Turkey’s former Kurdish laymakers sentenced to lengthy jail terms

2019-02-02 00:00:00 - From: Iraq News

ISTANBUL,— A Turkish court has sentenced two Kurdish politicians to lengthy jail terms on charges of links to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party PKK, belonging to a terrorist organization and disseminating terrorist propaganda, Demiroren News Agency (DHA) reported.

It said former parliamentarian Gultan Kisanak, who was arrested in 2016 when she was the joint mayor of the main Kurdish city of Diyarbakir in Turkish Kurdistan, southeast Turkey, was jailed for 14 years and three months.

Sebahat Tuncel, who had also served in parliament, was jailed for 15 years, the agency said. She has been on hunger strike for three weeks and did not attend the court hearing.

Tuncel was detained and released in July 2007 when she was elected to Turkey’s legislature while the court case was still proceeding. Turkish law grants full judicial immunity to parliament members at that time.

In May 2016, parliament voted to strip lawmakers of their legal immunity, paving the way for the Kurdish legislators’ arrests.

Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan has said the removal of elected officials and civil servants accused of links to the PKK is a vital part of the battle against it.

Kisanak rejected the charges in court and said she had been held for two years before Friday’s sentencing.

“I do what I do because it is true, legal, legitimate, humanitarian,” Demiroren quoted her as saying. “Everything I do is in the frame of democratic politics.”

Kisanak was arrested in October 2016 and accused of making speeches in support of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has waged an insurgency in the mainly Kurdish southeast of Turkey since the 1980s. More than 40,000 people have been killed in the violence.

In May 2018, Turkey’s Kurdish HDP politician Idris Baluken sentenced to over 16 years in prison and Kurdish HDP MP Dilek Ocalan was sentenced to two years and six months in prison over her speech in a funeral of a PKK guerrilla in February 2016, as part of the Turkish crackdown against Kurdish political movement.

Thousands of officials from the HDP have been detained since 2015. Turkey detained 200 HDP members in December 2016.

The PKK took up arms in 1984 against the Turkish state, which still denies the constitutional existence of Kurds, to push for greater autonomy in Turkish Kurdistan for the Kurdish minority who make up around 22.5 million of the country’s 79-million population.

More than 40,000 Turkish soldiers and Kurdish rebels, have been killed in the conflict.

A large Kurdish community in Turkey and worldwide openly sympathise with PKK rebels and Abdullah Ocalan, who founded the PKK group in 1974 and currently serving a life sentence in Turkey, has a high symbolic value for most Kurds in Turkey and worldwide according to observers.

Fighting in the region intensified between Turkish security forces and the PKK after the collapse of a two-year ceasefire in 2015.

Turkey, the European Union and the United States have all designated the PKK a terrorist organization.