By Jonathan L. Mayuga, Business Mirror Correspondent
Business Mirror; March 13, 2006
When Normand Secreto discovered there was high ethanol potential in molasses, he didn’t think twice about pursuing a thesis that would impact on the people and the economy. Soon enough, the 22-year-old BS Chemical Engineering graduate found ways to extract high ethanol content from strains of molasses which can be used in the production of ethanol products - including alcohol and fuel. Ethanol can be used as an additive for gasoline to mitigate the steadily increasing fuel process. It can also provide a cleaner and environment-friendly alternative to imported fossil fuels.
Normand got as far as his thesis, distinguished by having determined the highest percentage of ethanol (12 percent against the existing record of 9 percent) that can be extracted from molasses - and both his teachers at UP Los Baños and private firms looking to apply his discovery are excited. But the brilliant young scientist is dead, victim of a recent freak accident. He fell last week from a jeep where he was hanging on the running board, on his way to a retreat in Mount Makiling. He suffered a fatal blow on the skull.
His professor and thesis adviser, Dr. Fidel Rey Nayve, said Normand’s experiment would have been the most significant scientific discovery in ethanol production and would have made him the youngest, sought-after biofuels scientist in the country today.
Normand, however, did not live long enough to enjoy the recognition – or perhaps even the monetary rewards, which would have been useful to his family in General Santos City. “He was so young,” laments Nayve. “He could have done more for the country.”
Nayve described Normand as their “workhorse”, doing much of the job with enthusiasm and high spirits. “He was very patriotic. He dedicated his work to the Filipino people,” he said.
Despite his humble origins and the oft-repeated admonition of people for him to do well for he can provide for a family of six children where he was the eldest sibling, Normand’s sense of duty to country was overwhelming. In the acknowledgement page of his chemical engineering thesis: “Evaluation of Distillery Slops as Medium Component in Molasses-based Ethanol Fermentation Using Biotech Yeast Strains,” Normand wrote:
“To my countrymen, the Filipino people, who subsidized my schooling in this University; may you reap the true worth of the taxes you paid when I graduate. It is my pleasure to serve you all in my own little ways…Mabuhay ang Pilipino! I keep on praying…Babangon ang Pilipinas.”
Nayve admits he had a soft spot for his brilliant chemistry student. The eldest of six children, Normand belonged to a poor family like his teacher. “He was very studious. He knew that his family is depending on him to finish his studies,” says Nayve.
Nayve himself was able to study college through a scholarship offered by the state university to deserving students in the countryside. “I didn’t intend to study at UPLB because we were poor. I’m from Bicol. Even if I pass the UP College Admissions Test (UPCAT), we would not be able to afford the costs of my college education,” Normand’s professor said.
Nayve’s mother, way back in the late 1970s, was a plain housewife while his father was an employee of a bottling company. When 20 application forms were raffled off by their school to 200 students, he was lucky to “win” one application form, prompting him to fill it up and take the test for UPCAT.
Like him, Normand had to work to be able to study - despite the fact that being a state university student entitled them to a lot of benefits, including free tuition and allowance as state scholars. Normand graduated in 2005. He worked for a computer college before transferring to the UP Rural High School in Los Baños, where he taught mathematics last November.
Nayve says Normand continued to be involved in his BIOTECH team, doing most of the work in their biofuels program. “He really supervised it closely, that’s why the results came out well.”
Normand’s experiment was considered a breakthrough in ethanol production. Normand was able to produce ethanol at 12-percent volume per volume (v/v), even in medium containing 40-percent distillery slops. The thesis, which he shared with Nayve, and fellow researchers Irene Gabrido, Francisco Elegado and Catalino Alfafara, was present at the 27th Annual Scientific Meeting of the National Academy of Science and Technology in July 2005.
It focused on the current thrust of the government to expand the use of nonoil energy and fuel sources, especially biofuel. Normand used the simplest strategy of producing yeast strains that produce ethanol. He explained that the expected increase in ethanol production will be accompanied by the increase in distillery slops generation, which is the main waste in the distillery industry.
Distillery slops is a major environmental concern because of their high biological oxygen demand (BOD) and chemical oxygen demand (COD). Using the best combination of slops and yeast strain with bioreactor, Normand was able to determine potentially superior yeast strains among 10 local yeast isolates he used for the experiment. He concluded that high ethanol production at 12-percent v/v was possible even in medium containing 40-percent distillery slops, after one of the strains performed much better - perhaps better than most currently used industrial yeast strains.
Impressed by Normand’s dedication to the experiment, Nayve sees a big a possibility for industry players using the thesis in the production of ethanol - both alcohol and fuel.
Although the results of the thesis have not yet been fully validated by industry players, Nayve is confident the result of the experiment is valid and will boost production of ethanol in the country in the future. “This is a very important discovery. He got such a potent strain for use in ethanol production,” Nayve says.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Of ethanol and scientists’ options: A page from Prometheus Bound
By J.M. Bo
Published Mar 2006 in The UPLB Horizon
As the country reeled from the multiple increases slapped on gas and oil products after world oil prices surged to record-high levels, everyone went into action mode: law makers rushed legislation, government agencies created ad hoc bodies to address the issue, offices issued energy savings advisories, and homemakers pinched on their budget.
In the University, about two years earlier, the Environmental Biotechnology Program (EBP) of the National Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology (BIOTECH) had reinvigorated its activities under the former Biofuels Program which had lain dormant after the energy crisis in the 1980’s. BIOTECH had at the time isolated HBY3, an indigenous and high-alcohol producing yeast.
But as BIOTECH scientist and EBP Leader Fidel Rey Nayve said, BIOTECH was only able to go as far as testing HBY3 at the industry level when petroleum prices plunged and biofuels research became a victim of fad-based research funding. So the world heaved a sigh of relief when petroleum prices fell and BIOTECH had no choice but to shelve biofuels research as funding dried up. One country (Brazil), however, refused to forget the lessons of the oil crisis, proceeded with dogged determination, and is now the world’s foremost producer and exporter of ethanol.
Meanwhile, BIOTECH’s HBY3 was not left entirely in a dusty corner. Under unknown circumstances, it was pirated and used by the distillery industry to produce ethanol for alcoholic beverages. As Dr. Nayve sadly related, BIOTECH did not get anything from HBY3. “We had no intention of keeping the yeast strain or any technology for that matter to ourselves. What we just wanted is for BIOTECH to get financial returns (royalties) from them,” he said. To emphasize his point, he intimated that this year, BIOTECH’s core budget is only P100,000 per program, that when divided among five projects of the EBP, will leave only a measly P20,000 for each! This amount may not even be enough to cover the cost of media, i.e., yeast-extract, peptone, or bacto-agar!
According to Dr. Nayve, what is happening in BIOTECH is an offshoot of the low level of support that our government allocates to research and development. He said that industrialized countries allocate up to 3% of their GNP to scientific R&D while the Philippines allocated a pathetic 0.14% of its GNP during the same period (2000-2002). Dr. Nayve said that what supports BIOTECH are the external projects and its income generating services. The royalties from HBY3 would have contributed much towards enabling its researchers to continue with their research work.
And continue with the research work on bioethanol is what Dr. Nayve’s team at EBP will do. There are a lot of things going for the research team including the renewed interest in fossil fuel alternatives that are not import dependent, are sources of clean energy, and could generate rural employment to boot. Moreover, the country is endowed with renewable sources of bioethanol such as sugarcane and sugar refinery waste, sweet sorghum, cassava, lignocellulosic materials such as corn stover, grasses, and leaves. The list can go on.
Probably the most important component in bioethanol research are the human resources, the committed researchers who despite the lure of better-paying jobs, are staying on in the University for love of country. Dr. Nayve is only one himself in the BIOTECH team, although how long he and the rest will hold out considering the frustrating work conditions and lack of opportunities in the country , we can only guess and await with bated breath.
The BIOTECH team recently achieved a milestone in their research in bioethanol through the findings of a BS Chemical Engineering graduate, Normand Secreto, who worked on his thesis under Dr. Nayve and Dr. Catalino Alfafara’s tutelage and with the help of fellow researcher Irene Gabrido. Normand was able to identify a yeast that worked better than HBY3. If HBY3 was able to get an 8-9% volume per volume (v/v) concentration of ethanol from molasses in the bioreactor experiment, this yeast initially attained an 11% v/v concentration in the flask experiment, and later a 12% v/v concentration in the bioreactor experiment.
What is more remarkable about Normand’s research was that he was able to attain these levels of ethanol concentration not from a conventional medium but from a molasses medium containing 40% distillery slops. What is the significance of this in distillery waste management? This means that distillery slops can actually be recycled to produce ethanol!
