Killing in cold blood: How the Erdogan regime takes revenge on Kurds

Nora Bandari

The regime of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan continues its repressive methods against the Kurds, prompting the MPs of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) to organize a protest in the Turkish parliament on Sunday, December 13, due to their objection to Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu’s defense of the police that fired on and killed the young Kurd Kemal Kurkut.

Erdogan’s police crackdown

The opposition party’s deputies raised pictures of Kurdish victims to express their protest and dissatisfaction with Soylu’s defense of the forces that shot the Kurdish student and killed him. The Turkish judiciary even issued a verdict of innocence against the police officer accused of killing him during the Kurdish celebration of Nowruz in Diyarbakir in 2017. According to Turkey Now, 72 other policemen were charged, but none of them have been prosecuted.

It is noteworthy that Kurkut was a Kurdish student from Adiman studying music. He participated in the Nowruz celebrations in the city of Diyarbakir and was surprised by the Turkish police who stopped him for wearing a shirt with “Kurdistan” written on it. This prompted the police to demand that he take off the shirt, and as a result of his failure to respond, the police officers beat him. When he tried to flee from them, they shot him until he fell wounded, and then they shot him again to make sure he was killed.

To acquit the policemen, Turkish media outlets loyal to the Erdogan regime claimed that the police killed a suspected suicide bomber, and on November 17, a Turkish court issued a verdict of acquittal against the police officer accused of killing Kurkut.

A Kurdish deputy prison

The Kurdish university student was not the first case of its kind, which confirms the Erdogan regime’s suppression of the Kurds. The last case occurred when the Turkish judiciary issued on Monday, December 14, a sentence of nine years in prison for Kurdish HDP MP Rojda Nazlier, who was charged with committing terrorist crimes and belonging to an armed organization in Diyarbakir.

The Prosecutor of the Supreme Criminal Court claimed that Nazlier, who previously held the post of mayor of Kocaeli, cooperated with members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which Turkey classifies as a terrorist organization, and has covered up some of the party leaders who are wanted for security reasons.

Continuous suppression

The Turkish president has always pursued the opposition HDP deputies, especially since the electoral defeat of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2019, when HDP was able to win some municipalities and obtain seats in parliament, which is why the Turkish government is seeking, through arrest campaigns, to disperse the opposition ranks through the arrest of the party’s representatives on suspicion of association with the PKK.