Turkish police violence against Kurdish prisoners' mothers leads to uproar
The Turkish police’s maltreatment of elderly Kurdish women in the video the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) shared on Saturday received backlash from social media users, journalists, and politicians.
“What’s your beef with mothers, women, and particularly Kurdish mothers who are weeping,” Sezgin Tanrikulu, a lawmaker for the opposition People’s Republican Party (CHP), asked the Turkish Justice Ministry which regulates and oversees the prison system across Turkey.
“This police harassment and batons is the face of the oppressive government,” Tanrikulu, himself a Kurd and prominent human rights lawyer, wrote on Twitter.
He vowed to follow the case with the authorities.
Hundreds of Kurdish political prisoners led by the formerly jailed HDP lawmaker Leyla Guven are on a hunger strike to pressure President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s administration to lift what they call a policy of isolation on the imprisoned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) founder Abdullah Ocalan.
HDP called the police treatment “a picture of lawlessness and tyranny.”
Another CHP MP, Gursel Tekin, also a Kurd, called it “oppression with a heavy price.”
A world-renowned Kurdish visual artist, Ahmet Gunestekin, questioned whether equal citizenship existed in Turkey in a tweet commenting on the video.
The Kocaeli governorate issued an online statement after thousands of reactions and hashtags, saying there was “intelligence that provocative incidents would occur.”
In the lengthy statement, it said an investigation was launched into the “security members who overrode their mandate during the intervention.”
HDP pointed out that there was “no apologies, no sign of shame, no resignations, and no dismissals.”
In less than 24 hours, Turkish police attacked another protest in the Kurdish Mardin province’s Kiziltepe district.