Help the Kurds in Turkey: Uprising looms in NATO member state

You have expressed your solidarity with the democracy movements in the Middle East, not least of all in your visits to Tunis and Cairo on 12 and 24 February 2011. Our human rights organization is concerned about developments in other countries and the fates of the large national minorities living there.

Uprising looms in NATO member state

The international public has hardly noticed the protests taking place in Turkey. Primarily in the southeast of the country, whether the cities and towns almost all have majority Kurd populations, people are gathering to hold rallies and vigils almost every day. "Tents for of a democratic solution" are going up in the town squares. The largest political movement of the Kurds currently in Turkey, the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), are pushing for implementation of four long overdue and basic democratic demands for the fifteen million Kurdish citizens.

With the support of hundreds of thousands – and the number is growing daily – the BDP demands:

1. The release of all Kurdish political prisoners, including 100 elected Kurdish representatives, nine of them mayors.

2. The acknowledgement and equal status of the Kurdish language in preschools, schools and universities as well as in government agencies throughout the Kurdish-speaking region.

3. An end to all military operations against the civilian population in southeastern Turkey.

4. The repeal of all measures forbidding cultural and political institutions in Turkish Kurdistan, as well as the repeal of the 10% barring clause currently in effect throughout Turkey restricting the election of Kurds to the Turkish parliament.

It is intolerable that Turkey, a NATO member state, is holding not only 7,000 Kurdish men and women but also 3,000 Kurdish children and youths in jail as political prisoners. It is just as disturbing that European parties in sympathy with the acceptance of Turkey into the EU are willing to accept the fact that 3,876 Kurdish villages destroyed by the Turkish army still lie in ruins.

Several hundred thousand people wait in vain for the possibilities of reconstruction and a return to their homes. The fact that a number of Turkish intellectuals are persecuted simply because they have described the oppressive situation in Turkish Kurdistan in books or other publications should make any European indignant.

Turkish security forces have been employing violence in their attempts to quash the protests in southeastern Turkey. On Monday the mayor of the Kurdish city Nusaybin, in the Mardin province near the Syrian border, was severely wounded when security forces attacked peaceful demonstrators with truncheons.

Mr. Minister, we urge you to speak out loud and clear for the recognition and support of the Kurdish movement and thus to help prevent another looming civil war.

Please go to Turkey and take a stand as you did in Tunis and Cairo. Visit the "secret capital" of the Kurds, Diyarbakir.

Yours sincerely,

Tilman Zülch

President, Society for Threatened Peoples International

(Telephone: +49 (0)551/499 06 24)

PS: We have taken the liberty of publishing this letter in German, English and Turkish and sharing it with politicians and media representatives in Europe, the US, Canada, Australia and in the Islamic world.