A New Year's Party
David Barchard, Special to The Turkish Times - Not being much of a natural reveller, street parties hold few charms for me. Yet the gigantic street parties in Istanbul on Near Year's Eve this year, which gummed up not just squares and cross roads but also the side streets all the way from Beyoglu to Nisantasi made even an old fogey like me feel a twinge of envy. It looked suspiciously like fun on a grand scale even to someone like me who prefers to wear a silly paper hat only in the strict privacy of his home.

The numbers of Istanbul New Year revellers must have been far above those of London where, according to BBC TV, 15000 people gathered under exceptionally heavy police protection in Whitehall. There was not a single policeman evident in any of the local TV coverage I saw in Turkey, plenty of tinsel, lights, Santas, and, Christmas trees, but no riot police. I guess that there must have been a large number of police in readiness somewhere but they were much less high profile than their London colleagues.

So as the BBC coverage of the New Year flashed from world city to world city, you might have been forgiven for wondering why Istanbul and Turkey were not included in the news bulletins. Istanbul is, after all, the largest city in Europe these days and I think it is quite likely that the New Year festivities there were also among the largest and liveliest anywhere in the continent.

Well, I guess the reason must be that the news bosses at the BBC believe so strongly in their own news output that it never occurred to them that there could be much in the way of New Year festivities in Turkey. The BBC idea of New Year's Eve in Istanbul is probably people in turbans sitting with long faces at home clicking their beads before another day's work in the bazaar.

As the year end, the BBC informed its website readers that the most miserable country in the world by far, was Turkey.

Sounds doubtful to you? Well it must be true. It was the result of a specially commissioned opinion poll. Turks are, apparently, far more miserable even than the inhabitants of much less prosperous and less democratic countries like Pakistan, or so the BBC tell us.

All this is of course part of a wider image problem. During the European Union's fate Copenhagen Summit, another branch of the BBC, the influential Today morning radio programme, examined the idea of that Turkey might be a natural supplier of skilled labour for the rest of Europe.

The sequence did not of course mention the barriers which at present exist to stop Turkey playing this role, in particular the draconian and grossly insulting visa restrictions that Britain especially imposes on young Turks who have the temerity even to try and visit it for a holiday or language school course.

It turned out according to the programme that yes, there are lots of young able-bodied people in Turkey, but we then heard Mr Kretschmar, the new EU representative in Turkey, telling us that educational and training standards were low, and just for good measure, throwing in some dark mutterings about child labour in Turkey whose relevance was lost on quite a few of his listeners.

My suggestion to Mr Kretschmar is that he goes and visits his colleague the UNDP representative in Ankara with whom I spent a couple of highly informative hours last summer as he explained that standards in Turkish university education and training are actually very high.

What the recent publicity about Turkey's EU entry has shown is the image of Turkey held by European news-makers, is not just selective and biased. It is comically out of touch with reality. During the summit for example, Channel 4, another British TV station, ran a short news sequence about the Turkish economy and industry and, guess what, it handled the topic with a voice-over against a picture of a whiskery old man in baggy trousers slowly hammering a Middle Eastern silver dish into shape. Well I guess showing the Sabanci Towers or the Koc car plants or white goods factors would have been just so much less exotic.

Does all this matter? Opinions differ. I personally think there is a steep economic cost in lost sales and investments. But not everyone agrees. A old friend, a canny and worldly-wise Scottish professor in Bilkent, says businessmen and investors are far too intelligent to be put off by something as silly as opinion polls like the one I have just mentioned.

But this approach neglects the fact that the more unrealistic and extreme, perceptions of Turkey become, the more other negative forces are unleashed. The Ilisu Dam on the Tigris, in my view a highly beneficial project, has been delayed for years by a news campaign which to me seemed highly misleading. This had produced a domino effect in the media. After Ilisu construction companies were easily scared off another dam project in north eastern Turkey. Now there is a new campaign, again resting on facts which for me are not facts at all, to stop the Ceyhan-Baku pipeline itself. If the social and economic dynamics of change in Turkey were not so consistently ignored by the media, I doubt that this would be happening. But despite everything those advances are real: the crowds in Takisim and Nisantasi were right to be holding the largest New Year's party in Europe.