Bekir Coşkun is a Turkish

Turkish people

Turkish people, also known as the "Turks" , are an ethnic group primarily living in Turkey and in the former lands of the Ottoman Empire where Turkish minorities had been established in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Greece, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Romania...

 journalist, writer and columnist for the leading Turkish daily, Cumhuriyet

Cumhuriyet

Cumhuriyet is a centre-left Turkish daily newspaper, founded on May 7, 1924 by journalist Yunus Nadi Abalıoğlu. Based in Istanbul, it has been situated since October 17, 2005 in Mecidiyeköy. Cumhuriyet was the last newspaper to leave the old press district Cağaloğlu...

. He is a good friend of Emin Çölaşan

Emin Çölasan

Emin Çölaşan is a Turkish investigative journalist, whose daily column appeared in the country's internationally best-known and most influential mass-circulation newspaper, Istanbul-based Hürriyet, for 22 years, from 1985 to 2007...

, with who he had worked in the newspaper Hürriyet

Hürriyet

-External links:* * ** * *...

before they were controversially sacked by the paper's editor-in-chief, Ertuğrul Özkök

Ertugrul özkök

Ertuğrul Özkök is a Turkish journalist and a daily columnist. Between 1990 and 2010, he was the editor-in-chief for Hürriyet, a daily newspaper published in Turkish in Turkey and some European countries. Özkök is known for advocating modernization of Turkey, globalization, women's rights and...

. As staunch secularists, both are critical of the Justice and Development Party.

Personal life

Bekir Coşkun was born in the Turkmen

Turkmen people

The Turkmen are a Turkic people located primarily in the Central Asian states of Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and northeastern Iran. They speak the Turkmen language, which is classified as a part of the Western Oghuz branch of the Turkic languages family together with Turkish, Azerbaijani, Qashqai,...

 village of Tülmen in Şanlıurfa in the southeastern Anatolia region of the country.

Controversies

• He has been several times accused of being elitist and alien to Turkish society. In an article written some weeks before the July 2007 General Elections, he described AK Party supporters as "men who scratch their belly" to degrade them .

• He has had feuds Ertugrul Özkök, thinly accusing him of being servile to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The same accusations were leveled by Çölaşan in much stronger terms in a book published after his dismissal from the newspaper.

• After Abdullah Gül
  Abdullah Gül
  Dr. Abdullah Gül, GCB is the 11th and current President of the Republic of Turkey, serving in that office since 28 August 2007. He previously served for four months as Prime Minister from 2002-03, and as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2003-07....
  
  's victory in the presidential elections of 2007
  Turkish presidential election, 2007
  The 2007 Turkish presidential election refers to two attempts to elect the country's 11th president, to succeed Ahmet Necdet Sezer. The most likely candidate for president was Abdullah Gül...
  
  , 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 led to an outcry among supporters of secularism in the country that people who didn't share AK Party's ideology would no longer be welcome in the country.

• After Emin Çölaşan left Hürriyet, for a while he considered leaving as well. In the mean time, rival newspaper and staunchly secularist Cumhuriyet
  Cumhuriyet
  Cumhuriyet is a centre-left Turkish daily newspaper, founded on May 7, 1924 by journalist Yunus Nadi Abalıoğlu. Based in Istanbul, it has been situated since October 17, 2005 in Mecidiyeköy. Cumhuriyet was the last newspaper to leave the old press district Cağaloğlu...
  
  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
  Aydin Dogan
  Aydın Doğan is a Turkish entrepreneur and businessman.-Biography:Born in 1936 as a member of a well-known family in Kelkit, Aydin Dogan got his elementary and secondary school education in Kelkit and finished high-school in Erzincan...
  
  , the owner of the most powerful media conglomerate in Turkey (Doğan Media Group, which owns Hürriyet) convinced Cumhuriyet representatives to retract their offer. He was recently transferred to Haberturk Gazetesi, and continues writing his daily columns.

• He was fired from Haberturk Gazetesi.

External links

• Onuncu Köy Bekir Coşkun's daily column in Hürriyet
  Hürriyet
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