Where was the state for the past 10 years?

As you know during the period of 1958-59 in order to prevent renegade operations from Syria to Turkey, 650 to 700 mines were laid on approximately 250,000 square meters of land. Turkey now wants to get rid of these mines.

But clearing the mines is a technical thing. It’s not everybody’s thing. Even if you have a map, in time there shifting occurs and only special firms can handle it. The cost of using specialized companies is high. Approximately $800-900 million need to be paid.

Turkey first delegated this job to the Turkish Armed Forces but when they understood that they wouldn’t be able to handle it, they threw the ball to NATO’s specialized organization NAMSA. And that was the right thing to do. NAMSA is a low cost and competent organization.

However, NAMSA stated it would not be able to finish this job in five years and withdrew. The reason was the signed agreement which stated that the mines needed to be totally cleared by 2014. Under these circumstances, the government has planned to make a private company pay the bill by giving it operating rights for a period of 44 years "under the condition of conducting farming."

Of course hell was raised. Approximately 250,000 square meters of fertile land made everybody in the region drool. On top of that the number of companies that could do this is not very high. There are the Israelis. The Canadians.

Then of course people started to produce conspiracy theories and wrote incredible scenarios that reached from making territorial benefits available to Jews to creating a new Gaza on our territory. Nobody noticed that the state of the Turkish Republic came this far because of neglect. You see, the Ottawa convention was signed in 1999. The convention included the condition that mines were to be cleared by 2014.

Turkey kept waiting until 2003. It forgot about it and never cared about it.

It passed Parliament in 2003 but still until today there has never been any work done. And when someone remembered that there is only five years left until 2014, everybody got alarmed.

Then the situation was like this. Let’s all together cry over this.



Is Turkey shooting itself

in the foot?

Professor Andrew Berry, one of the most important names from the department of genetic science at Harvard University and who joined the Darwin event at Sabancı University, gave an extremely important warning. I wonder much about whether Minister of Education Nimet Çubukçu heard this warning. If she heard it, does she recognize she needs to do something about it? Or did she ignore it in order not to attract arrows from her party?

Professor Berry stated that not teaching the theory of evolution at many levels of elementary and junior high schools in Turkey was "an insane and tragic situation." The chat by İpek Yezdani from the daily Milliyet includes an extremely important warning for this country.

Professor Berry drew attention to a danger awaiting us by saying, "If you’re not teaching your children the scientific basis of biology, you’ll shoot yourself in the foot." Professor Berry says that if we do not teach our children such scientific facts we’ll leave them in the arms of the pious, so we need to attend to this point carefully.

He shows us the danger of this style of raising our children. He warns against pious people’s interpretations and rejection of Darwin.

But sadly this is a fact. There is a portion of society that does not want the Darwin theory to spread and they are supported by the AKP government.

It should be our duty to know and be sensitive about what information enters the minds of our children, who make up Turkey’s future. Seen from this perspective, there is much benefit in listening to Professor Berry’s alarm. That is why I wish Nimet Çubukçu would hear this. I’d like to know what she thinks.