Online Sex Videos Force Resignations of Six Members of Turkish Opposition Party

ISTANBUL — Just weeks before general elections in Turkey, six leading members of an opposition party were forced to resign from Parliament on Saturday after sexually explicit videos of one of them were posted on the Internet.

The Web site that posted the videos had threatened to release others that it said showed the five other members who resigned.

The resignations could severely weaken the Nationalist Movement Party, the second largest opposition group in Parliament, which is struggling to win the minimum of 10 percent of the vote required to be seated in Parliament.

Four members of Parliament from the same party resigned earlier this month after similar videos were posted on the same Web site.

The Web site, farkliulkuculer.com, has cast itself as part of a breakaway ultranationalist group aiming to cleanse and reform the nationalist movement in Turkey. The site’s administrators are anonymous.

The Public Communication Agency, which monitors Internet traffic in Turkey, blocked access to the Web site shortly after the videos were uploaded, presumably because of their explicit content.

Devlet Bahceli, the leader of the Nationalist Movement, denounced the videos as blackmail. “It is not correct to mess with these people’s personalities,” he said.

He said the Web site had demanded his resignation by last Wednesday if he wanted the videos to remain secret. He had earlier vowed not to yield to such threats.

Representatives of his party, noting that if they lose representation in Parliament the governing Justice and Development Party would be likely to gain, have accused the government of failing to properly investigate the videos and the Web site.

Lawyers for the Nationalist Movement filed a claim with a court in Ankara, the capital, on Wednesday demanding an investigation. The filing, citing calls made on a cellphone linked to the Web site, said that the video scandal was organized in the United States. Party leaders have previously accused a Turkish-American religious group, Fethullah Gulen, of working with the governing party to drive the Nationalist Movement from politics.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has campaigned strongly against the Nationalists, rebuffed those claims in a television show last week, saying that the Nationalist Movement was trying to blame the government for its internal problems.

The Nationalist Movement Party held 72 seats in the 540-member Parliament before the resignations on Saturday, and polls before the resignations showed it winning about 12 percent of the vote in the election next month. The governing Justice and Development Party is expected to win a third term as the majority government.

Political analysts, pointing to the timing of the release of videos that were evidently collected over a long period, expressed concern about the unethical tactics used to attack the Nationalists. “With these large number of resignations, we have an unprecedented scene here in the world of politics,” said Fatih Cekirge, a political analyst speaking on NTV, who called the blackmailing “political genocide.”

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Briefly: Turkish University to Offer Armenian Language Course

Turkish university to offer Armenian language course

Using a $23,500 grant from the German Marshall Fund’s Black Sea Trust, Kadir Has University in Istanbul plans to begin offering Armenian language lessons this month.

Serdar Dinler, director of the university’s Center for Lifelong Learning, said by telephone that the course would be taught by a doctoral candidate from Armenia as part of a cultural exchange between countries whose ties have been fraught for a century.

“Turkey is becoming an energy-transit corridor and a center for diplomacy in the region,” Mr. Dinler said. “Also the Turkish government has a new ‘zero problems’ policy with its neighbors, so we believe that the new generation in Turkey needs to have more dialogue with neighboring countries, including Armenia, Russia, Iran, Greece, etc. Knowing the language can only help.”

Kadir Has is a private university established along the Golden Horn in 1997 and named after its founder, a Turkish automotive magnate.

— SUSANNE FOWLER

Students not ready to adopt Kindle for notes and reading

Just seven months after adopting an e-reading device, the Kindle DX, for university-level reading and note-taking, some 60 percent of students had put it aside in favor of traditional learning material, according to a new study presented at a conference on human-computer interaction by the Association for Computing Machinery in Vancouver, British Columbia, last week.

The study’s authors are investigating the impact of electronic reading devices on higher learning. “We are still trying to understand what we lose or gain by the adoption of e-reading technology,” said Alex Thayer, the primary co-author of the study and a doctoral student in human centered design and engineering at the University of Washington.

Students found it difficult to adapt traditional reading, scanning and note-taking methods to the platform. The study’s authors found that the e-reader disrupted students’ ability to remember the physical location of passages and notes in book.

However, the study also found that the e-reader, owing to its size and portability, was more likely to replace paper-based learning than computer-based learning. Students are more likely to use a Kindle than a computer on public transit, for example, Mr. Thayer explained.

The study is based on the learning habits of 39 first-year graduate students at the University of Washington’s department of computer science and engineering. Despite a relatively small sample size, the study represents one of the first to look at long term academic learning habits of students using electronic readers, according to the study’s authors.

“E-readers are not where they need to be in order to support academic reading,” Professor Charlotte Lee, who led the study, said in a statement.

— CHRISTOPHER F. SCHUETZE

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Turkish Leader Says Qaddafi Must Step Down Immediately

Turkey has historic and business ties to Libya, and during more than two months of conflict it has tried to act as an intermediary between Colonel Qaddafi’s government and the rebels seeking his ouster. As a result, each side has accused Turkey of favoring the other, or of hedging its bets.

