they were working on how to assist the private sector. 

The Turkish military announced on Dec. 30 that Russian jets hit positions of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) near the Syrian town of al-Bab. 

Turkey opened its doors to Syrians and started granting them entry in April 2011. Since then, Turkey continues to allow Syrians to enter the country by strictly adhering to international law, particularly to the principle of non-refoulement. 

People made fun of it at the time, and long afterwards, but it's a nice way of expressing a very important distinction.

"As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know." 

Former Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner is accused of being involved in a corruption case by granting state tenders to a family friend/businessman in road building contracts. During the trial in Buenos Aires, the federal judge decided to freeze Kirchner's assets worth $633 million.

Before writing this piece, I looked back at my archives and checked what I had written in the final days of 2014 and 2015. It turned out that I was not happy with those previous years either. "After Turkey's horrible year," reads the title of my Dec. 30, 2014 column. "After yet another horrible year," reads the title of my Dec. 30, 2015 column. 

We are leaving a very difficult year behind. Turkey and the Turkish people have witnessed worst ever coup attempt on July 15 in a direct attack on its fragile democracy by a group of pro-Gülen military personnel and other bureaucrats. 

At the end of each year it has become a tradition to evaluate the past year and write about expectations from the coming one. Scenarios about the country, the region and the world are being specified in newspapers and columns. This year I will restrain myself from doing this for a couple of reasons.

"Noooo," I told my editor over the phone. "Noooo. It is not fair to ask me to deliver what Turkey's most upbeat writers have failed to do. There is nothing, absolutely nothing good about 2016, which the BBC called the most turbulent year of modern Turkish political history."