Türkiye: stop harassing Diyarbakir arrestees and protect Kurdish cultural expression
Minority Rights Group (MRG) calls for the cessation of harassment against Kurds arrested this September in Diyarbakir, Türkiye, in association with their cultural and linguistic activities. At least 22 people were detained and an investigation against them is ongoing. These arrests are but the latest in a long history of the abuse of the criminal justice system to persecute legitimate and protected Kurdish cultural expression.
MRG denounces the policing and securitization of Kurdish cultural and political activity, and the concomitant harassment and intimidation of Kurdish civil society, as tools of the Turkish government’s systematic repression of Kurdish identity dating back decades to the very founding of the Turkish state. MRG calls on Türkiye to uphold its obligations under international law to protect the cultural and political rights of all individuals, regardless of their ethnicity.
The rights and freedoms afforded to different ethnic and religious groups in Turkey are unevenly distributed, with Kurds being one notable example of a community that has faced extensive repression and discrimination at the hands of both society and the state. Minority protection in Türkiye is weak – to this day, it relies heavily on the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which only covers certain non-Muslim communities recognized at that time, leaving many others, including Kurds, without legal recognition and with very limited protection.
Citing the Lausanne treaty, the government has declined to accede to modern legal instruments that would more strongly protect the rights of all its minorities. It has also sought to limit its obligations towards minorities by being one of only two countries – the other being Qatar – to accede to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights with a reservation on Article 27, which safeguards minority rights to culture, religion and language. Türkiye must urgently modernize its minority rights legal framework and ensure that equal protections for all minority communities are created and implemented. In particular, it must apply the rights granted to non-Muslims in the Lausanne Treaty to all religious, ethnic and linguistic minority groups.
In the early hours of 25 September 2024, anti-terror police stormed a Kurdish bookstore Payîz Pirtuk in Diyarbakir and the headquarters of Kurdish language teaching association, Research Association for Languages and Culture of Mesopotamia (MED-DER). The raid, which lasted several hours, resulted in the detention of at least 22 people and the confiscation of MED-DER hard drives as well as hundreds of Kurdish language books and magazines. Charges faced by the detainees are still unknown due to a confidentiality order on the investigation, led by the Diyarbakır Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office.
This latest crackdown on language and cultural institutions follows a wave of arrests between July and August this year of men, women and children performing Kurdish dances in videos uploaded to TikTok. This includes six people who were arrested on 26 July 2024 for dancing at a wedding party to a Kurdish political folk song. The persecution of Kurds expressing their language and culture through music, literature or dance has come in the form of arrests, pre-trial detentions and serious charges of ‘spreading terrorist propaganda’, which carries a prison sentence of up to five years.
Featured image: Representatives of civil society organisations and political parties gathered in Sheikh Said Square, Diyarbakir, to protest against the MED-DER detentions. Credit: Mehmet Masum Suer/SOPA/SIPA US/Alamy Stock Photo.
