STATUE HONORING MASSACRED ARMENIANS STOLEN
United Press International
Oct 15 2006
A bronze statue honoring the memory of Armenians killed in Turkey
during World War I has been stolen from its pedestal in a Paris suburb.
The statue stood in front of the train station in Chaville. It
disappeared late Friday or early Saturday, the BBC reported.
Investigators are unsure if the motive was financial or political. The
660-pound bronze statue is worth a lot of money as scrap metal but the
theft also occurred immediately after a vote in the French parliament
to make denying the Armenian genocide a crime.
Police say there was no vandalism apart from the taking of the statue
and no graffiti or other hints of political purpose.
Turkey has objected strongly to the proposed French law, which
must still pass the upper house of parliament and be signed by the
president.

REACTION IS A MUST; HOWEVER IT SHOULD CONTAIN COMMON SENSE
Sabah, Turkey
Oct 15 2006
The reactions against French parliament’s legal draft to penalize the
ones denying the so-called Armenian genocide are growing. The call for
common sense is also increasing besides the comments which call for
boycotting the French goods. The member of European parliament, Vural
Oger, stated that France has rejected the heritage of enlightenment age
with this legal draft. Oger stated that the voting of French Parliament
hit the country’s relations with Turkey through an inconsiderate and
arrogant act.

A PRISM HELD TO TURKEY
Reviewed by Anne Julie Wyman
San Fransisco Chronicle
Oct 15 2006
Mystic, kaleidoscopic novel by writer often compared to Pamuk
The Gaze
By Elif Shafak; translated by Brendan Freely
MARION BOYARS BOOKS; 264 Pages; $14.95 PAPERBACK
Orhan Pamuk, some say, is writing Turkey. Writing books, too, but
mostly crafting his country’s identity right before our astonished
Western eyes.
While there’s some truth to that — Pamuk himself admits that
Turkey had few very prominent writers a generation or two ago —
he’s certainly not doing it alone. Elif Shafak, his most talented
contemporary, provides a type of insight into Turkey’s spiritual
bloodlines that Pamuk often does not. Funnily enough, Shafak, the
daughter of a Turkish diplomat, born in France and educated in Spain,
professes that she never felt quite at home in Turkey anyhow.
Like Istanbul itself, Shafak is multicultural, multivalent,
multi-ethnic. At 35, she has already lived many lives away from
Istanbul, in Germany and Jordan as well as France and Spain (currently,
she’s an assistant professor at the University of Arizona). Her
characters are Turkish, Siberian, American, Spanish, Armenian,
Jewish, young, old, ageless, Eastern, Western and sometimes none
of the above. Even her prose circles endlessly, every last syllable
tumbled against its fellows to an almost blinding shininess.
Her most recent English release, “The Gaze,” is set in Istanbul
(and Russia and France and two other centuries), but for Shafak it’s
standard issue — it’s disjointed, and it’s dazzling.
Which is not to say it’s perfect. Bedazzlement is not clarity. Nor
is it very satisfying, nor does it preclude frustration.
Good thing, then, that for the most part Shafak knows what she’s
doing. A very good thing, as “The Gaze” splits itself along two rather
convoluted lines. In one, a morbidly obese anonymous bulimic woman
lives with her lover, a dwarf named B-C. The two dress in drag every
so often and leave their apartment for the express purpose of being
seen, punishing themselves and others for looking. In the other, an
immortal faceless man recruits two women, one impossibly ugly and one
impossibly beautiful, and stages a fantastical circus in 19th century
Istanbul. His performances are for single-sex audiences, focusing
on the differences in the ways men and women see — and by seeing,
damage — themselves and each other. The lovers’ sections are further
fractured by entries from the Dictionary of Gazes, B-C’s massive
tome-in-progress of Turkish words related to sight. Also included
are extended dream sequences and flashbacks of childhood trauma,
narrated by the obese woman. The circus section includes lengthy
jaunts to 19th century France and 17th century Siberia via folklore.
Complicated enough? Shafak’s style is repetitive, supersaturated
and usually entertaining, but at times heavy-handed. “The Gaze’s”
structure is similarly complex. Its twin plots are at first so rigidly
separated that when they finally merge, it’s like witnessing a little
literary miracle of life, inspiring and confusing all at once. What
a trick she pulls — the book’s ending lays bare the beginning of its
creation. This is the way Shafak works: She piles it on and piles it
on, and then, just when you feel you’ve been buried alive, she yanks
it all away and you get to see heaven.