Although slops are not toxic, the volume that is generated by distilleries, estimated at 10-15 liters for every liter of ethanol produced, is enough to clog up rivers, kill our fishery and even the tourism industry, as well as obliterate our coastal resources. The slops deprive the bodies of water with oxygen that every living thing they host needs in order to survive. As Normand and Dr. Nayve’s team worked on increasing ethanol concentration, they anticipated that the volume of distillery slops will increase and aggravate the distillery waste management problem. So why not make the problem a part of the solution? And make it they did!
With Dr. Nayve’s team, Normand was poised to expand the tests on the high ethanol yielding yeast at the industry level when a freak accident snuffed out his young and promising life (see related story on this page). Dr. Nayve says that Normand was such a loss to the team, being the very dedicated and focused researcher that he was.
Although short, Normand’s life clearly had a purpose and his demise may just be equally meaningful. It could fast track the industry-research linkage that Dr. Nayve’s team was planning to enter into to further confirm their findings on the promising yeast strain. For starters, it brought the attention of a distiller, who, after reading Normand’s story that was published in a newspaper, expressed interest in funding further research on the promising yeast strain’s potential to produce ethanol. Dr. Nayve, however, is approaching linkages with caution because he does not want to lose this yeast strain to piracy. He expressed his anxiety about having to take care of intellectual property issues and wished that this will be taken care of by more knowledgeable people or units.
Fad-based if not low support for R&D, inadequacy in addressing intellectual property issues... these are just two long-festering issues that have made it harder for our scientists to practice in the country. The few ones who opted to stay may just bail out from frustration that their work would ever create the impact that they desire to see. Will our generation ever live to see our scientists and researchers contentedly practicing their craft in the country, not forever looking at other options where the grass is greener?
Published Mar 2006 in The UPLB Horizon
As the country reeled from the multiple increases slapped on gas and oil products after world oil prices surged to record-high levels, everyone went into action mode: law makers rushed legislation, government agencies created ad hoc bodies to address the issue, offices issued energy savings advisories, and homemakers pinched on their budget.
In the University, about two years earlier, the Environmental Biotechnology Program (EBP) of the National Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology (BIOTECH) had reinvigorated its activities under the former Biofuels Program which had lain dormant after the energy crisis in the 1980’s. BIOTECH had at the time isolated HBY3, an indigenous and high-alcohol producing yeast.
But as BIOTECH scientist and EBP Leader Fidel Rey Nayve said, BIOTECH was only able to go as far as testing HBY3 at the industry level when petroleum prices plunged and biofuels research became a victim of fad-based research funding. So the world heaved a sigh of relief when petroleum prices fell and BIOTECH had no choice but to shelve biofuels research as funding dried up. One country (Brazil), however, refused to forget the lessons of the oil crisis, proceeded with dogged determination, and is now the world’s foremost producer and exporter of ethanol.
Meanwhile, BIOTECH’s HBY3 was not left entirely in a dusty corner. Under unknown circumstances, it was pirated and used by the distillery industry to produce ethanol for alcoholic beverages. As Dr. Nayve sadly related, BIOTECH did not get anything from HBY3. “We had no intention of keeping the yeast strain or any technology for that matter to ourselves. What we just wanted is for BIOTECH to get financial returns (royalties) from them,” he said. To emphasize his point, he intimated that this year, BIOTECH’s core budget is only P100,000 per program, that when divided among five projects of the EBP, will leave only a measly P20,000 for each! This amount may not even be enough to cover the cost of media, i.e., yeast-extract, peptone, or bacto-agar!
According to Dr. Nayve, what is happening in BIOTECH is an offshoot of the low level of support that our government allocates to research and development. He said that industrialized countries allocate up to 3% of their GNP to scientific R&D while the Philippines allocated a pathetic 0.14% of its GNP during the same period (2000-2002). Dr. Nayve said that what supports BIOTECH are the external projects and its income generating services. The royalties from HBY3 would have contributed much towards enabling its researchers to continue with their research work.
And continue with the research work on bioethanol is what Dr. Nayve’s team at EBP will do. There are a lot of things going for the research team including the renewed interest in fossil fuel alternatives that are not import dependent, are sources of clean energy, and could generate rural employment to boot. Moreover, the country is endowed with renewable sources of bioethanol such as sugarcane and sugar refinery waste, sweet sorghum, cassava, lignocellulosic materials such as corn stover, grasses, and leaves. The list can go on.
Probably the most important component in bioethanol research are the human resources, the committed researchers who despite the lure of better-paying jobs, are staying on in the University for love of country. Dr. Nayve is only one himself in the BIOTECH team, although how long he and the rest will hold out considering the frustrating work conditions and lack of opportunities in the country , we can only guess and await with bated breath.
The BIOTECH team recently achieved a milestone in their research in bioethanol through the findings of a BS Chemical Engineering graduate, Normand Secreto, who worked on his thesis under Dr. Nayve and Dr. Catalino Alfafara’s tutelage and with the help of fellow researcher Irene Gabrido. Normand was able to identify a yeast that worked better than HBY3. If HBY3 was able to get an 8-9% volume per volume (v/v) concentration of ethanol from molasses in the bioreactor experiment, this yeast initially attained an 11% v/v concentration in the flask experiment, and later a 12% v/v concentration in the bioreactor experiment.
What is more remarkable about Normand’s research was that he was able to attain these levels of ethanol concentration not from a conventional medium but from a molasses medium containing 40% distillery slops. What is the significance of this in distillery waste management? This means that distillery slops can actually be recycled to produce ethanol!
Although slops are not toxic, the volume that is generated by distilleries, estimated at 10-15 liters for every liter of ethanol produced, is enough to clog up rivers, kill our fishery and even the tourism industry, as well as obliterate our coastal resources. The slops deprive the bodies of water with oxygen that every living thing they host needs in order to survive. As Normand and Dr. Nayve’s team worked on increasing ethanol concentration, they anticipated that the volume of distillery slops will increase and aggravate the distillery waste management problem. So why not make the problem a part of the solution? And make it they did!
With Dr. Nayve’s team, Normand was poised to expand the tests on the high ethanol yielding yeast at the industry level when a freak accident snuffed out his young and promising life (see related story on this page). Dr. Nayve says that Normand was such a loss to the team, being the very dedicated and focused researcher that he was.
Although short, Normand’s life clearly had a purpose and his demise may just be equally meaningful. It could fast track the industry-research linkage that Dr. Nayve’s team was planning to enter into to further confirm their findings on the promising yeast strain. For starters, it brought the attention of a distiller, who, after reading Normand’s story that was published in a newspaper, expressed interest in funding further research on the promising yeast strain’s potential to produce ethanol. Dr. Nayve, however, is approaching linkages with caution because he does not want to lose this yeast strain to piracy. He expressed his anxiety about having to take care of intellectual property issues and wished that this will be taken care of by more knowledgeable people or units.
Fad-based if not low support for R&D, inadequacy in addressing intellectual property issues... these are just two long-festering issues that have made it harder for our scientists to practice in the country. The few ones who opted to stay may just bail out from frustration that their work would ever create the impact that they desire to see. Will our generation ever live to see our scientists and researchers contentedly practicing their craft in the country, not forever looking at other options where the grass is greener?
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Storyteller, Scholar: Macario D. Tiu
by Charina Sanz Zarate / Mindanews
DAVAO CITY -- “The art of storytelling lies within the storyteller, “ Ruth Sawyer writes, “to be searched for, drawn out, made to grow.” The secret of this gift, she says in her book “The Way of the Storyteller”, really lies in the storyteller’s creative imagination; her power to evoke emotion; and her sense of conviction.
It is in this narrative spirit and tradition that we celebrate the work of another gifted storyteller, Dr. Macario D. Tiu, whose prose and imagination and whose diverse writings – from literature to history – never fail to enthrall, captivate, even titillate, a generation of Mindanao readers.
Once again, with his latest work entitled “Davao: Reconstructing History from Text and Memory”, Tiu presents us another historical narrative of Davao which is so far the most comprehensive and scholarly work on Davao. Written in fluid language and adhering to rigorous scholarship, Davao history is pushed back further than 1848 when it was conquered by the Basque adventurer Jose Oyanguren.
The book also features many new information: the most substantive discussion of each Davao tribe in any single volume, including a theory of their migration; the most in-depth discussion of Datu Bago as well as other Davao heroes; sample studies of the different settlers at different period of Davao history; and the widest collection of myths and legends representing almost all the tribes of Davao. The book is published by the Ateneo de Davao University Research and Publication Office for the Mindanao Coalition of Development NGOs.
Perhaps the reason why Tiu’s narratives resonate with us deeply is because he tells it in ways that we easily feel and understand. “Qualify, simplify,” he told a young scholar recently, who seemed lost in the maze of theoretical paradigms that complicate in what would have been otherwise clear and simple realities.
