Tag: Turkey (Total 69)

VAN, TURKEY/WASHINGTON —
Eighteen journalists, nearly all of whom work for Kurdish media outlets, stood trial at hearings across Turkey this week.

Lawyers and media rights groups say the trials show how Turkey’s laws on terrorism and protests can be used to detain or harass journalists.

While the world is busy with COVID-19, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s regime is actively engaged with its pan-Islamic and nationalistic ambitions in eliminating the most “disloyal” segments of the Kurdish population.

New video from ultra-racist Turkish nationalist group Ataman Kardeşliği in which a member beats a Syrian refugee with a stick.

Video warns refugees to “leave our country, or we’ll bury you in it,” then calls on the youth of Turkey to “shed the blood of ethnic occupiers.”

A factory in Turkey’s Trabzon province was raided by Turkish nationalists for producing hats for a Kurdish alliance taking part in the Iraqi elections, local media outlets reported on Thursday. The hats were set ablaze in the middle of the street.

United States Department of State, U.S. Department of State Country Report on Human Rights Practices 1995 – Turkey, 30 January 1996, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6aa7dc.html [accessed 8 September 2021]

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), of which Turkey is a member, has passed a resolution referring the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) deputies jailed in Turkey as “political prisoners,” Turkish Minute reported on Tuesday, citing Deutsche Welle Turkish service.

Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) Parliamentary Group Deputy Chair Meral Danış-Beştaş has filed a parliamentary question on the release of three ISIS members who were arrested for kidnapping and trying to sell an Ezidi child.

Bans on Kurdish cultural events or activities are not rare in Turkey. The outlawing of the Kurdish-language play “Beru” has been condemned as the latest attack on Kurdish culture.

“It all happened very quickly,” said Kurdish director Nazmi Karaman. The police suddenly appeared outside the theater and everyone was forced to leave, he said.

“The play has been performed in Turkey for three years now. The authorities never had a problem with it before, but suddenly they appear to have changed their mind,” the director complained. Shortly before “Beru,” which translates as “Faceless,” was due to be performed for the first time in Istanbul’s municipal theater, it was banned by the administrator of Istanbul’s Gaziosmanpasa district for “disturbing public order.”

The two-act play, due to be performed by the Kurdish theater group Teatra Jiyana Nu, is an adaptation of a satirical play by Italian writer Dario Fo. Almost 4,000 people had already seen the play performed in the last three years, both in Turkey and abroad, but it would have been the first Kurdish-language performance in the 106-year history of Istanbul’s municipal theater. Director Nazmi Karaman believes that its staging would have sent an important signal to Turkish Kurds and Turkish society at large.

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — One person was killed after a Kurdish family was attacked in Konya in central Turkey on Wednesday, a local media outlet has reported.

Around 60 people attacked the family, according to Mezopotamya Agency (MA), shooting at the car they were in. It described the incident as a “racist attack.”

The family, originally from the Kurdish-majority city of Diyarbakir (Amed) has been living in Konya’s Meram district for twenty years.

Hakim Dal, a 43-year-old male member of the family, was killed in the attack, according to MA.

“They didn’t want us because we are Kurds. They told us ‘you will sell this place and leave,’” his brother Hamdi Dal told the news outlet.

An eyewitness claimed that family had been attacked in the past.

“There have been at least three attempts to attack the family before,” Mohammed Emin told MA, adding that the village chief was “provoking” locals to hurt the family.

Turkish authorities arrested three people in connection with what was described as a “racist attack” in Mersin against a Kurdish family from Erbil in mid-May.

Many Kurds from the Kurdistan Region holiday and do business in Turkey. Erbil and Ankara enjoy good economic relations, with the Kurdistan Region exporting oil to international markets through its northern neighbor and Duhok’s Ibrahim Khalil border crossing connecting Turkey to Iraq.

The attack drew ire and was condemned by Kurdish and Turkish officials.

The repression of the Kurdish political opposition has intensified as Turkey’s authoritarian turn gathered pace since 2015. Since then, the HDP’s district and provincial mayors have been removed from their positions on spurious allegations and thousands of party officials have been arrested and imprisoned.

Main opposition CHP group deputy chair Engin Altay has referred to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan “as the world’s most expensive president,” saying his presidential palace complex in Ankara’s Beştepe district costs the nation over 10 million liras ($1.3 million) per day. Altay also said that 110 vehicles and two helicopters escort Erdoğan on the 6 km route between the presidential palace and parliament building.

The Imrali Island prison, where Kurdish leader, Abdullah Ocalan, has been held in isolation for twenty-two years, accepts no visitors and the annual delegations never actually reach this island fortress. But the delegation’s visit to Turkey provides an opportunity for an international group to draw attention to the conditions faced by a political prisoner that many have called the Kurdish Mandela and find out about the state of human rights in Turkey more generally.

Official correspondence from Turkey’s consulate general in Frankfurt to the Justice Ministry in Ankara has revealed that a German prosecutor denied a request for judicial assistance submitted by a Turkish court in the case of famous singer Ferhat Tunç.

To serve as a mayor from Turkey’s pro-Kurdish political party these days is to fear arrest at any moment and govern in circumstances that hover between stifling and absurd, said Ayhan Bilgen, one of the few who has kept his office during an unrelenting government purge.

ANKARA/BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Turkey is taking its decades-old conflict with Kurdish militants deep into northern Iraq, establishing military bases and deploying armed military drones against the fighters in their mountain strongholds.

Turkey is moving to close its second-largest opposition party, the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), in what is widely seen as perhaps the last bolt for a government that has exhausted all other options as its public support craters and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) faces an uphill battle in the next national elections.