Turkey’s Supreme Election Council (YSK) announced last week that in some Kurdish cities ballot boxes for the June 24 presidential and parliamentary elections would be relocated, a move that will favour President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ruling party and undermine the vote for the pro-Kurdish opposition. For Erdoğan it is imperative to win the polls, as […]
While scrolling through social media a few days ago, I almost missed news about a family I know. Their daughter Hacer Aslan was burnt alive while sheltering in a basement during the military operations in the southeastern mainly Kurdish city of Cizre in January 2016. Her mother is still looking for Hacer’s body and believes […]
On Saturday, Turkish politician and activist Tuna Bekleviç ended his 1000-kilometer Brotherhood March from Turkey’s capital Ankara to Kurdish-majority province of Diyarbakir in Turkey’s southeast. Bekleviç set out on the Brotherhood March on April 16, marking the one-year anniversary since the constitutional referendum vote that resulted in enhanced presidential powers. In order to cement these […]
“I don’t have a problem with Kurdish people; I have a problem with the PKK.” As Kurds, we hear this sentence all the time. The form of the sentence changes depending on the flavour of the day. After the Turkish offensive in Afrin, the sentence turned into: Kurd: 3,000 people were killed in Afrin. Turk: […]
I grew up in one of the poor districts of Diyarbakır, the biggest city in Turkey’s mainly Kurdish southeast. At the beginning of the 1980s, we began to hear that there was some kind of armed conflict in the mountains, between “terrorists” and the state. After a while, we heard these “terrorists” were called “Apocu”. […]
“It was the evening of Newroz 1992. I was in high school. We celebrated Newroz in Nusaybin without violence, but more than 100 people were killed during the celebrations in Cizre, a neighbouring district. The people of Nusaybin were so sad. While people were talking about the massacre in Cizre that evening, Interior Minister İsmet […]