“The community poet”, he writes, “clarifies, simplifies, and makes things understood.” He likens the poet’s origins to a baylan. “The baylan is the bridge between humans and the spirit world. She interprets what the deities say. She clarifies what is strange or mysterious. She is the simplifier. She is the clarifier. She familiarizes,[xvii] and communitizes things. That is the role of the poet.”
Seeing the kinship between a poet and a balyan is very much like Tiu - - the home-grown Mindanawon scholar who asserts to make the strange familiar by “indigenizing and vernacularizing the foreign” as he puts it. One is therefore tempted to think that the “balyan” in his short story of the same title which won first prize in the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial awards this year (Cebuano) can perhaps be a “self-representation” of sorts.
Last year, Dr. Tiu, a Palanca awardee in 2001 for short story in Cebuano and Philippine Graphic Fiction awardee in 2000, was also chosen one of four finalists for the history category of the National Book Award 2003 for "Davao 1890-1910: Conquest and Resistance in the Garden of the Gods."
Dr. Tiu is currently the editor of Tambara, the official journal of the Ateneo de Davao University and writes a column for Mindanews entitled “Bisag Unsa”.
In the book’s foreword, Patricio N. Abinales, author of “Making Mindanao”, has this succinct tribute to Tiu: “Mindanawons have something to be proud of in this work by Davao ‘s leading scholar and multi- awarded poet and short-story writer. For it is a major contribution to a Mindanao-wide effort of recovering our story as a people of an island that has, since its incorporation to the Philippine body politic, consistently shaped the directions and shifts of its national narrative.”
Macario D. Tiu is indeed an inspiration to a generation of Mindanao scholars and shows the way to an engaged scholarship, one that is imbued with a sense of purpose and conviction, pursued not for its own sake but to reshape realities and to advocate for changes, and to rewrite a marginal past from the vantage point of the silenced and the inarticulate.
(The book had its "soft launching" on December 15. It will be formally launched on January 14, during the inauguration of the new Davao Museum. Copies of the book are available at the AdDU Bookstore, AdDU Research and Publication Office, Mindanawon, Mindanews, and other outlets. For details, call 221-2411 local 8213 and look for Ryan Digan.)
DAVAO CITY -- “The art of storytelling lies within the storyteller, “ Ruth Sawyer writes, “to be searched for, drawn out, made to grow.” The secret of this gift, she says in her book “The Way of the Storyteller”, really lies in the storyteller’s creative imagination; her power to evoke emotion; and her sense of conviction.
It is in this narrative spirit and tradition that we celebrate the work of another gifted storyteller, Dr. Macario D. Tiu, whose prose and imagination and whose diverse writings – from literature to history – never fail to enthrall, captivate, even titillate, a generation of Mindanao readers.
Once again, with his latest work entitled “Davao: Reconstructing History from Text and Memory”, Tiu presents us another historical narrative of Davao which is so far the most comprehensive and scholarly work on Davao. Written in fluid language and adhering to rigorous scholarship, Davao history is pushed back further than 1848 when it was conquered by the Basque adventurer Jose Oyanguren.
The book also features many new information: the most substantive discussion of each Davao tribe in any single volume, including a theory of their migration; the most in-depth discussion of Datu Bago as well as other Davao heroes; sample studies of the different settlers at different period of Davao history; and the widest collection of myths and legends representing almost all the tribes of Davao. The book is published by the Ateneo de Davao University Research and Publication Office for the Mindanao Coalition of Development NGOs.
Perhaps the reason why Tiu’s narratives resonate with us deeply is because he tells it in ways that we easily feel and understand. “Qualify, simplify,” he told a young scholar recently, who seemed lost in the maze of theoretical paradigms that complicate in what would have been otherwise clear and simple realities.
“The community poet”, he writes, “clarifies, simplifies, and makes things understood.” He likens the poet’s origins to a baylan. “The baylan is the bridge between humans and the spirit world. She interprets what the deities say. She clarifies what is strange or mysterious. She is the simplifier. She is the clarifier. She familiarizes,[xvii] and communitizes things. That is the role of the poet.”
Seeing the kinship between a poet and a balyan is very much like Tiu - - the home-grown Mindanawon scholar who asserts to make the strange familiar by “indigenizing and vernacularizing the foreign” as he puts it. One is therefore tempted to think that the “balyan” in his short story of the same title which won first prize in the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial awards this year (Cebuano) can perhaps be a “self-representation” of sorts.
Last year, Dr. Tiu, a Palanca awardee in 2001 for short story in Cebuano and Philippine Graphic Fiction awardee in 2000, was also chosen one of four finalists for the history category of the National Book Award 2003 for "Davao 1890-1910: Conquest and Resistance in the Garden of the Gods."
Dr. Tiu is currently the editor of Tambara, the official journal of the Ateneo de Davao University and writes a column for Mindanews entitled “Bisag Unsa”.
In the book’s foreword, Patricio N. Abinales, author of “Making Mindanao”, has this succinct tribute to Tiu: “Mindanawons have something to be proud of in this work by Davao ‘s leading scholar and multi- awarded poet and short-story writer. For it is a major contribution to a Mindanao-wide effort of recovering our story as a people of an island that has, since its incorporation to the Philippine body politic, consistently shaped the directions and shifts of its national narrative.”
Macario D. Tiu is indeed an inspiration to a generation of Mindanao scholars and shows the way to an engaged scholarship, one that is imbued with a sense of purpose and conviction, pursued not for its own sake but to reshape realities and to advocate for changes, and to rewrite a marginal past from the vantage point of the silenced and the inarticulate.
(The book had its "soft launching" on December 15. It will be formally launched on January 14, during the inauguration of the new Davao Museum. Copies of the book are available at the AdDU Bookstore, AdDU Research and Publication Office, Mindanawon, Mindanews, and other outlets. For details, call 221-2411 local 8213 and look for Ryan Digan.)
Turkish Schools Offer Pakistan a Gentler Vision of Islam
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
The New York Times, May 4, 2008
KARACHI, Pakistan — Praying in Pakistan has not been easy for Mesut Kacmaz, a Muslim teacher from Turkey.
He tried the mosque near his house, but it had Israeli and Danish flags painted on the floor for people to step on. The mosque near where he works warned him never to return wearing a tie. Pakistanis everywhere assume he is not Muslim because he has no beard.
“Kill, fight, shoot,” Mr. Kacmaz said. “This is a misinterpretation of Islam.”
But that view is common in Pakistan, a frontier land for the future of Islam, where schools, nourished by Saudi and American money dating back to the 1980s, have spread Islamic radicalism through the poorest parts of society. With a literacy rate of just 50 percent and a public school system near collapse, the country is particularly vulnerable.
Mr. Kacmaz (pronounced KATCH-maz) is part of a group of Turkish educators who have come to this battleground with an entirely different vision of Islam. Theirs is moderate and flexible, comfortably coexisting with the West while remaining distinct from it. Like Muslim Peace Corps volunteers, they promote this approach in schools, which are now established in more than 80 countries, Muslim and Christian.
Their efforts are important in Pakistan, a nuclear power whose stability and whose vulnerability to fundamentalism have become main preoccupations of American foreign policy. Its tribal areas have become a refuge to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and the battle against fundamentalism rests squarely on young people and the education they get.
At present, that education is extremely weak. The poorest Pakistanis cannot afford to send their children to public schools, which are free but require fees for books and uniforms. Some choose to send their children to madrasas, or religious schools, which, like aid organizations, offer free food and clothing. Many simply teach, but some have radical agendas. At the same time, a growing middle class is rejecting public schools, which are chaotic and poorly financed, and choosing from a new array of private schools.
The Turkish schools, which have expanded to seven cities in Pakistan since the first one opened a decade ago, cannot transform the country on their own. But they offer an alternative approach that could help reduce the influence of Islamic extremists.
They prescribe a strong Western curriculum, with courses, taught in English, from math and science to English literature and Shakespeare. They do not teach religion beyond the one class in Islamic studies that is required by the state. Unlike British-style private schools, however, they encourage Islam in their dormitories, where teachers set examples in lifestyle and prayer.
“Whatever the West has of science, let our kids have it,” said Erkam Aytav, a Turk who works in the new schools. “But let our kids have their religion as well.”
That approach appeals to parents in Pakistan, who want their children to be capable of competing with the West without losing their identities to it. Allahdad Niazi, a retired Urdu professor in Quetta, a frontier town near the Afghan border, took his son out of an elite military school, because it was too authoritarian and did not sufficiently encourage Islam, and put him in the Turkish school, called PakTurk.
“Private schools can’t make our sons good Muslims,” Mr. Niazi said, sitting on the floor in a Quetta house. “Religious schools can’t give them modern education. PakTurk does both.”
The model is the brainchild of a Turkish Islamic scholar, Fethullah Gulen. A preacher with millions of followers in Turkey, Mr. Gulen, 69, comes from a tradition of Sufism, an introspective, mystical strain of Islam. He has lived in exile in the United States since 2000, after getting in trouble with secular Turkish officials.
