{"id":166312,"date":"2021-01-29T21:21:15","date_gmt":"2021-01-29T18:21:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/the-flap-over-yellowknifes-flag-raising-practices\/"},"modified":"2021-01-29T21:21:15","modified_gmt":"2021-01-29T18:21:15","slug":"the-flap-over-yellowknifes-flag-raising-practices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/the-flap-over-yellowknifes-flag-raising-practices\/","title":{"rendered":"#The flap over Yellowknife’s flag-raising practices"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#The flap over Yellowknife’s flag-raising practices<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n At the request of Turkish Yellowknifers, the city proclaimed Oct. 29 as ‘Turkish Republic Day’ and raised the iconic flag outside city hall. Then complaints started rolling in.\n <\/div>\n
\n Three years ago, Yellowknife resident Reyhan Sarikaya didn\u2019t know her city had a municipal flagpole. At least, she\u2019d never noticed it. Then the Turkish consul general<\/a> in Vancouver visited in 2017 and gifted the Northwest Territories capital a flag. A month later, at the request of Sarikaya and others, Yellowknife proclaimed Oct. 29 as \u201cTurkish Republic Day\u201d and raised the iconic banner\u2014a white crescent and star on a red backdrop\u2014outside city hall.<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought, what a fantastic way to share my culture and heritage,\u201d says Sarikaya, a first-generation Turkish Canadian. \u201cWe gathered everyone with Turkish heritage in Yellowknife. We\u2019re, what, five people?\u201d<\/p>\n

The gesture made Sarikaya feel recognized and app<\/a>reciated, so she made a habit of requesting the flag go up on the anniversary of Turkey\u2019s founding; the city obliged, and each Oct. 29 the coterie of Turkish Yellowknifers who gathered for the event grew by one or two. That is until last fall, when Sarikaya\u2019s flag-raising celebration\u2014and all others\u2014ground to a halt, mired in sensitivities over geopolitical events that originate far from the shores of Great Slave Lake.<\/p>\n

READ:\u00a010 pivotal First Nations rights disputes to watch in 2021<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The previous year, as the flag had flown, some residents expressed distress to the city, recalls Shauna Morgan, a second-term city councillor. Turkey had just started a military offensive in Syria; what, they asked, was Yellowknife doing raising the country\u2019s flag?<\/p>\n

Yellowknife\u2019s leaders, it goes without saying, had not intended to make a political statement. Council gets requests to make proclamations for everything from National Francophone Awareness Week to Terry Fox Day. The unofficial policy, says Morgan, was blissfully simple: \u201cSo long as they came from someone living in Yellowknife, we would grant those requests. Sometimes in conjunction with the proclamation, people would ask to have a flag raised. It might be the Pride flag or the flag for the Snowking Winter Festival.\u201d Numerous countries have seen their flags fly outside Yellowknife city hall, including India and the Philippines.<\/p>\n

But not everyone was interpreting the Turkish association\u2019s request the same way, Morgan says. Some felt the city was being asked to recognize not only the importance of Turkish Canadians to life in Yellowknife, but the idea that Turkey is a peace-promoting country. The 2018 version of the proclamation stated that Turkey \u201chas played a critical role in international efforts for peace, prosperity and stability.\u201d Later versions were reworded to focus on the local Turkish community\u2019s contributions.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, councillors were playing catch-up to learn about Turkey\u2019s backing of Azerbaijan in an escalating military conflict with Armenia. Just weeks earlier, the Armenian community in Yellowknife had protested outside city hall to raise awareness of the conflict halfway around the world.<\/p>\n

Council agreed to proclaim Turkish Republic Day in Yellowknife, but this time without raising the Turkish flag. \u201cWe need to find ways to celebrate cultural contributions without wading into foreign conflicts that we don\u2019t know enough about and have no place taking a stand on,\u201d Morgan says. \u201cIt\u2019s not like we have any staff tasked with researching foreign affairs about conflicts that may spark if we fly this or that flag.\u201d<\/p>\n

READ:\u00a0This Alberta town holds funerals for worn-out flags<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So the ceremonies have gone on pause, and council is now debating whether to wave the white flag on the practice permanently. Firmly in the corner of maintaining the tradition is Rommel Silverio, Yellowknife\u2019s first Filipino councillor. \u201cWhen you raise a flag for a certain country, you don\u2019t think of the geopolitical aspect,\u201d he said at a recent debate. \u201cTo me, it\u2019s the friendship of this country\u2014and welcoming Canada for us and giving our contribution to this place.\u201d A resident\u2019s home country may have an unstable government, he added, but to them it\u2019s still home. Silverio, who has supported flag-raising to commemorate Yellowknife\u2019s Filipino Heritage Month, suggested a policy that would bar raising the flags of countries that don\u2019t respect human rights.<\/p>\n

Morgan counters by referencing her own time decades ago living and doing development work in the Philippines: that country, she observes, doesn\u2019t exactly have a stellar human rights record. \u201cBut hardly any country in the world can say it has a great human rights record,\u201d she adds. \u201cWhen we fly flags of other countries that either have or are still committing human rights abuses, it\u2019s hard to deny the symbolism of you picking the side of that national government against whoever they are persecuting.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the interest of finding middle ground, Morgan proposed flying flags of local cultural groups\u2014provided they have banners that are not national flags. Either way, council hopes to have an official policy in place soon.<\/p>\n

As for the handful of Turkish Yellowknifers who gathered annually by the flagpole, Sarikaya says they see the end of their ritual as a lost opportunity\u2014for the city to represent them and, if anyone is offended, for a conversation toward reconciliation. \u201cWe have an amazing Turkish community here,\u201d she says, \u201cand we don\u2019t represent the trauma that your ancestors or your family suffered.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

This article appears in print in the February 2021 issue of<\/em> Maclean\u2019s magazine with the headline, \u201cRaising a red flag.\u201d Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here<\/a>.<\/em>
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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#The flap over Yellowknife’s flag-raising practices” At the request of Turkish Yellowknifers, the city proclaimed Oct. 29 as ‘Turkish Republic Day’ and raised the iconic flag outside city hall. Then complaints started rolling in. Three years ago, Yellowknife resident Reyhan Sarikaya didn\u2019t know her city had a municipal flagpole. At least, she\u2019d never noticed it….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":166313,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.macleans.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/YELLOWKNIFE-FLAGS-HUTCHINS-JAN05-750x422.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[22974,67806,91393,75393,91394],"class_list":["post-166312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-canada","tag-editors-picks","tag-flag","tag-turkey","tag-yellowknife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=166312"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166312\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/166313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=166312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=166312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=166312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}