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Suicide rates in Turkey, especially amongst the youth, have increased in parallel with deepening poverty and unemployement rates, MA reports.
The Peoples’ Democratic Party’s (HDP’s) MP for Diyarbakır (Amed) Dersim Dağ stated that the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power with the promise of fighting against poverty and corruption, but during the long years of its reign, the country has increasingly suffered, mainly due to poverty and corruption.
“Handing out ‘potato and onion bags’ to the people who cope with increasing poverty shows the depth of the crisis. The AKP is directly responsible for making the people poor,” Dağ said.
Emphasizing that the opposition that has raised voices against this increasing poverty has been punished for doing so, Dağ continued: “As the partisans of the AKP add more to their wealth, people who are in a deadlock in poverty commit suicide, especially the youth. Due to unemployment, after years of education, the youth feel desperate. Therefore, suicides have become a more common phenomenon.”
Dağ criticised the Turkish government’s policy of war, which she directly related to the country’s economic crisis. “People’s money is being divided into three segments and spent in this way: to the partisans, to the palace and to the war. The money spent on war pushes people to the edge of poverty even more,” she said.
She also spoke about the questionable role of the media. “The AKP sees that people are hungry and poor, but they do not want this fact to appear in the public agenda and the news headlines. So the partisan media is additionally responsible for the hunger and suicides,” she stated. “The media is responsible for revealing the truth, but today in Turkey, they have forgotten these ethical guidelines and become the puppets of those in power”.
Dağ asserted that the HDP has taken the economic crisis and poverty to the top of its agenda for a considerable time. “The portrait of society we witness during our meetings with the people is far from the rose-tinted portrait the ruling power projects,” she said. “We will continue with our meetings with the labourers in this country and we will return to the people what the AKP government has been taking away from them though our struggle.”
