Bekir Coşkun
Bekir Coşkun ( Tülmen, Şanlıurfa, Turkey) is a Turkish people journalist, writer and columnist in the leading Turkish daily, Hürriyet. He was a very good friend of Emin Çölaşan who also used to work in the same newspaper before he was controversially sacked by the paper's chief editor Ertuğrul Özkök following AKP's election victory on July 22nd, 2007. Both are known as unrelentless critics of AKP rule, and are staunch secularists.
Bekir Coşkun was born in the Turkmen village of Tülmen in Şanlıurfa in the Southeastern of the country.
Controversies
- He has had regular spats with the Ozkok, thinly accusing him of being in the pocket of Erdogan and of trying to curry favors with him.[1] The same accusations, in much stronger terms, were later levelled by Colasan, in a book published after his dismissal from the newspaper.
- After Abdullah Gül's victory in the presidential elections in 2007, Coşkun stated, "he will not be my President", upon which the Prime Minister Erdogan responded by saying "he should abdicate his citizenship and leave the country if he doesn't consider [Gul] as his President". This lead to an outcry among supporters of secularism in the country who feared that people who didn't share AKP's ideology would no longer be welcome in the country.[2]
- After Emin Colasan left Hurriyet, he considered leaving Hurriyet for a while. In the mean time, rival newspaper and staunchly secularist Cumhuriyet (The Republic) offered him to become one of their columnists. The absence in Coskun's columns for a period of two weeks in August 2007 was attributed by some to an imminent switch. During this time, Aydin Dogan, the owner of the most powerful media conglomerate in Turkey (Dogan Media Company) which owns Hurriyet, met with Cumhuriyet officials and he convinced them to retract their offer.[3] Coskun still writes for Hurriyet.