Kurdish football team Amedspor was crowned champion of the Turkish Football Federation’s Second League on Sunday after a competitive season, securing a place in the TFF’s First League.
Ekrem İmamoğlu, mayor of Istanbul from main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), took to X (formerly Twitter) to congratulate the team “wholeheartedly”.
Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the CHP’s former leader, celebrated Amedspor’s achievement and wished the team luck in the first league.
Meanwhile, Tuncer Bakirhan, co-chair of the country’s pro-Kurdish Peoples’ and Democracy Party (DEM), congratulated Amedspor’s win against the backdrop of the challenges faced by the Kurdish team.
Irkçılığa maruz kaldın, haksızlığa uğradın, yasaklarla karşılaştın. Ama milyonların yüreği ve dayanışmasıyla başardın. Tebrikler #Amedspor #ŞampiyonAmedspor pic.twitter.com/eyOaHMXTeL
— Tuncer BAKIRHAN (@tuncerbakirhan) April 28, 2024
“You have been exposed to racism, you have been treated unfairly, you have faced prohibitions. But you succeeded with the hearts and solidarity of millions. Congratulations #Amedspor #ŞampiyonAmedspor [ChampionAmedspor]”, Bakirhan posted on X.
The win reflects a massive victory for fans of Amedspor and for the Kurdish community as a whole. Controversy surrounding the naming of the team, derived from the Kurdish ‘Amed’ for Turkey’s largest Kurdish-majority city of Diyarbakır, directly symbolised the decade of challenges faced by the team and the wider significance of its successes.
The team and its fans have been subjected to repeated racist attacks, both verbal and physical. In March 2023, as political and cultural tensions gripped the country ahead of the presidential elections, fans of Amedspor’s competitors Bursaspor threw knives and bullets onto the pitch and displayed symbols designed to intimidate, related to extrajudicial killings and abductions that took place against Kurds during the 1990s. The referee failed to stop the Amed-Bursa match.
Amedspor fans, including minors, are repeatedly subjected to arrest and prosecution for remaining seated during the national anthem, a legal act in Turkey.
Other teams from Kurdish-majority areas of the country are also subjected to racially motivated attacks. In October, the team bus of Petrolspor, a club from the Kurdish-majority province of Batman (Elîh), was mobbed. Police reportedly stood by and watched.
Amedspor’s promotion to the TFF’s First League comes shortly after a historic defeat by Turkey’s nationalist ruling party and its far-right ally. The Justice and Development Party (AKP) – Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) alliance took significant municipal losses on 31 March, in polls regarded as heralding a possible beginning-of-the-end for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ‘one-man’ rule. Main opposition İmamoğlu, Istanbul mayor for the main opposition CHP, has long been touted as a potential presidential candidate.
During presidential elections last year, the CHP shelved temporarily promised Kurdish-orientated policies and in a last-minute grab for more conservative votes aligned with anti-Kurd war strategy. The DEM Party, with the Kurdish rights at its core, saw historic support at polls during the recent local elections in March. İmamoğlu’s congratulatory comments come with one question for Kurds, how loyal will the main opposition CHP remain should their candidate step into a presidential role?
