ABSTRACT
It was late summer 2006 and we were sitting on a boat crossing the Bosphorus when a dark-skinned man sitting opposite offered us tea. ‘Where are you from?’ he asked, launching into conversation. ‘We are from Belgium’, I uttered in broken Turkish. ‘Belgium, Brussels?!’, he replied with a smile, ‘Belgium is a good country, I know. You have Nelly Maes!’ My husband and I were startled. Here we found ourselves having tea with an ordinary Kurdish man in Istanbul who spoke with great respect of a Flemish politician probably unknown to many Belgian citizens. The man went on to recount having seen the former MEP many times on RojTv, the Kurdish satellite television channel broadcasting from Denderleeuw-Brussels – and the senior female politician in question was one of the fiercest defenders of the Kurds’ plight in the European Parliament.
