Bekir Coşkun

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Bekir Coşkun (Tülmen, Şanlıurfa, Turkey) is a Turkish 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 after he published a piece denouncing a jihadist publication soon after following AKP's election victory on July 22, 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.

1 Controversies
2 Works
3 See also
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Controversies

He has been several times accused of being elitist and alien to Turkish society by AKP suppoters. In an article written some weeks before the July 2007 General Elections, he described AKP electorates as "men who scratch their belly" (göbeğini kaşıyan adam) to depict them.

He has had regular spats with the Özkök, thinly accusing him of being in the pocket of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and of trying to curry favors with him.^[1] The same accusations, in much stronger terms, were later leveled by Çölaşan, in a book published after his dismissal from the newspaper.

After Abdullah Gül's victory in the presidential elections of 2007, Coşkun stated, "he will not be my President", upon which the Prime Minister Erdoğan retorted 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 that people who didn't share AKP's ideology would no longer be welcome in the country.^[2]

After Emin Çölaşan left Hürriyet, for a while he considered leaving as well. In the mean time, rival newspaper and staunchly secularist Cumhuriyet (The Republic) offered him to become one of their columnists. The absence of Coşkun's columns for a period of two weeks in August 2007 was attributed by some to an imminent switch. During this time, Aydın Doğan, the owner of the most powerful media conglomerate in Turkey (Doğan Media Company) which owns Hürriyet, met with Cumhuriyet representatives and he convinced them to retract their offer.^[3] Coskun writes for Hürriyet to this day.