Murat Belge

Murat Belge (born March 16, 1943 in Ankara ) is a Turkish publicist and publisher .

He is the son of the diplomat Burhan Asaf Belge and the nephew of the writer and politician Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu , both of whom were among the founders of left Kemalism in the 1930s . He studied English and was one of the leaders of the left student movement in the 1960s and 1970s . After the military coup in 1971 and the coup in 1980 , he lost his academic post as a result.

With like-minded people he founded the İletişim Yayınları publishing house , which publishes works by Orhan Pamuk , among others . He published frequently in the magazine Birikim and the daily newspaper Radikal ; since 2008 he has been a columnist for the newspaper Taraf . As a result, he became the best-known representative of a left-wing liberal current that deals critically with orthodox Marxism and Kemalism. He drew particularly strong hostility from nationalist circles because he helped initiate the debate about the persecution of the Armenians in Turkey during the First World War.

In April 2013, Belge was appointed by the then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to a commission called the “Council of Wise Men” , which was supposed to support the peaceful end to the conflict with the Kurdish PKK in civil society , but ultimately remained ineffective.