Fatih Mehmet Maçoğlu, the mayor of Ovacık, a village in eastern Turkey, drew national attention when he delivered on his campaign promise of transparency and accountability.
"There’s something unusual in Ovacık, a village in a snow-capped valley in eastern Turkey where the Turkish Air Force regularly bombs Kurdish rebels. In the lobby of the town hall is a painting of Karl Marx, not of Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, whose picture hangs in most other Turkish government offices. In early February, a piece of paper posted on the building’s outer wall itemized the town’s income, expenditures, and surplus budget, part of which goes to scholarships for university students. Displaying the itemized income each year is a practice that the local mayor, Fatih Mehmet Maçoğlu, began when he was elected, four years ago. Maçoğlu promised the village’s roughly thirty-one hundred residents transparency and accountability; publicly itemizing the local government’s income was one way to deliver it. Soon after this year’s income was posted, a photo of the piece of paper was shared on Twitter—a source of news for many young Turks. Within weeks, the obscure village mayor became a grassroots symbol of good governance in Turkey. ..."
New Yorker
2016 February: The Feminist, Democratic Leftists Our Military Is Obliterating - Debbie Bookchin, 2016 May: Turkey’s Authoritarian Turn, 2016 July: How Turkey Came to This, 2017 March: As repression deepens, Turkish artists and intellectuals fear the worst, 2017 July: A Long March for Justice in Turkey, 2017 July: Radical Municipalism: The Future We Deserve, 2017 September: Istanbul: Memories and the City - Orhan Pamuk, 2018 January: Turkey’s State of Emergency
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