Mr. Gulen’s idea, Mr. Aytav said, is that “without science, religion turns to radicalism, and without religion, science is blind and brings the world to danger.”
The schools are putting into practice a Turkish Sufi philosophy that took its most modern form during the last century, after Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey’s founder, crushed the Islamic caliphate in the 1920s. Islamic thinkers responded by trying to bring Western science into the faith they were trying to defend. In the 1950s, while Arab Islamic intellectuals like Sayyid Qutub were firmly rejecting the West, Turkish ones like Said Nursi were seeking ways to coexist with it.
In Karachi, a sprawling city that has had its own struggles with radicalism — the American reporter Daniel Pearl was killed here, and the famed Binori madrasa here is said to have sheltered Osama bin Laden — the two approaches compete daily.
The Turkish school is in a poor neighborhood in the south of the city where residents are mostly Pashtun, a strongly tribal ethnic group whose poorer fringes have been among the most susceptible to radicalism. Mr. Kacmaz, who became principal 10 months ago, ran into trouble almost as soon as he began. The locals were suspicious of the Turks, who, with their ties and clean-shaven faces, looked like math teachers from Middle America.
“They asked me several times, ‘Are they Muslim? Do they pray? Are they drinking at night?’ ” said Ali Showkat, a vice principal of the school, who is Pakistani.
Goats nap by piles of rubbish near the school’s entrance, and Mr. Kacmaz asked a local religious leader to help get people to stop throwing their trash near the school, to no avail. Exasperated, he hung an Islamic saying on the outer wall of the school: “Cleanliness is half of faith.” When he prayed at a mosque, two young men followed him out and told him not to return wearing a tie because it was un-Islamic.
“I said, ‘Show me a verse in the Koran where it was forbidden,’ ” Mr. Kacmaz said, steering his car through tangled rush-hour traffic. The two men were wearing glasses, and he told them that scripturally, there was no difference between a tie and glasses.
“Behind their words there was no Hadith,” he said, referring to a set of Islamic texts, “only misunderstanding.”
That misunderstanding, along with the radicalism that follows, stalks the poorest parts of Quetta. Abdul Bari, a 31-year-old teacher of Islam from a religious family, lives in a neighborhood without electricity or running water. Two brothers from his tribe were killed on a suicide mission, leaving their mother a beggar and angering Mr. Bari, who says a Muslim’s first duty is to his mother and his family.
“Our nation has no patience,” said Mr. Bari, who raised his seven younger siblings, after his father died suddenly a dozen years ago. He decided that one of his brothers should be educated, and enrolled him in the Turkish school.
The Turks put the focus on academics, which pleased Mr. Bari, who said his dream was for Saadudeen, his brother, to lift the family out of poverty and expand its horizons beyond religion. Mr. Bari’s title, hafiz, means he has memorized the entire Koran, though he has no formal education. Two other brothers have earned the same distinction. Their father was an imam.
His is a lonely mission in a neighborhood where nearly all the residents are illiterate and most disapprove of his choices, Mr. Bari said. He is constantly on guard against extremism. He once punished Saadudeen for flying kites with the wrong kind of boys. At the Turkish school, the teenager is supervised around the clock in a dormitory.
“They are totally against extremism,” Mr. Bari said of the Turks. “They are true Muslims. They will make my brother into a true Muslim. He’ll deal with people with justice and wisdom. Not with impatience.”
Illiteracy is one of the roots of problems dogging the Muslim world, said Matiullah Aail, a religious scholar in Quetta who graduated from Medina University in Saudi Arabia.
In Baluchistan, Quetta’s sparsely populated province, the literacy rate is less than 10 percent, said Tariq Baluch, a government official in the Pasheen district. He estimated that about half of the district’s children attended madrasas.
Mr. Aail said: “Doctors and lawyers have to show their degrees. But when it comes to mullahs, no one asks them for their qualifications. They don’t have knowledge, but they are influential.”
That leads to a skewed interpretation of Islam, even by those schooled in it, according to Mr. Gulen and his followers.
“They’ve memorized the entire holy book, but they don’t understand its meaning,” said Kamil Ture, a Turkish administrator.
Mr. Kacmaz chimed in: “How we interpret the Koran is totally dependent on our education.”
In an interview in 2004, published in a book of his writings, Mr. Gulen put it like this: “In the countries where Muslims live, some religious leaders and immature Muslims have no other weapon in hand than their fundamental interpretation of Islam. They use this to engage people in struggles that serve their own purposes.”
Moderate as that sounds, some Turks say Mr. Gulen uses the schools to advance his own political agenda. Murat Belge, a prominent Turkish intellectual who has experience with the movement, said that Mr. Gulen “sincerely believes that he has been chosen by God,” and described Mr. Gulen’s followers as “Muslim Jesuits” who are preparing elites to run the country.
Hakan Yavuz, a Turkish professor at the University of Utah who has had extensive experience with the Gulen movement, offered a darker assessment.
“The purpose here is very much power,” Mr. Yavuz said. “The model of power is the Ottoman Empire and the idea that Turks should shape the Muslim world.”
But while radical Islamists seek to re-establish a seventh-century Islamic caliphate, without nations or borders, and more moderate Islamists, like Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, use secular democracy to achieve the goal of an Islamic state, Mr. Gulen is a nationalist who says he wants no more than a secular democracy where citizens are free to worship, a claim secular Turks find highly suspect.
Still, his schools are richly supported by Turkish businessmen. M. Ihsan Kalkavan, a shipping magnate who has built hotels in Nigeria, helped finance Gulen schools there, which he said had attracted the children of the Nigerian elite.
“When we take our education experiment to other countries, we introduce ourselves. We say, ‘See, we’re not terrorists.’ When people get to know us, things change,” Mr. Kalkavan said in his office in Istanbul.
He estimated the number of Mr. Gulen’s followers in Turkey at three million to five million. The network itself does not provide estimates, and Mr. Gulen declined to be interviewed.
The schools, which also operate in Christian countries like Russia, are not for Muslims alone, and one of their stated aims is to promote interfaith understanding. Mr. Gulen met the previous pope, as well as Jewish and Orthodox Christian leaders, and teachers in the schools say they stress multiculturalism and universal values.
“We are all humans,” said Mr. Kacmaz, the principal. “In Islam, every human being is very important.”
Pakistani society is changing fast, and more Pakistanis are realizing the importance of education, in part because they have more to lose, parents said. Abrar Awan, whose son is attending the Turkish school in Quetta, said he had grown tired of the attitude of the Islamic political parties he belonged to as a student. Now a government employee with a steady job, he sees real life as more complicated than black-and-white ideology.
“America or the West was always behind every fault, every problem,” he said, at a gathering of fathers in April. “Now, in my practical life, I know the faults are within us.”
Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting from Karachi and Quetta in Pakistan and from Istanbul.
The New York Times, May 4, 2008
KARACHI, Pakistan — Praying in Pakistan has not been easy for Mesut Kacmaz, a Muslim teacher from Turkey.
He tried the mosque near his house, but it had Israeli and Danish flags painted on the floor for people to step on. The mosque near where he works warned him never to return wearing a tie. Pakistanis everywhere assume he is not Muslim because he has no beard.
“Kill, fight, shoot,” Mr. Kacmaz said. “This is a misinterpretation of Islam.”
But that view is common in Pakistan, a frontier land for the future of Islam, where schools, nourished by Saudi and American money dating back to the 1980s, have spread Islamic radicalism through the poorest parts of society. With a literacy rate of just 50 percent and a public school system near collapse, the country is particularly vulnerable.
Mr. Kacmaz (pronounced KATCH-maz) is part of a group of Turkish educators who have come to this battleground with an entirely different vision of Islam. Theirs is moderate and flexible, comfortably coexisting with the West while remaining distinct from it. Like Muslim Peace Corps volunteers, they promote this approach in schools, which are now established in more than 80 countries, Muslim and Christian.
Their efforts are important in Pakistan, a nuclear power whose stability and whose vulnerability to fundamentalism have become main preoccupations of American foreign policy. Its tribal areas have become a refuge to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and the battle against fundamentalism rests squarely on young people and the education they get.
At present, that education is extremely weak. The poorest Pakistanis cannot afford to send their children to public schools, which are free but require fees for books and uniforms. Some choose to send their children to madrasas, or religious schools, which, like aid organizations, offer free food and clothing. Many simply teach, but some have radical agendas. At the same time, a growing middle class is rejecting public schools, which are chaotic and poorly financed, and choosing from a new array of private schools.
The Turkish schools, which have expanded to seven cities in Pakistan since the first one opened a decade ago, cannot transform the country on their own. But they offer an alternative approach that could help reduce the influence of Islamic extremists.
