Emin Çölaşan
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Emin Çölaşan is a Turkish investigative journalist and a daily columnist in the mass-circulation newspaper Hürriyet. He is one of the most famous names in Turkey's written press.
Emin Çölaşan is born on 14 March 1942 in Ankara to a Cretan Turkish family. His father was a general director who had made his mark in the State Meteorological Service and his surname, which literally means desert strider, makes reference to a grandfather who had been exiled in profound Libya by the sultan Abdülhamid II. His maternal grandfather is Refik Şevket İnce, a comrade-in-arms of Atatürk with ministerial posts held in the 1920s and the 1950s, and who was born in Polichnitos near Mytilene in Midilli (Lesbos today). The island is a favorite vacation spot for Çölaşan himself.
Çölaşan finished his secondary studies in the prestigious TED Ankara College and graduated from the equally high status Middle East Technical University with a degree in management studies. For a decade, he worked in various public institutions and he started his career in journalism in 1977 in the newspaper Milliyet and he shifted in 1985 to Hürriyet by starting to contribute as a regular columnist, an influential position carried on still. Çölaşan is the author of numerous books, focused primarily on malpractices within governmental and public circles in Turkey, as well as a party and/or instigator in frequent polemics with his divulgations and statements on various matters.
[edit] Points and controversies
- Çölaşan was an extremely virulent critic of the late President of Turkey, Turgut Özal, targeted in two of his books; "Turgut'un serüveni" (Turgut's adventure) and "Turgut nereye koşuyor?" (Where is Turgut running?). The choice figures for his lasting enmity in our day are İ. Melih Gökçek, the AKP mayor of Ankara, and Mehmet Barlas, another well-known Turkish columnist. Çölaşan is by and large a staunch, and at times nightmarish, critic of the incumbent AKP government in Turkey.
- His spouse, Tansel Çölaşan, is a member of the Turkish Council of State (Danıştay) and was an eye-witness and survivor of the May 2006 attack on the council's premises by Alparslan Arslan.