Shafak herself is deeply spiritual, if not religious. Her first novel,
“Pinhan,” which has not been released yet in English, received a
Turkish prize for mysticism and transcendentalism in literature.
The narrative structure of another novel, “The Flea Palace,”
corresponds to the architecture of an apartment building. It’s the most
accessible of her less linear work. “The Gaze” was published in Turkey
in 1999 and released in the United States after “The Saint of Incipient
Insanities.” “The Bastard of Istanbul” was released in Turkey in 2005
and will be published in the United States by Viking in January.
Both “The Saint of Incipient Insanities” and “The Bastard of Istanbul”
were written in English, a move perceived by many nationalist Turks as
a betrayal of what Shafak calls Turkey’s language-cleansing project, a
state-sponsored purge of tens of thousands of old or foreign words from
Turkish. As “The Gaze’s” complex Dictionary attests, Shafak pays more
attention to her terminology than almost any other writer. For example:
“ayna (mirror): The odalisques in the harem couldn’t get their fill
of looking at their unsurpassed beauty in the mirrors that had been
brought from Venice. Their greatest desire was for the Sultan to see
what the mirror showed.”
As “The Gaze” so idiosyncratically probes, a mirror’s real magic —
and its danger — is not at its surface but in the depths of the
person reflected in it. Shafak’s narrator hates how others see her,
but her shame is achingly deep, expressed through both her eating
disorder and her relationship with B-C. “Love is a corset,” she says.
“In order to understand why it lasts such a short time you have to
be exceedingly fat.”
As such piercing reflection attests, two factors, shame and honesty,
determine the crystallization or destruction of identity in “The
Gaze.” But the narrator’s search for an intact self represents a
nearly universal process. It’s one that occurs in the relationship
of self to body, in the soul, on the page, in families, marriages,
communities. The relationship of contemporary Turkish writers to
Turkey, to each other and to themselves is also one mediated by
individual honesty and collective shame. What do I admit? That the
Ottoman Empire committed acts of genocide? How much trouble will I
get in for admitting it? What does Turkey want the rest of the world
to see? Do I care? What is Turkey? Is it Eastern or Western? Can it
be both? Istanbul is a jeweled city; Istanbul is a rotting city. It
is here, between mortification and pride, where Turkish writers are
often at the mercy of their country’s more defensive instincts.
“The Bastard of Istanbul” mentions the 1915 massacre of hundreds of
thousands of Armenians by the Turks. It was for those mentions that
Shafak was recently accused of violating Article 301 of the Turkish
Penal Code, which provides grounds for as much as three years of
imprisonment for “insulting Turkishness.” In December, Pamuk was
charged under Article 301 for remarks he made about the Armenian
genocide to a Swiss magazine.
He was the keynote speaker at this year’s PEN/International World
Voices festival; according to the organization’s notes on Turkey,
dozens of Turkish writers have faced similar charges, though most
have not been jailed. Article 301 is one of the reasons Turkey has not
yet been admitted to the European Union. Imprisoning your writers —
to put it bluntly — looks pretty bad. Pamuk’s charges were dropped
in January, the week the EU began its scrutiny of the Turkish Penal
Code. Shafak’s were dropped in September, six days after the birth
of her first child.
Stylistically, the two novelists are not often compared, though both
have produced a number of intricate puzzles. In novels such as “Snow”
and “My Name Is Red,” Pamuk makes much of suspense, deception and
stories within stories.
Shafak, too, loves structural conceit, masquerades and hide-and-seek.
Pamuk’s prose is much more reserved than Shafak’s; in “Istanbul:
Memories and the City,” he admits he has a taste for monochromatics,
the exposed grays of Istanbul’s wooden palaces, the sooty cobbles,
the purity of the snow, while her “Gaze” shatters that same city and
shovels the pieces into a giant psychedelic kaleidoscope.
Still, reading Shafak and Pamuk side by side is a joyful project. For
example, in “The Gaze’s” Dictionary of Gazes, there’s an entry on
“Pamuk Prenses” — Snow White. And in “Snow,” Pamuk writes about Reat
Ekrem Kocu, the first native of Istanbul to make an encyclopedia of
the city’s spectacles.
