Erdogan arrests 12 students for singing in Kurdish language

Mohamed Abdel-Ghaffar

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been expanding his circle  of repression and crackdown over citizens since the so-called coup in July 2016.

Turkish authorities have arrested 12 students in Antalya, a Turkish resort city in the south-west, after singing a song in Kurdish language during the Nowruz celebration.

The students are charged with joining a terrorist organization, namely The Revolutionary Youth Movement. One of the students is said to have colon cancer.

A verdict will be issued regarding the case next January.

One of the students had a photo of a Kurdish young man who was beaten and killed by Turkish police forces in Sirnak on his mobile phone, this was considered an evidence of convection by the public prosecution.

Turkey is tightening on Kurdish cultural celebrations, and prohibits talking or printing books in their language, as part of the Turkish attack on ethnicity, which is classified by the Turkish government as a terrorist organization.

In other news, Turkish prosecutors on Tuesday ordered the detention of 186 people, including military members and ex-police officers, as part of a large-scale post-coup crackdown targeting followers of the faith-based Gülen movement.

The Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office on Tuesday issued detention warrants for 70 military members from the Turkish ground and naval forces, and from the Coast Guard, over Gülen links.

The soldiers were accused of using payphones to maintain their affiliation with the Gülen movement.

As of today, 2,422 soldiers have been detained due to allegedly using payphones, 1,501 of whom were put in pretrial detention.