Doğan Erbaş, an MP for the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), evaluated recent attacks on Kurds in cities in Turkey with Turkish majorities, and the 22-year-long solitary confinement imposed on Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).
Erbaş spoke to the Fırat News Agency (ANF) after the massacre on 30 July of a Kurdish family in Konya. He said that the brutal murder of seven family members was a result of anti-Kurdish policies, policies of leniency to assailants in similar incidents and the polarising rhetoric of the government and its allies.
Seven members of the Kurdish Dedeoğulları family were massacred on 30 July in an armed attack on their home in Konya, a province in the centre of Turkey. Following a previous attack on the same family on 12 May, family members were interviewed by police, and they included in their statements complaints regarding death threats they had received. Suspects arrested in the 12 May incident were released, and an application by the family lawyer Abdurrahman Karabulut to the Chief State Prosecutor of Konya on 17 June demanding that they be detained on charges including attempted murder was simply ignored.
Erbaş pointed out that increasing attacks against Kurdish people and the rising tensions were linked to the deadlock in the resolution of the Kurdish question, and that the severe isolation imposed on Abdullah Öcalan was at the heart of this deadlock.
“We must not forget,” he said; “each day Öcalan is kept in isolation is another day that the deadlock and the war continue. The basic reason for all the negative developments, oppression, attacks and genocidal policies towards the Kurdish people is the isolation imposed on Abdullah Öcalan.”