These small pleasures — of which there are hundreds, despite Shafak
and Pamuk’s hugely different styles — signify that as a collective,
this new literary Turkey possesses an aesthetic richness to match
its sociopolitical complexities.
Pamuk lives in Istanbul, in the same apartment building in the
Nicantaci district his father and uncle built in 1951. Shafak splits
her time between Tucson and Turkey. She writes in two languages and
calls neither her mother tongue.
But in an increasingly hybrid world, it’s individual courage, not
blood, that ought to determine allegiances — and talent that ought to
subvert them all. Brave, gifted, Elif Shafak is an international gem.
Anne Julie Wyman is a writer in Palo Alto.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

OSCE: AZERBAIJANI SIDE’S ACCUSATIONS OF INTENTIONAL ARSONS GROUNDLESS
Regnum, Russia
Oct 15 2006
Fires which have recurred in some Nagorno Karabakh areas for the
last months were caused by natural climatic reasons, OSCE Yerevan
office head, ambassador Vladimir Pryakhin stated during his meeting
with Armenian National Security Council secretary, defense minister
Serge Sargsyan.
As REGNUM was informed by the defense ministry spokesman Colonel Seyran
Shakhsuvaryan, Vladimir Pryakhin presented outcomes of monitoring
carried out recently by international organizations and mediated by
the OSCE.
It was ascertained that fires which have been engulfing several Nagorno
Karabakh areas for the last months have natural climatic causes,
and the Azerbaijani side’s accusations of intentional arsons were
groundless. According to the conclusion of international environmental
protection organizations, a powerful fire-prevention system has to
be created in the zone.
The OSCE Mission on ecological situation’s evaluation performed
the monitoring in the border zone between Nagorno Karabakh and
Azerbaijan. The mission is comprised of representatives of the USA,
Germany, Macedonia, Switzerland, Italy, France, Moldova, and Estonia,
as well as experts from Nagorno Karabakh, and Azerbaijan. According
to the Nagorno Karabakh Emergency directorate, the main damage was
inflicted on grain crops on the area of 2,064 hectares. The whole
damage caused by the fires totaled 3.5bln of drams.

IF THE PRINTED WORD IS IRRELEVANT, WHY WAS A RUSSIAN JOURNALIST ASSASSINATED?
Ian Bell
Sunday Herald, UK
Oct 15 2006
Print is dead. I read that somewhere. Text is antique, at least
according to the prophets of multiple media who can still string a word
or two together. To hear it endlessly told, fragile paper and smelly
ink are the last, stubborn obstacles to the shiny digital revolution.
There may be something in it. In a world in which its goofy founders
can flog off YouTube as an online home movie exchange for £880 million
after barely 20 months in business, and without once stooping to turn
a profit, words on paper might strike many as beside the point.
Think of all the educated people you meet who are “too busy” to read.
Think of Gore Vidal alleging that a majority of Americans are now
functionally illiterate: how, practically speaking, can you argue
with that? Print is dead and the dominant global literary form is
blog-standard: millions upon growing millions talking to themselves.
(See [email protected]).
My laptop, because it always knows better than I, just took that last
little joke to be an actual web address, and highlighted the thing
in fetching blue while offering to make the necessary connection,
without once asking if I minded. It, too, knows that print is dead.
It will still turn keystrokes into words, if I really insist, but you
can sense the meaning of its feeble little beeps. Wouldn’t I rather
click to YouTube?
Not as such. Websites and search engines never seem to grant the
complexity of information, meaning and intellectual experience I
need. Perhaps the fault is mine. But computers are a pest, most of
the time, and screens are bad for the eyes. The pretty pictures seem
to lack texture and the reporting of the world – when not derived
from one of those antediluvian printed things – is mostly facile,
superficial, untrustworthy, or some permutation of the three.
Print is dead, but I cannot function, as a grown-up, without a
newspaper or a book. Print is dead, but the useful content of the
web-world still depends, mysteriously, on those who place words on
paper. Print is dead, but not half as dead as some of its dedicated
servants.
Anna Politkovskaya did not have much time to worry about the
contemporary relevance of ink and pulped trees as a suitable medium in
the new information age. The reporter for Novaya Gazeta’s task was to
file and to stay alive. Her problem was that the former duty can make
the latter impossible in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The 48-year-old
Polit kovskaya persisted in writing about our valued ally’s slide
towards autocracy, particularly in the brutalisation of Chechnya,
and last weekend another nameless thug did the regime another favour.
