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Gökhan Yavuzel, a Kurdish poet and author, who has been living in exile in Wales, was arrested at İstanbul airport on Saturday as he tried to return Turkey for medical reasons.
“After living in exile for five years, I had to return to the country because of health problems. I am currently being taken into custody at İstanbul airport,” Yavuzel wrote on Twitter.
Yavuzel, who is also a member of PEN International, a worldwide association of writers, prepared a petition in 2016 on behalf of “Authors for Peace” to protest against the Turkish military’s operations in Kurdish-populated provinces in the southeast of Turkey.
The petition was published to support the “Academics for Peace”, an initiative established in 2012 to promote a peaceful resolution to the Kurdish conflict and targeted by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in 2016 after they published a petition entitled “We will be not a party to this crime!”
Turkish prosecutors launched an investigation into the authors who signed the petition, and an arrest warrant was issued for Yavuzel.
The author applied for asylum in the United Kingdom in 2019 and started living in Wales after his application was accepted.
He was attacked near his home in Cardiff in 2021, after his name was reportedly added to an “hit list” against critics of Erdoğan’s government.