They prescribe a strong Western curriculum, with courses, taught in English, from math and science to English literature and Shakespeare. They do not teach religion beyond the one class in Islamic studies that is required by the state. Unlike British-style private schools, however, they encourage Islam in their dormitories, where teachers set examples in lifestyle and prayer.
“Whatever the West has of science, let our kids have it,” said Erkam Aytav, a Turk who works in the new schools. “But let our kids have their religion as well.”
That approach appeals to parents in Pakistan, who want their children to be capable of competing with the West without losing their identities to it. Allahdad Niazi, a retired Urdu professor in Quetta, a frontier town near the Afghan border, took his son out of an elite military school, because it was too authoritarian and did not sufficiently encourage Islam, and put him in the Turkish school, called PakTurk.
“Private schools can’t make our sons good Muslims,” Mr. Niazi said, sitting on the floor in a Quetta house. “Religious schools can’t give them modern education. PakTurk does both.”
The model is the brainchild of a Turkish Islamic scholar, Fethullah Gulen. A preacher with millions of followers in Turkey, Mr. Gulen, 69, comes from a tradition of Sufism, an introspective, mystical strain of Islam. He has lived in exile in the United States since 2000, after getting in trouble with secular Turkish officials.
Mr. Gulen’s idea, Mr. Aytav said, is that “without science, religion turns to radicalism, and without religion, science is blind and brings the world to danger.”
The schools are putting into practice a Turkish Sufi philosophy that took its most modern form during the last century, after Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey’s founder, crushed the Islamic caliphate in the 1920s. Islamic thinkers responded by trying to bring Western science into the faith they were trying to defend. In the 1950s, while Arab Islamic intellectuals like Sayyid Qutub were firmly rejecting the West, Turkish ones like Said Nursi were seeking ways to coexist with it.
In Karachi, a sprawling city that has had its own struggles with radicalism — the American reporter Daniel Pearl was killed here, and the famed Binori madrasa here is said to have sheltered Osama bin Laden — the two approaches compete daily.
The Turkish school is in a poor neighborhood in the south of the city where residents are mostly Pashtun, a strongly tribal ethnic group whose poorer fringes have been among the most susceptible to radicalism. Mr. Kacmaz, who became principal 10 months ago, ran into trouble almost as soon as he began. The locals were suspicious of the Turks, who, with their ties and clean-shaven faces, looked like math teachers from Middle America.
“They asked me several times, ‘Are they Muslim? Do they pray? Are they drinking at night?’ ” said Ali Showkat, a vice principal of the school, who is Pakistani.
Goats nap by piles of rubbish near the school’s entrance, and Mr. Kacmaz asked a local religious leader to help get people to stop throwing their trash near the school, to no avail. Exasperated, he hung an Islamic saying on the outer wall of the school: “Cleanliness is half of faith.” When he prayed at a mosque, two young men followed him out and told him not to return wearing a tie because it was un-Islamic.
“I said, ‘Show me a verse in the Koran where it was forbidden,’ ” Mr. Kacmaz said, steering his car through tangled rush-hour traffic. The two men were wearing glasses, and he told them that scripturally, there was no difference between a tie and glasses.
“Behind their words there was no Hadith,” he said, referring to a set of Islamic texts, “only misunderstanding.”
That misunderstanding, along with the radicalism that follows, stalks the poorest parts of Quetta. Abdul Bari, a 31-year-old teacher of Islam from a religious family, lives in a neighborhood without electricity or running water. Two brothers from his tribe were killed on a suicide mission, leaving their mother a beggar and angering Mr. Bari, who says a Muslim’s first duty is to his mother and his family.
“Our nation has no patience,” said Mr. Bari, who raised his seven younger siblings, after his father died suddenly a dozen years ago. He decided that one of his brothers should be educated, and enrolled him in the Turkish school.
The Turks put the focus on academics, which pleased Mr. Bari, who said his dream was for Saadudeen, his brother, to lift the family out of poverty and expand its horizons beyond religion. Mr. Bari’s title, hafiz, means he has memorized the entire Koran, though he has no formal education. Two other brothers have earned the same distinction. Their father was an imam.
His is a lonely mission in a neighborhood where nearly all the residents are illiterate and most disapprove of his choices, Mr. Bari said. He is constantly on guard against extremism. He once punished Saadudeen for flying kites with the wrong kind of boys. At the Turkish school, the teenager is supervised around the clock in a dormitory.
“They are totally against extremism,” Mr. Bari said of the Turks. “They are true Muslims. They will make my brother into a true Muslim. He’ll deal with people with justice and wisdom. Not with impatience.”
Illiteracy is one of the roots of problems dogging the Muslim world, said Matiullah Aail, a religious scholar in Quetta who graduated from Medina University in Saudi Arabia.
In Baluchistan, Quetta’s sparsely populated province, the literacy rate is less than 10 percent, said Tariq Baluch, a government official in the Pasheen district. He estimated that about half of the district’s children attended madrasas.
Mr. Aail said: “Doctors and lawyers have to show their degrees. But when it comes to mullahs, no one asks them for their qualifications. They don’t have knowledge, but they are influential.”
That leads to a skewed interpretation of Islam, even by those schooled in it, according to Mr. Gulen and his followers.
“They’ve memorized the entire holy book, but they don’t understand its meaning,” said Kamil Ture, a Turkish administrator.
Mr. Kacmaz chimed in: “How we interpret the Koran is totally dependent on our education.”
In an interview in 2004, published in a book of his writings, Mr. Gulen put it like this: “In the countries where Muslims live, some religious leaders and immature Muslims have no other weapon in hand than their fundamental interpretation of Islam. They use this to engage people in struggles that serve their own purposes.”
Moderate as that sounds, some Turks say Mr. Gulen uses the schools to advance his own political agenda. Murat Belge, a prominent Turkish intellectual who has experience with the movement, said that Mr. Gulen “sincerely believes that he has been chosen by God,” and described Mr. Gulen’s followers as “Muslim Jesuits” who are preparing elites to run the country.
Hakan Yavuz, a Turkish professor at the University of Utah who has had extensive experience with the Gulen movement, offered a darker assessment.
“The purpose here is very much power,” Mr. Yavuz said. “The model of power is the Ottoman Empire and the idea that Turks should shape the Muslim world.”
But while radical Islamists seek to re-establish a seventh-century Islamic caliphate, without nations or borders, and more moderate Islamists, like Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, use secular democracy to achieve the goal of an Islamic state, Mr. Gulen is a nationalist who says he wants no more than a secular democracy where citizens are free to worship, a claim secular Turks find highly suspect.
Still, his schools are richly supported by Turkish businessmen. M. Ihsan Kalkavan, a shipping magnate who has built hotels in Nigeria, helped finance Gulen schools there, which he said had attracted the children of the Nigerian elite.
“When we take our education experiment to other countries, we introduce ourselves. We say, ‘See, we’re not terrorists.’ When people get to know us, things change,” Mr. Kalkavan said in his office in Istanbul.
He estimated the number of Mr. Gulen’s followers in Turkey at three million to five million. The network itself does not provide estimates, and Mr. Gulen declined to be interviewed.
The schools, which also operate in Christian countries like Russia, are not for Muslims alone, and one of their stated aims is to promote interfaith understanding. Mr. Gulen met the previous pope, as well as Jewish and Orthodox Christian leaders, and teachers in the schools say they stress multiculturalism and universal values.
“We are all humans,” said Mr. Kacmaz, the principal. “In Islam, every human being is very important.”
Pakistani society is changing fast, and more Pakistanis are realizing the importance of education, in part because they have more to lose, parents said. Abrar Awan, whose son is attending the Turkish school in Quetta, said he had grown tired of the attitude of the Islamic political parties he belonged to as a student. Now a government employee with a steady job, he sees real life as more complicated than black-and-white ideology.
“America or the West was always behind every fault, every problem,” he said, at a gathering of fathers in April. “Now, in my practical life, I know the faults are within us.”
Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting from Karachi and Quetta in Pakistan and from Istanbul.
Turkish honour killings: A dishonourable practice
Apr 12th 2007 | DIYARBAKIR AND VAN
The Economist print edition
Despite a government crackdown, honour killings persist in Turkey
WITH his soulful eyes and timid smile, Murat Kara, a 40-year-old stocking seller in the mainly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir, is an unlikely murderer. Yet 13 years ago he pumped seven bullets into his younger sister. His widowed mother and uncles told him to kill the 17-year-old after she eloped with her boyfriend, staining the family's honour. Mr Kara resisted for three months because “I loved my sister and didn't believe she deserved to die.” But then the neighbours stopped talking to him, the grocer refused to sell him bread, the local imam said he was disobeying Allah, and his mother threatened to curse the milk she had breast-fed him. So he gave in.