Politkovskaya was the 13th Russian journalist to have been assassinated
since the fall of the USSR. Her profile, not to mention her bravery,
was more conspicuous than most, but her crime was familiar, her death
almost predictable. She failed to keep silence, despite many threats
and previous attempts on her life. Her reward – three shots to the
chest, one to the head, in a lift in her own apartment block while a
CCTV camera recorded the scene – was a murder of professional quality.
Those who plotted her death paid Politkovskaya the greatest
compliment imaginable, though the fact is unlikely to console two
bereaved children. Her words on paper were not “irrelevant to modern
needs”. Her journalism mattered more to those who run Russia than any
rebellious billionaire, opposition politician, foreign government,
or patient democracy activist.
Thanks to an abundance of oil and gas, Putin’s regime can silence
squeamish Western powers while Russia’s democracy becomes a joke.
Thanks to a flexing of Kremlin muscle, the country’s broadcast media
are tamed. But Anna Politkovskaya, refusing to shut up, was a real
threat. People read and people believed: imagine that. She was a
careful reporter: nothing more, and never less. Just words on paper.
In this trade, we expect to lose five or six dozen colleagues in what
passes for an average year. War reporting, as ever, claims more than
its share. These days, equally, naive young freelancers in search of
a byline have been adding their blood, copiously, to the harvest.
Iraq and the madcap war on terror have meanwhile inflated the
general body-count: truth as collateral damage. But the killing of
Politkovskaya is a reminder of a new twist to the old game.
Journalists are being killed or intimidated while pursuing a lawful
trade in their own countries, and for the sake of their own people.
The list is too long, and never likely to be exhaustive. Fearless
journalism is unwise in Zimbabwe or Burma or Iran. It is ill-advised
in China or Saudi, in Tibet or Indonesia. It is suicidal in North
Korea or Syria. These states, and many more, have no real fears of
foreign propaganda. As in Russia, home truths are the authentic,
emerging enemy. Happy optimists once alleged that the growth of the
internet would cause the walls of tyranny to tumble everywhere. As
it turns out, no government has yet fallen to a blogger.
Why not? Perhaps because print must focus in order to function
while the web is diffuse. Perhaps because those words-on-paper are
imprinted with a kind of cultural memory, a thing of embedded, layered
associations and meanings. Perhaps we understand the language within
the language in a way that has become almost instinctual. We read
the signs even as we read the words. Perhaps. Or perhaps the truth
is less pretentious: one clear voice is preferable to Babel.
By all accounts, Orhan Pamuk doesn’t get out much. They say he spends
long hours in an Istanbul apartment, avoiding people, smoking steadily,
and writing endlessly. He has given his primary allegiance to print
in a 30-year career that saw him win literature’s Nobel last week at a
“young” 54.
The gesture by the Swedish Academy was “political”, no doubt, as
enraged right-wing Turkish nationalists have alleged. Those who award
the prize indulge the taste, from time to time, and why not? Art’s
relationship with society, like freedom of expression, is political.
Pamuk is deeply interested in both. Last year he found himself on trial
in his homeland for “insulting Turkishness” and breaching article
301 of Turkey’s legal code. His crime was merely to mention to a
Swiss journalist that the continuing official denial of the Ottoman
genocide of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915, and of the state killing
of 30,000 Kurds in the 1980s and 1990s, was bad for the country.
Like the Nobel, his trial – won on “a technicality” – made news around
the world. That was just as well. Pamuk’s distress drew attention to
the 80-odd Turkish writers and journalists persecuted for mentioning
the unmentionable. Forty-five cases brought by nationalist lawyers
are waiting to be heard even now. All involve the simple right to
debate the truth. All depend on the peculiar potency of words on paper.
In a curious piece of timing, the national assembly of France was
passing a bill of its own last Thursday as the Swedish Academy’s
decision was being announced. If enacted – though that is unlikely –
the proposed legislation would render denial of the Armenian genocide
a crime, punishable by a year in prison .
Turkey has detected a barely hidden agenda – a desire to prevent its
accession to the EU – and threatened retaliation. Even some of the
Turkish and Armenian writers fighting for a true accounting of the
1915 slaughter have objected. Which country has told the whole truth
about its imperial past, after all? Not France. And how is freedom
advanced if anyone is muzzled?
