Van (Turkish: Van; Armenian: Վան; Kurdish: Wan; Ottoman Turkish: فان; Medieval Greek: Εύα, Eua) is a city in North Kurdistan / southeastern Turkey, on the eastern shore of Lake Van. The city has a long history. It has been a large city since the first millennium BC, initially as the capital of the kingdom of Urartu in the 9th century BC and later as the center of the Armenian kingdom of Vaspurakan. Today, Van has a Kurdish majority and a sizeable Turkish minority.
In 2010 the official population figure for Van was 367,419, but many estimates put it much higher with a 1996 estimate stating 500,000 and former Mayor Burhan Yengun is quoted as saying it may be as high as 600,000.
Van is also a university city. It is famous for its incredible breakfasts, and for curious white cats with one green and one blue eye.
Ecology is one of the three pillars of the paradigm of Democratic Confederalism, the political-theoretical concept of the Kurdish Freedom Movement. Besides democracy and gender liberation, ecology has been mentioned explicitly as a dimension in this concept since 2005. However to date, ecology is less discussed and practiced than the two other pillars.
TJA started preparations to create women's cooperatives in Van.
Raise in Special Consumption Tax (ÖTV) affects the secondhand car market negatively in Turkey. Van Car Dealers’ Cooperative chairperson İsmet İnan stated that the capital of car dealers shopkeepers reduced by half and added they did not predict a drop in prices.
This article analyzes women’s political representation in Kurdish-majority regions of Turkey before and after the 2019 crackdown on elected mayors from the People’s Democratic Party (HDP), as well as women’s political representation in the Syrian region of Serekaniye (Ras al-Ain) before and after Turkey’s Operation Peace Spring.
Since the beginning of 2015, "Mesopotamia Ecology Movement", which was formed in 2011, has entered an important process of restructuring itself. Under a new structure and with profounder political claims, more and more people are getting involved for a more ecological society, producing a new dynamic which will have short- and long-term positive effects on Northern Kurdistan.
This article aims to analyse the economic dimension of Democratic Autonomy, whose creation is projected to take place alongside politics, self-defence, diplomacy, culture, ecology and collective emancipation, and relates to the reader the arguments and experiences within the economic field.
Opposed to the economy controlled by the state and corporations, the number of cooperatives where relations of production and consumption are formed without intermediaries is on the rise. Recently, these cooperatives have begun to emerge in Kurdistan, as a reflection of the operation of an economy independent from the state and corporations. Below we share the interview we carried out with one of these co-operatives, the Medya Consumers’ Cooperative (Medya Tüketim Kooperatifi), at their market in Wan.
