No, the kedi did­n’t go any­where, they were just a bit wind­ed. But they have all kinds of plans to sug­gest to you.


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Kedis­tan is a webzine with an orig­i­nal and lib­er­tar­i­an spir­it that treats of ongo­ing events in the Mid­dle-East, notably in Turkey, of cats, and of sub-Mediter­ranean cul­ture”.  This is what you can read if you click on Why Kedis­tan on the home page.

The text is five years old. We don’t know if the qual­i­fiers “orig­i­nal and lib­er­tar­i­an” were always on call, but what we do know is that, com­ing close to five years now, almost 3 000 arti­cles went through the cats’ claws, all cen­tered on that part of the world and which can now be found on the Kedis­tan web links.

So, are the kedi tired of pub­lish­ing? Yeah, a bit… 

And also affect­ed by a sit­u­a­tion in the Mid­dle East that does­n’t lend itself to out­ra­geous opti­mism, be it in Turkey, in Irak ou in North­ern Syr­ia. The waters of the Tiger or of the Euphrates are far from quench­ing the thirst of a bet­ter future for the peo­ples of Mesopotamia nor of turn­ing the wheel at Kedis­tan. Repeat­ing the same analy­ses ad infini­tum, and com­ment­ing on screwy polit­i­cal deals, waves of repres­sion, expo­nen­tial growths in mil­i­ta­riza­tion would dri­ve any cat bat­ty, no?

Fol­low­ing the atten­tion cre­at­ed around the mobi­liza­tions caused by the Gezi events and, amid the war in Syr­ia, the appear­ance of the polit­i­cal project in Roja­va, Kedis­tan filled an infor­ma­tion void along with oth­ers, for a while. Espe­cial­ly since the mas­sacres of Kur­dish pop­u­la­tions and destruc­tion of their towns were under-reported.

We’re rather pleased to have drawn the main­stream press on oth­er roads than that of Dam­as­cus, to Ankara, Istan­bul, Kobanê or Qamis­lo. And we are espe­cial­ly pleased by the white peb­bles gath­ered along the road over these five years, and that turned into the kedi’s guides, just as they do in the tale. A huge thank you to those who brought us so much in terms of polit­i­cal under­stand­ing of the region, because they had set out on the road before us… They have enriched Kedis­tan’s links and net­works. You will encounter them by wan­der­ing through the 3 000 archived arti­cles, or by head­ing straight to their pub­lish­ing sites.

And final­ly, thank you to our faith­ful read­ers of all ages who used the mag­a­zine as a tool, held us up and even helped the mag­a­zine’s finan­cial survival.

This tool also proved use­ful for sol­i­dar­i­ty and pub­lic aware­ness cam­paigns. It played its part, we know it.

So Kedis­tan stops here? 

We must say we took our time before reach­ing our deci­sion. The hyper­ac­tive Kedis­tan rush­ing to extin­guish every fire has lived, that much is certain.

Every­thing will stay online, but the rythm of pub­li­ca­tion will no longer be of 7 or 8 arti­cles per week (or even 10, as some­times hap­pened). Our con­cerns will con­tin­ue to grav­i­tate around Mesopotamia, but we refuse to keep on echo­ing news oth­er activist sites han­dle very well with great con­stan­cy.

Dur­ing the sol­i­dar­i­ty cam­paigns we met and con­nect­ed with hun­dreds of big-heart­ed indi­vid­u­als and asso­ci­a­tions. This net­work is essen­tial and remains active. But we were also some­what dam­aged both moral­ly and finan­cial­ly by oth­er encoun­ters, not always pos­i­tive, with peo­ple devoid of scru­ples or nat­ur­al-born crooks. These peo­ple rubbed us the wrong way and it took a while before the social media gos­sip died down… As some­one said “over­all, the results are pos­i­tive”.1

We also knew we would not be sat­is­fied with sim­ply leav­ing “archives“and that the kedi would be tempt­ed, from time to time, to pick up on a cam­paign or on a press­ing mat­ter of activism…

So we may as well agree on an accept­able for­mat in which we will pub­lish from now on, on a vol­un­tary basis as has always been the case, with the under­stand­ing that we’ll pass our turn when the infor­ma­tion is avail­able else­where, and that we will share it on social net­works, alter­na­tive infor­ma­tion sites hav­ing flour­ished in the past few years. We may as well say that we will not feel guilty if we don’t talk about every­thing, every­where and every time… We may as well state it upfront, mov­ing for­ward gets tir­ing when it isn’t done in sync with reality.

How­ev­er, in order to rest, we will open a new col­umn, next to the old ones, that of the nomadic cats, that of “break­aways across the world”, and in sev­er­al languages.

So many major issues call to us, beyond the fron­tiers of Mesopotamia, because they call for plan­et-wide approaches…Therefore, the kedi will stick their paws into such ques­tions from now…

Briefly stat­ed, Kedis­tan will change a bit, because in a cat’s life, five is the age of adult­hood, the time to move on.

Besides, each kedi hungers for his or her own cat-flap out­side the mag­a­zine, this one with trans­la­tion projects, that one with draw­ing, writing…

The edi­to­r­i­al team with be tight­ened, will change, will diver­si­fy and Kedis­tan will be open to even more guests, more trans­la­tions… But with­out the sword of urgency dan­gling over our heads.

We will go into fur­ther details in an upcom­ing arti­cle, and slow­ly, the new con­fig­u­ra­tion will take shape.

A new one-year sub­scrip­tion dri­ve will open mid-Sep­tem­ber, with read­ing and con­sul­ta­tion remain­ing free of charge, as always.

Yes, free access to Kedis­tan will remain as a fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ple, and its pres­ence on the web, always at the same address.

Oh yes… This is important:

The Big Four and Google in par­tic­u­lar have decid­ed that “norme https ” was to replace the “http” address.

We were told this would guar­an­tee bet­ter “vis­i­bil­i­ty” and a so-called “rein­forced secu­ri­ty”. For banks, maybe, but for a web­site like Kedis­tan and oth­ers, this is just a way the Big Four have found to cau­tion against “non secured infor­ma­tion”. Do not pay any atten­tion to their so-called “secu­ri­ty” warn­ings appear­ing on your brows­er or when you click on a link. Our web­site is secure and you have noth­ing to wor­ry about. We pay for that, by the way. Google will have to wait before we adopt their norms…

To be continued…


Translation by Renée Lucie Bourges
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Le petit mag­a­zine qui ne se laisse pas caress­er dans le sens du poil.