But on Tuesday, Mr. Erdogan appeared to draw a line, saying during a televised news conference that Colonel Qaddafi had violently resisted calls for change and that he must leave power for the good of the country and the Libyan people.

“Muammar Qaddafi, instead of taking our suggestions into account, refraining from shedding blood or seeking for ways to maintain the territorial unity of Libya, chose blood, tears, oppression and attacks on his own people,” Mr. Erdogan said. “Now, at this stage, the thing that needs to be done is Muammar Qaddafi to immediately step down from power that he holds in Libya.”

About 25,000 Turkish workers were engaged in major construction projects in Libya at the beginning of the unrest in February, and Turkey led an extensive evacuation operation for its citizens and others. The two countries began a visa agreement last year, allowing Libyan citizens to stay in Turkey for at least three months without a visa and signaling a turn in diplomatic and business relations.

A Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesman said that Mr. Erdogan had spoken with Colonel Qaddafi three times in private, “urging him to step down peacefully and allow establishment of an administration to reflect people’s demands,” but that Colonel Qaddafi had refused.

A spokesman for the rebels, Jalal al-Gallal, called the announcement by the Turkish prime minister a welcome development, saying, “It just increases the isolation of the regime.” For weeks, Qaddafi opponents throughout eastern Libya had blamed Turkey — rightly or wrongly — for what they perceived as a slowdown in the NATO bombing campaign, and accused Turkey’s leaders of playing a double game.

“This means there is no more hindrance in NATO,” Mr. Gallal said.

Mr. Erdogan’s comments came ahead of an expected meeting between Arab and Western members of the Libya Contact Group in Rome this week. Colonel Qaddafi has dismissed a proposed “road map” to end the Libyan conflict that was put forward by Turkey last month and that included the withdrawal of armed forces from besieged cities, the safe delivery of humanitarian aid and democratic reforms.

Colonel Qaddafi’s forces kept up their attack on the besieged city of Misurata on Tuesday, though they concentrated most of their firepower on the front lines, rather than the city. They also continued to threaten shipping lanes into the port, the city’s lifeline, which has been closed for days by shelling.

The Red Star One, a vessel chartered by the International Organization for Migration, has been waiting offshore since Saturday for permission to dock and evacuate 1,000 mainly African migrants and dozens of wounded Libyan civilians, Reuters reported. Officials with the group called on NATO and Libyan authorities on Tuesday to assure the ship’s safe passage.

In the southwestern mountain region, loyalist forces shelled a road leading from a critical border crossing near Dhiba, Tunisia, that was seized by rebel forces last week, The Associated Press said. Having been defeated in their attempt to retake the crossing, the Qaddafi militias now seem content to shell the road, trying to disrupt the rebels’ efforts to resupply towns in the area.

At about 9 p.m. on Tuesday a large car bomb exploded near the courthouse that has become the symbol of the rebel movement in Benghazi, wounding at least two people and damaging buildings and cars nearby.

A rebel military spokesman, Col. Ahmed Omar Bani, citing the size of the explosion, said: “We’re 90 percent sure it’s a car bomb.” He said they were also exploring the possibility that dynamite that someone was preparing to use for fishing had accidentally caused the blast.

Crowds who gathered at the scene blamed Colonel Qaddafi’s loyalists. As word of the explosion spread, it seemed to confirm the recurring fears in Benghazi that Colonel Qaddafi’s followers were living silently among them and intent on attacking symbols of fledgling rebel power, or the movement’s followers. In recent weeks, there has been a stepped-up security presence at the courthouse, where at a recent prayer service men with guns and uniforms formed a line around the worshipers.

The rebels have mounting financial problems as well. Their finance minister, Ali Tarhouni, told reporters on Tuesday that the rebels had only enough money to administer the areas under their control for three to four weeks, Reuters reported.

Mr. Tarhouni said that the rebels were hoping to borrow up to $3 billion — secured against Libya’s frozen assets — from countries like France, Italy and the United States to pay expenses including salaries.

At the United Nations, the secretary general’s envoy for Libya, Abdul Ilah Khatib, a former Jordanian foreign minister, briefed the Security Council on the considerable hurdles involved in such mediation. Although both sides have expressed willingness to respect a cease-fire, they maintain mutually exclusive pre-conditions. Colonel Qaddafi wants all NATO military action to stop first, while the opposition insists on the departure of Colonel Qaddafi and his family as the initial step, he noted.

Mr. Khatib said he was exploring ways to link a verifiable cease-fire with a lasting political process that includes all the relevant parties. “The main difficulty at this stage is getting all sides to agree on the essential elements of a political process that meets the aspirations of the Libyan people,” he told the council.

Sebnem Arsu reported from Istanbul, and Kareem Fahim from Benghazi, Libya. C. J. Chivers contributed reporting from Misurata, Libya.