The killing of women by male relatives who believe they have dishonoured the family-eg, by getting pregnant outside wedlock or wearing revealing clothes-has haunted Turkey for centuries. Bowing to pressure from the media, feminist groups and the European Union, Turkey's mildly Islamist government has launched an unprecedented campaign against honour killings, disarming even its fiercest critics.
State-employed imams now declare honour killings “sinful” in the Friday sermons they deliver across the country. Tens of thousands of army conscripts and police recruits are taught that violence against women is bad. Brooking the ire of his conservative constituents, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, told a gathering of foreign Muslims that “discrimination against women is worse than racism.” Nor is this mere talk. Turkey's penal code has been tweaked to stiffen penalties not only for those who commit honour killings but also for those who plan them. Had Mr Kara, who got seven years thanks to a judge who deemed he had been unduly provoked, killed his sister today, he would in all probability be serving a life sentence.
The trouble is that, despite the government's efforts, honour-related crimes show little sign of abating. A parliamentary report last August found that 1,091 such crimes had been committed in the past five years-over four a week. Only three of 51 honour killers interviewed for another study said they had any regrets.
In a society where female chastity is venerated and the motto “my horse, my gun and my woman are sacred” is common among men, “this should not come as a surprise,” notes Zozan Ozgokce, a female activist who runs an EU-funded project in Van to counsel abused women. Fatma Sahin, a deputy from Mr Erdogan's AK Party who drafted the parliamentary report, blames the deeply entrenched patriarchal and feudal system in the Kurdish provinces, where many of the murders occur. Rampant poverty and illiteracy have been exacerbated by the forced eviction of millions of Kurdish villagers by the army in its war against PKK rebels in the 1990s.
With refugee families of up to 20 or more crammed into tiny slums, incest and rape have shot up, says Handan Coskun, a social worker in Diyarbakir who is investigating links between female suicides and honour crimes. One survivor said she was ordered to take her own life (and locked in a room with a bottle of bleach) by her father, who sought to disguise his daughter's failed murder as suicide. She managed to escape; less fortunate souls have been found dead with their wrists slit or hanging from a rope.
In Diyarbakir and elsewhere in the south-east, new efforts are being made to protect vulnerable women through emergency hotlines and shelters for abused women. The first government-run refuge opened its doors outside Diyarbakir two years ago. Many of the residents are pregnant teenage rape victims, who risk being killed by relatives who blame them (and not their rapists) for their plight.
Still, male accomplices or perpetrators are often targeted, too. And honour crimes are not a uniquely Kurdish phenomenon, says Leyla Pervizat, an Istanbul-based expert. This is especially true of the fiercely conservative Black Sea region where “after the men are killed, their penises are cut off and stuffed in their mouths,” she adds laconically. What gives her hope is that the number of those willing to tip off the authorities about a planned murder is growing-so more lives are being saved. And many of the whistleblowers are male.
The Economist print edition
Despite a government crackdown, honour killings persist in Turkey
WITH his soulful eyes and timid smile, Murat Kara, a 40-year-old stocking seller in the mainly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir, is an unlikely murderer. Yet 13 years ago he pumped seven bullets into his younger sister. His widowed mother and uncles told him to kill the 17-year-old after she eloped with her boyfriend, staining the family's honour. Mr Kara resisted for three months because “I loved my sister and didn't believe she deserved to die.” But then the neighbours stopped talking to him, the grocer refused to sell him bread, the local imam said he was disobeying Allah, and his mother threatened to curse the milk she had breast-fed him. So he gave in.
The killing of women by male relatives who believe they have dishonoured the family-eg, by getting pregnant outside wedlock or wearing revealing clothes-has haunted Turkey for centuries. Bowing to pressure from the media, feminist groups and the European Union, Turkey's mildly Islamist government has launched an unprecedented campaign against honour killings, disarming even its fiercest critics.
State-employed imams now declare honour killings “sinful” in the Friday sermons they deliver across the country. Tens of thousands of army conscripts and police recruits are taught that violence against women is bad. Brooking the ire of his conservative constituents, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, told a gathering of foreign Muslims that “discrimination against women is worse than racism.” Nor is this mere talk. Turkey's penal code has been tweaked to stiffen penalties not only for those who commit honour killings but also for those who plan them. Had Mr Kara, who got seven years thanks to a judge who deemed he had been unduly provoked, killed his sister today, he would in all probability be serving a life sentence.
The trouble is that, despite the government's efforts, honour-related crimes show little sign of abating. A parliamentary report last August found that 1,091 such crimes had been committed in the past five years-over four a week. Only three of 51 honour killers interviewed for another study said they had any regrets.
In a society where female chastity is venerated and the motto “my horse, my gun and my woman are sacred” is common among men, “this should not come as a surprise,” notes Zozan Ozgokce, a female activist who runs an EU-funded project in Van to counsel abused women. Fatma Sahin, a deputy from Mr Erdogan's AK Party who drafted the parliamentary report, blames the deeply entrenched patriarchal and feudal system in the Kurdish provinces, where many of the murders occur. Rampant poverty and illiteracy have been exacerbated by the forced eviction of millions of Kurdish villagers by the army in its war against PKK rebels in the 1990s.
With refugee families of up to 20 or more crammed into tiny slums, incest and rape have shot up, says Handan Coskun, a social worker in Diyarbakir who is investigating links between female suicides and honour crimes. One survivor said she was ordered to take her own life (and locked in a room with a bottle of bleach) by her father, who sought to disguise his daughter's failed murder as suicide. She managed to escape; less fortunate souls have been found dead with their wrists slit or hanging from a rope.
In Diyarbakir and elsewhere in the south-east, new efforts are being made to protect vulnerable women through emergency hotlines and shelters for abused women. The first government-run refuge opened its doors outside Diyarbakir two years ago. Many of the residents are pregnant teenage rape victims, who risk being killed by relatives who blame them (and not their rapists) for their plight.
Still, male accomplices or perpetrators are often targeted, too. And honour crimes are not a uniquely Kurdish phenomenon, says Leyla Pervizat, an Istanbul-based expert. This is especially true of the fiercely conservative Black Sea region where “after the men are killed, their penises are cut off and stuffed in their mouths,” she adds laconically. What gives her hope is that the number of those willing to tip off the authorities about a planned murder is growing-so more lives are being saved. And many of the whistleblowers are male.
After Lifetime in Germany, Turks Still Alone and Torn
By MARK LANDLER
March 25, 2007
The New York Times
DUISBURG, Germany, March 20 — The last cups of Turkish black tea had been drained, the platters of olives and goat cheese cleared, but the snowy-haired Turks lingered at the table.
“Of course I always think about going back,” said Yusuf Mermer, 69, who left Ankara in 1969 for the Ruhr, where he operated a forklift. He now lives in a nursing home here. “I have nieces and nephews in Turkey, but I would just be a burden on them.”
His voice cracked and tears trickled down his creased face. “Looking back, I don’t even know why I came to Germany,” he said. “Things were going fine for me in Turkey.”
Four decades after the first Turks arrived as guest workers, they are reaching retirement in a land that still feels foreign. For Mr. Mermer and many others, it is a bleak time with the recognition that they will live out their days in a place where they had planned to stay only a few years.
Germany never planned on them staying, either, and now faces a looming social and financial burden. Of its 2.7 million people of Turkish origin, 320,000 are of retirement age. That is expected to double by 2020.
Many of these immigrants, particularly older women, do not have the savings or pension and health benefits to afford a nursing home with round-the-clock care. The government has to pick up the shortfall — an unexpected payback for the long years of service of these guest workers, or gastarbeiter.
Socially isolated after decades of living in Turkish enclaves, these accidental Germans often speak little or no German. And having toiled in low-paying, physically taxing jobs, they are in poor health relative to native Germans of comparable age.
“For the first time in our history, we have to deal with considerable numbers of immigrants who are elderly,” said Reiner Klingholz, the director of the Berlin Institute for Population and Development. “They age differently from Germans. They have different medical problems.”
But they do share one thing with Western Europeans: they cannot rely on their busy children to take care of them. Three cities are trying different approaches to help them.
In Berlin, the country’s first private nursing home exclusively for Turkish people opened last year. Called Turk Huzur Evi, or the Turkish House of Well-Being, it will eventually offer beds for 155 people. It has a Muslim prayer room, with a visiting imam who preaches regularly, and serves Turkish food and meat prepared according to Islamic rules.
In Frankfurt, the state of Hesse finances a retirement home with a section for Muslims. Its 11 beds are filled, the majority with Turks, though there have been Afghans.
Here in Duisburg, the nursing home, known as Haus am Sandberg and run by the German Red Cross, has 15 Turkish residents — 8 women and 7 men — and nearly 80 Germans. They share airy quarters around a two-story atrium. Ralf Krause, the director, said it made little sense to segregate the Turkish residents, since they were already a diverse group: Sunnis and Kurds, Anatolians and people from Istanbul, devout Muslims and acolytes of Ataturk, Turkey’s great nationalist leader.
