German police. Photo: DPA
BERLIN,— Germany’s top security official has banned two publishers for allegedly belonging to a banned Kurdish organization.
German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said Tuesday that he banned the publishers Mezopotamien Verlag und Vertrieb GmbH and the MIR Multimedia GmbH because they support the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK.
The interior minister said in a statement that searches of the two publishing houses in western and northern Germany were underway.
Seehofer said, “It’s necessary to push back the PKK because they continue to be active in Germany despite being banned.”
He said that the two groups used their earnings solely to support the PKK which was outlawed as a foreign terrorist group in Germany in 1993.
Germany is home to around 14,500 PKK supporters.
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.
Copyright © 2019, respective author or news agency, AP | Ekurd.net