Two activists, Ramazan Canpolat and Yakup Bulut, were remanded in custody in Istanbul on Friday after taking part in a memorial event for the victims of the Suruç massacre.
The event, which took place on Thursday 20 July, commemorated the 8th anniversary of a tragic event that occurred in 2015 claiming the lives of 33 activists in the Suruç (Pîrsûs) district of Urfa (Riha), a Kurdish majority city in southeast Turkey. The activists were en route to Kobane in Syria to aid in reconstruction work after the town’s liberation from ISIS by Kurdish-led forces, when they became victims of an ISIS suicide bombing, resulting in 33 dead and over 100 injuries. Since then, the massacre has been a focal point for protests and demands for justice.
The memorial proceeded peacefully despite a heavy police presence, but as it ended, the police launched an attack on the crowd, arresting 154 people including Canpolat and Bulut.
The arrests have been met with widespread condemnation, and accusations of excessive use of force by the police. The Istanbul Bar Association has also reported instances of torture of lawyers and activists detained in Istanbul police stations.
Families of the massacre victims made the following demands at the event and posed a number of questions seeking answers:
They called for then Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu to provide “an explanation of what happened between 7 June and 1 November [2015]”.
They demanded to know why senior ISIS leader İlhami Bali, who met with Turkish intelligence service officers in Ankara in 2016 while there was a red notice out for his arrest, was not apprehended.
They demanded the cancellation of inquiries into those being investigated merely for seeking a fair trial in court.
They highlighted the three-and-a-half year delay in the inclusion in the case file of footage of before and after the massacre, and they also revealed that 5 hours of footage depicting the aftermath of the massacre had been inexplicably removed.
They pointed out that no action has yet been taken to address this missing footage.
Additionally, they questioned why the sole defendant arrested in the case, Yakup Şahin, who was also involved in the Ankara massacre resulting in the death of a further 103 people, has not been brought before court. They demanded an investigation into why the Suruç police failed to take any action against the alleged bomber and ISIS member Abdurrahman Alagöz, when they interviewed him prior to the massacre.
Lastly, they called for the files related to the various ISIS massacres, especially those connected to the Diyarbakır (Amed), Ankara and Suruç incidents to be merged, and the connections between them to be recognised.
Despite the arrests and the subsequent crackdown on protests, the activists have vowed to continue their fight for justice, stating, “We are not afraid, we are everywhere, we are Suruç.”