There is plenty of room for friction. “It’s not even as if they all eat olives and goat cheese,” he said, referring to the traditional Turkish breakfast served each Tuesday.
On a recent morning, however, there was quiet harmony in the breakfast room. Young women, some in head scarves, served food to their parents. A little girl scampered about, chattering in German.
Children and grandchildren are the main reason these Turkish immigrants stay. With the passage of time, many of them have few friends or family members left back home.
“They always say they want to go back, but their families are in Germany, so they are torn,” said Bengi Azcan, 40, a German-born social worker who is the daughter of Turkish immigrants. “It is especially sad because they know they will never achieve their dream.”
Dilber Cevik, 67, moved to Germany three decades ago from Amasya, in central Anatolia. She worked in a fishery in Hamburg before moving to Duisburg, a forest of smokestacks and steel mills on the Rhine with one of the Germany’s highest concentrations of Turkish immigrants.
“When you’re young, of course, you never think about being retired,” Mrs. Cevik said, sitting in a wheelchair. “I never imagined I would end up in a retirement home in Germany. But it is God’s will.”
Two of her daughters live nearby and visit twice a week. Mrs. Cevik has other children in Turkey, but frets that the medical care would not be as good there.
Like most immigrants here, Mrs. Cevik speaks only Turkish. Some have forgotten their German — common among the aging, particularly those with Alzheimer’s — while others never learned more than a few words. “We never needed German; we were always surrounded by Turkish people,” said Mr. Mermer, who went back to Turkey once, but returned to Germany for good in 1972, the year before Germany stopped inviting workers from abroad.
The lack of connection to German society compounds the isolation that many Turkish immigrants feel after retiring, Ms. Azcan said.
The German government, which has struggled with immigration policy in general, has yet to come to grips with aging immigrants. In the 1980s, it tried to entice people to return home by paying them cash. About 250,000 foreigners — mostly Turks — did leave by 1984, but the flow soon dwindled because there were few jobs in Turkey then.
With only 4,000 Turks a year returning home these days, the German government and Turkish groups will have to share the burden of providing culturally aware nursing homes and caring for the growing number of retirees, said Faruk Sen, director of the Center for Turkish Studies in Essen. There are signs of that. In another part of Duisburg, a Turkish group that is building one of Germany’s largest mosques has included plans for a small retirement community across the street.
The German and Turkish residents of Haus am Sandberg are experiencing genuine integration for the first time, after a lifetime in what social scientists have called “parallel societies.” Frieda Fuchs, a 90-year-old German, said her Turkish neighbors made life more interesting.
Multicultural living is not without its crossed wires, however. A few weeks ago, the staff brought the groups together for a dinner with cuisine from both countries. Sitting across the table from the Turks, the Germans broke into a quavering chorus of “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,” the former lyrics of Germany’s national anthem.
“Maybe they were rattled because we were playing Turkish music,” Ms. Azcan said, wincing at the memory. “This is a process. We’ll see as we go along which model works best.”
March 25, 2007
The New York Times
DUISBURG, Germany, March 20 — The last cups of Turkish black tea had been drained, the platters of olives and goat cheese cleared, but the snowy-haired Turks lingered at the table.
“Of course I always think about going back,” said Yusuf Mermer, 69, who left Ankara in 1969 for the Ruhr, where he operated a forklift. He now lives in a nursing home here. “I have nieces and nephews in Turkey, but I would just be a burden on them.”
His voice cracked and tears trickled down his creased face. “Looking back, I don’t even know why I came to Germany,” he said. “Things were going fine for me in Turkey.”
Four decades after the first Turks arrived as guest workers, they are reaching retirement in a land that still feels foreign. For Mr. Mermer and many others, it is a bleak time with the recognition that they will live out their days in a place where they had planned to stay only a few years.
Germany never planned on them staying, either, and now faces a looming social and financial burden. Of its 2.7 million people of Turkish origin, 320,000 are of retirement age. That is expected to double by 2020.
Many of these immigrants, particularly older women, do not have the savings or pension and health benefits to afford a nursing home with round-the-clock care. The government has to pick up the shortfall — an unexpected payback for the long years of service of these guest workers, or gastarbeiter.
Socially isolated after decades of living in Turkish enclaves, these accidental Germans often speak little or no German. And having toiled in low-paying, physically taxing jobs, they are in poor health relative to native Germans of comparable age.
“For the first time in our history, we have to deal with considerable numbers of immigrants who are elderly,” said Reiner Klingholz, the director of the Berlin Institute for Population and Development. “They age differently from Germans. They have different medical problems.”
But they do share one thing with Western Europeans: they cannot rely on their busy children to take care of them. Three cities are trying different approaches to help them.
In Berlin, the country’s first private nursing home exclusively for Turkish people opened last year. Called Turk Huzur Evi, or the Turkish House of Well-Being, it will eventually offer beds for 155 people. It has a Muslim prayer room, with a visiting imam who preaches regularly, and serves Turkish food and meat prepared according to Islamic rules.
In Frankfurt, the state of Hesse finances a retirement home with a section for Muslims. Its 11 beds are filled, the majority with Turks, though there have been Afghans.
Here in Duisburg, the nursing home, known as Haus am Sandberg and run by the German Red Cross, has 15 Turkish residents — 8 women and 7 men — and nearly 80 Germans. They share airy quarters around a two-story atrium. Ralf Krause, the director, said it made little sense to segregate the Turkish residents, since they were already a diverse group: Sunnis and Kurds, Anatolians and people from Istanbul, devout Muslims and acolytes of Ataturk, Turkey’s great nationalist leader.
There is plenty of room for friction. “It’s not even as if they all eat olives and goat cheese,” he said, referring to the traditional Turkish breakfast served each Tuesday.
On a recent morning, however, there was quiet harmony in the breakfast room. Young women, some in head scarves, served food to their parents. A little girl scampered about, chattering in German.
Children and grandchildren are the main reason these Turkish immigrants stay. With the passage of time, many of them have few friends or family members left back home.
“They always say they want to go back, but their families are in Germany, so they are torn,” said Bengi Azcan, 40, a German-born social worker who is the daughter of Turkish immigrants. “It is especially sad because they know they will never achieve their dream.”
Dilber Cevik, 67, moved to Germany three decades ago from Amasya, in central Anatolia. She worked in a fishery in Hamburg before moving to Duisburg, a forest of smokestacks and steel mills on the Rhine with one of the Germany’s highest concentrations of Turkish immigrants.
“When you’re young, of course, you never think about being retired,” Mrs. Cevik said, sitting in a wheelchair. “I never imagined I would end up in a retirement home in Germany. But it is God’s will.”
Two of her daughters live nearby and visit twice a week. Mrs. Cevik has other children in Turkey, but frets that the medical care would not be as good there.
Like most immigrants here, Mrs. Cevik speaks only Turkish. Some have forgotten their German — common among the aging, particularly those with Alzheimer’s — while others never learned more than a few words. “We never needed German; we were always surrounded by Turkish people,” said Mr. Mermer, who went back to Turkey once, but returned to Germany for good in 1972, the year before Germany stopped inviting workers from abroad.
The lack of connection to German society compounds the isolation that many Turkish immigrants feel after retiring, Ms. Azcan said.
The German government, which has struggled with immigration policy in general, has yet to come to grips with aging immigrants. In the 1980s, it tried to entice people to return home by paying them cash. About 250,000 foreigners — mostly Turks — did leave by 1984, but the flow soon dwindled because there were few jobs in Turkey then.
With only 4,000 Turks a year returning home these days, the German government and Turkish groups will have to share the burden of providing culturally aware nursing homes and caring for the growing number of retirees, said Faruk Sen, director of the Center for Turkish Studies in Essen. There are signs of that. In another part of Duisburg, a Turkish group that is building one of Germany’s largest mosques has included plans for a small retirement community across the street.
The German and Turkish residents of Haus am Sandberg are experiencing genuine integration for the first time, after a lifetime in what social scientists have called “parallel societies.” Frieda Fuchs, a 90-year-old German, said her Turkish neighbors made life more interesting.
Multicultural living is not without its crossed wires, however. A few weeks ago, the staff brought the groups together for a dinner with cuisine from both countries. Sitting across the table from the Turks, the Germans broke into a quavering chorus of “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,” the former lyrics of Germany’s national anthem.
“Maybe they were rattled because we were playing Turkish music,” Ms. Azcan said, wincing at the memory. “This is a process. We’ll see as we go along which model works best.”
Shipments of children, a darkly growing trade
By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
SATURDAY, APRIL 9, 2005
MANILA — The young girls often come in groups of five or more, clustered in the farthest sections of passenger ships, away from prying eyes. They hardly talk to each other, but only because they hardly know each other. They are mostly teenagers, some as young as 14. Most of them are excited about the trip to Manila, which is usually their first.