That, of course, is Pamuk’s point. That was Politkovskaya’s point.
Journalism, so often despised, defends freedom by its very existence.
Art, so often abused or misused, illuminates the nature of that
freedom. You can end up giving comfort to the propagators of ideas
you despise: that’s the price, and the reason why a Turkish novelist
or a Russian journalist earn their honours the hard way.
If print dies, the lone, essential voices die with it. Two thousand
years of accumulated culture sink, unnoticed, into the Google swamp.
Every truth becomes relative. If print dies – and who will then
write the obituaries? – all that can remain, beautifully rendered,
technologically exquisite, open to one and all, is undifferentiated
noise. Sometimes, after all, a web is just a snare.
–Boundary_(ID_RDKjdlRd3eYYd8RgK3kTCA)–
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

STATUE COMMEMORATING MASSACRE OF ARMENIANS STOLEN FROM PARIS SUBURB CANADIAN PRESS
Canadian Press
Oct 15 2006
CHAVILLE, France (AP) – A statue commemorating the First World War-era
massacre of Armenians in Turkey was stolen, an official said Saturday,
two days after French legislators approved a bill that would make it
a crime to deny that the killings amounted to genocide.
The bronze monument, installed in front of the train station in the
Paris suburb of Chaville in 2002, disappeared between Friday night
and Saturday morning, said authorities for the Haut-de-Seine region.
The police have not ruled out the possibility that the statue, which
weighs several hundred kilograms, was stolen to be sold as scrap metal,
said Stephane Topalian, who serves on the board of the local chapter
of the Armenian church.
However, Topalian stressed the timing of the robbery, which came after
France’s lower house of parliament on Thursday passed a bill that make
it a crime to deny the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks
around the time of the First World War amounted to genocide. Under
the bill, those who contest it was genocide would risk up to a year
in prison.
The legislation, which infuriated Turkey, passed 106-19.
President Jacques Chirac’s government opposed the bill, although it
did not use its majority in the lower house to vote it down. Instead,
most ruling party legislators did not vote on the text that was
brought by the opposition Socialist party.
It still needs to be approved by the French Senate and the president
to become law.
Armenia accuses Turkey of massacring Armenians during the First World
War, when Armenia was under the Ottoman Empire. Turkey says Armenians
were killed in civil unrest during the collapse of the empire, and
strongly objects to the killings being called genocide.

STATUE COMMEMORATING WORLD WAR I ERA MASSACRE OF ARMENIANS STOLEN
Focus News, Bulgaria
Oct 14 2006
Paris. A statue commemorating the World War I era massacre of Armenians
was stolen, local authorities said on Saturday, two days after French
lawmakers approved a controversial bill that would make it a crime to
deny that mass killings of Armenians in Turkey amounted to genocide, AP
reported. The bronze monument, installed in front of the train station
in the Paris suburb of Chaville in 2002, vanished between Friday night
and Saturday morning, said authorities for the Haut-de-Seine region.

TWO SHOTS FIRED FROM ARMENIAN
Zaman, Turkey
Oct 14 2006
Armenian soldiers on the Armenian border have reportedly opened
harassment fire on Turkey’s side of the border.
According to a statement posted on the website of the General Staff of
Turkey, “A group of soldiers from an Armenian border unit committed
a violation by shooting twice toward Turkish soil with no casualties
or loss of property.”
The incident has been reported to the foreign ministry for the
appropriate action to be taken.

NOBEL WINNER PAMUK POSTPONES UNIVERSITY LECTURE
Zaman, Turkey
Oct 14 2006
Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, who was announced as the winner of the
2006 Nobel Prize in literature, has put off a lecture he was scheduled
to give at the University of Minnesota on Monday.
“Orhan Pamuk … must postpone his trip to the University of Minnesota
until later in the year because of all the notoriety surrounding the
announcement of the prize,” according to a statement posted on the
official web site of the university, where he was going to give a
lecture on Turkish literature.
The lecture entitled “On Making the Other Talk” was originally
scheduled to be held at the Cowles Auditorium in the Minneapolis
campus of the university.
The Arsham and Charlotte Ohanessian Chair in CLA,the Institute for
Advanced Study, the Institute for Global Studies and the Center for
Holocaust and Genocide Studies are the co-sponsors of the lecture.