But some, like Julia, know they made the wrong decision the moment the ship pulls away.
“I was afraid the whole time. I don’t know what would happen to me,” said Julia, who spoke on the condition that her real name not be used.
Julia was 17 when a man approached her on the street in General Santos, a city in the southern Philippines, and offered her a job as a housemaid in Manila. She was promised a monthly salary of $55 - a handsome sum for a girl whose parents earn hardly half of that in a month. All the man asked of Julia was that she lie about her age and leave that same night.
Together with four other teenage girls, Julia boarded a passenger ship bound for Manila last November, one of the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Filipino children being trafficked to Manila every day, most of them ending up in prostitution dens or in warehouses and factories where they are treated virtually as slaves.
It is a modus operandi that is being repeated all over the country, particularly in the poorest areas. As a result, the Philippines is now one of the hot spots in Southeast Asia for trafficking in persons, especially children, which generates approximately $10 billion a year worldwide, according to Unicef, the UN agency that works to protect children.
According to Unicef, a “good proportion” of the estimated 60,000 to 100,000 exploited children in the Philippines have been trafficked. A decade ago, a national survey determined that a quarter-million Filipino children were working and living away from their homes.
While most trafficking is done domestically, many of the Filipino victims end up as prostitutes in Japan, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan and Europe.
The Philippines is also a transit point and destination for victims from China, the U.S. State Department said in a report on human trafficking released in June last year.
“Endemic poverty, a high unemployment rate, a cultural propensity towards migration, a weak rule-of-law environment, and sex tourism all contribute to significant trafficking activity in the Philippines,” the report said.
“There’s an increasing number of trafficking going on now,” said Dolores Alforte, executive director for the Philippines of Ecpat, an international network that opposes child prostitution, trafficking and pornography.
A recent study by Alforte’s group found at least seven “high-risk areas” in the country: the cities of Zamboanga, Cagayan de Oro, Laoag, Dumaguete, Cebu, and Manila as well as the province of Bicol.
Although the government, along with nongovernmental groups, has been active in its campaign against child trafficking, traffickers - usually friends and acquaintances, even relatives, of the victims’ families - have always found ways to be a step ahead, said Vicky Juat, Unicef’s child protection officer in Manila.
For example, when the government and these organizations, along with the coast guard and the maritime police, increased their inspection of passenger ships, even establishing halfway houses for trafficked people in certain ports, the traffickers merely used other routes or shifted to buses and small ferries, which are not as well-monitored.
But even with increased vigilance by the authorities, the traffickers still manage to lure victims. At the port of Manila, hardly a day goes by without minors’ being abandoned by their recruiters for fear of the police, according to the Visayan Forum Foundation, a Unicef-supported private group that put up a halfway house inside the port compound.
The number of trafficked children is often increased by the conflicts in the south. According to Rebecca Barrious-Ballesteros, head of Visayan Forum’s protective care unit, the number of trafficked children increased tenfold during certain months in 2003, when fighting broke out between the government and Muslim insurgents in Mindanao.
“We’ve noticed an increase in the number of those we help in recent months,” Ballesteros said. “That could mean that more trafficking has been going on, but that could also mean that it is because of the increased intervention by government and nongovernment groups.”
Visayan Forum has cared for more than 2,000 trafficked Filipinos since October 2003.
Juat, the Unicef officer, said the Philippines continued to be a hot spot because of a number of factors, foremost of which is the grinding poverty in the provinces, where most of the victims come from.
“We are country that’s very vulnerable mainly because of the poverty,” Juat said. She said that in many cases parents agreed to send their children away, partly to ease the burden on them but mainly so these children could work and help out. Often, the recruiters would give advance money to the parents.
In one instance, the Visayan Forum found out that many of the victims they thought they had sent home turned up later at the organization’s halfway house, indicating a reluctance among many of the victims to go home. “They’d be going home to the same poor environment so they probably thought, ‘Why bother?”‘ said Unicef’s Juat.
In fact, Julia, the girl from General Santos City, does not plan to go home soon. “I’d rather stay here at the halfway house for a little while, maybe finish high school,” she said.
Julia had been rescued from her recruiters when a fellow passenger learned that the girls were going to be sold to a prostitution den and promptly reported the situation to the authorities.
International Herald Tribune
SATURDAY, APRIL 9, 2005
MANILA — The young girls often come in groups of five or more, clustered in the farthest sections of passenger ships, away from prying eyes. They hardly talk to each other, but only because they hardly know each other. They are mostly teenagers, some as young as 14. Most of them are excited about the trip to Manila, which is usually their first.
But some, like Julia, know they made the wrong decision the moment the ship pulls away.
“I was afraid the whole time. I don’t know what would happen to me,” said Julia, who spoke on the condition that her real name not be used.
Julia was 17 when a man approached her on the street in General Santos, a city in the southern Philippines, and offered her a job as a housemaid in Manila. She was promised a monthly salary of $55 - a handsome sum for a girl whose parents earn hardly half of that in a month. All the man asked of Julia was that she lie about her age and leave that same night.
Together with four other teenage girls, Julia boarded a passenger ship bound for Manila last November, one of the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Filipino children being trafficked to Manila every day, most of them ending up in prostitution dens or in warehouses and factories where they are treated virtually as slaves.
It is a modus operandi that is being repeated all over the country, particularly in the poorest areas. As a result, the Philippines is now one of the hot spots in Southeast Asia for trafficking in persons, especially children, which generates approximately $10 billion a year worldwide, according to Unicef, the UN agency that works to protect children.
According to Unicef, a “good proportion” of the estimated 60,000 to 100,000 exploited children in the Philippines have been trafficked. A decade ago, a national survey determined that a quarter-million Filipino children were working and living away from their homes.
While most trafficking is done domestically, many of the Filipino victims end up as prostitutes in Japan, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan and Europe.
The Philippines is also a transit point and destination for victims from China, the U.S. State Department said in a report on human trafficking released in June last year.
“Endemic poverty, a high unemployment rate, a cultural propensity towards migration, a weak rule-of-law environment, and sex tourism all contribute to significant trafficking activity in the Philippines,” the report said.
“There’s an increasing number of trafficking going on now,” said Dolores Alforte, executive director for the Philippines of Ecpat, an international network that opposes child prostitution, trafficking and pornography.
A recent study by Alforte’s group found at least seven “high-risk areas” in the country: the cities of Zamboanga, Cagayan de Oro, Laoag, Dumaguete, Cebu, and Manila as well as the province of Bicol.
Although the government, along with nongovernmental groups, has been active in its campaign against child trafficking, traffickers - usually friends and acquaintances, even relatives, of the victims’ families - have always found ways to be a step ahead, said Vicky Juat, Unicef’s child protection officer in Manila.
For example, when the government and these organizations, along with the coast guard and the maritime police, increased their inspection of passenger ships, even establishing halfway houses for trafficked people in certain ports, the traffickers merely used other routes or shifted to buses and small ferries, which are not as well-monitored.
But even with increased vigilance by the authorities, the traffickers still manage to lure victims. At the port of Manila, hardly a day goes by without minors’ being abandoned by their recruiters for fear of the police, according to the Visayan Forum Foundation, a Unicef-supported private group that put up a halfway house inside the port compound.
The number of trafficked children is often increased by the conflicts in the south. According to Rebecca Barrious-Ballesteros, head of Visayan Forum’s protective care unit, the number of trafficked children increased tenfold during certain months in 2003, when fighting broke out between the government and Muslim insurgents in Mindanao.
“We’ve noticed an increase in the number of those we help in recent months,” Ballesteros said. “That could mean that more trafficking has been going on, but that could also mean that it is because of the increased intervention by government and nongovernment groups.”
Visayan Forum has cared for more than 2,000 trafficked Filipinos since October 2003.
Juat, the Unicef officer, said the Philippines continued to be a hot spot because of a number of factors, foremost of which is the grinding poverty in the provinces, where most of the victims come from.
“We are country that’s very vulnerable mainly because of the poverty,” Juat said. She said that in many cases parents agreed to send their children away, partly to ease the burden on them but mainly so these children could work and help out. Often, the recruiters would give advance money to the parents.
In one instance, the Visayan Forum found out that many of the victims they thought they had sent home turned up later at the organization’s halfway house, indicating a reluctance among many of the victims to go home. “They’d be going home to the same poor environment so they probably thought, ‘Why bother?”‘ said Unicef’s Juat.
In fact, Julia, the girl from General Santos City, does not plan to go home soon. “I’d rather stay here at the halfway house for a little while, maybe finish high school,” she said.
Julia had been rescued from her recruiters when a fellow passenger learned that the girls were going to be sold to a prostitution den and promptly reported the situation to the authorities.
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