On Oct. 12, Pamuk, arguably Turkey’s most renowned contemporary writer,
was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in literature, becoming the first
Turk to claim the most prestigious award in the world.
However, some claim that politics was involved in the decision of
the Nobel jury, since Pamuk won the prize on the same day as the
French National Assembly adopted a bill criminalizing the denial of
the so-called Armenian genocide.
In October 2005, Pamuk said in an interview with a Swiss newspaper
that one million Armenians and thirty thousand Kurds had been killed
in Turkey and that nobody had the courage to talk about it except
him. He then faced a trial in Istanbul last December for insulting
Turkishness, but the court eventually dropped the charges.

WHAT ILLEGAL ARMENIAN WORKERS REMIND US
By Kadir Dikbas
Zaman, Turkey
Oct 14 2006
Wishing to protect the “genocide” lie with a law, France keeps
insisting on its hostile attitude. The bill was passed in the French
parliament yesterday. The next step is the Senate, and Turkey is now
discussing what should be done about the bill.
One of the suggestions put forward is to deport illegal Armenian
citizens, estimated to be 40,000-70,000, who are working in Turkey.
This issue, that had not been discussed very much previously, flared
up after the French parliament began discussing a bill to penalize
those who deny the events of 1915 as genocide.
It is hard to understand why the illegal immigration issue had been
disregarded until now, despite a systematic campaign to portray Turks
as perpetrators of the so-called Armenian genocide and France trying
to distort history through political means. Now we are rightly asking
why this issue of illegal employment has been overlooked when it is
extremely difficult for our citizens to find a job. However, there
are also some who think these poor workers should not be disturbed.
The truth is that Turkey is facing serious illegal labor problems.
The problem is not only limited to Armenians. Many people from
neighboring countries come to Turkey and work in all kinds of
businesses. Coming as tourists, workers from Eastern Europe, the
Middle East and some Asian countries usually work in small and
middle-size enterprises, particularly in construction, molding and
casting, leather, textiles, plastic, agriculture, shipping, loading
and unloading, cleaning, sales and the hotel industry.
Because they work illegally, they earn very low wages under difficult
conditions and may be exploited. Apart from these workers, other
illegal aliens are engaged in prostitution, smuggling and drugs.
Turkey began to import labor officially after 1960, but the country
first confronted the inflow of illegal labor on a large scale after the
disintegration of the USSR. Today, illegal immigration has reached
huge dimensions. These people come to Turkey as tourists with a
one-month or three-month visa but do not return to their respective
countries. Some renew their visas and continue business as usual.
Others enter Turkey illegally.
Nobody knows the exact number of illegal workers in Turkey but it
is estimated to be one million. The most noteworthy report on this
issue is the one prepared by the Turkish Labor and Social Security
Ministry, entitled “Informal Employment and Employment of Illegal
Foreign Workers.” The following lines attract attention in the 2004
report: “As no clear data could be obtained on the number of illegal
foreign workers in our country, there is no official figure on the
anticipated extent of illegal foreign employment in Turkey.
Nonetheless, it is estimated that illegal foreign employment in Turkey
has reached very serious dimensions, and the numbers are clearly in
the hundreds of thousands.” This figure is estimated to be between
500,000 and one million, according to the Confederation of Turkish
Trade Unions, the report said.
Even though the dimension and the damage caused by illegal foreign
employment cannot be fully determined, ordinary citizens living or
spending their holidays, particularly in Istanbul and tourist regions,
can clearly see the scope and negative effects of illegal labor.
We all know that unemployment is one of Turkey’s biggest problems
today. With 2.2 million people currently out of work, our unemployment
rate stands at 8.8 percent.
Illegal foreign workers employed for low salaries do not only increase
the number of unemployed Turkish citizens but also decrease revenue
for insurance premiums and taxes. Another dimension of the issue
is the transfer of income. We think many foreigners registered as
tourists bring foreign currency to the country but in fact it is just
the opposite. Even if we calculate on the basis that every illegal
worker transfers an average of $1,000 a year — at least — to his
country, the total amount is around $1 billion.
Even Northern Cyprus fines Turks working illegally in the country
and returns them to Turkey. Does Turkey, which should give priority
to its own unemployed citizens, have the luxury of disregarding a
million illegal foreign workers?