Çiçek Sepeti, a prominent online shopping platform in Turkey, apologised on Monday following public outrage at the sale, as a ‘souvenir product’, of a poster that showed symbols of state crimes in Turkey’s southeast in the 1990s.
The poster included a drawing of a “white Taurus”, a model of Renault used in the 1990s by security forces for kidnappings in Kurdish-majority provinces.
The poster also displayed a picture of Mahmut Yıldırım, known to many by his code name “Yeşil” [Green]. Yıldırım was an assassin hired by the Turkish Gendarmes Intelligence and Anti-Terrorist Units (JİTEM) in various operations, before he disappeared in 1998.
It came to public light that the poster was for sale on Çiçek Sepeti after similar posters were displayed by Bursaspor supporters, a football team that represents Turkey’s northwestern province of Bursa, during a tense match on Sunday with Amedspor, the football team of the Kurdish-majority southeastern province of Diyarbakır (Amed).
In an outage on social media users condemned the controversial poster, threatening to boycott the shopping platform unless the poster was removed from sale.
Late Monday, Çiçek Sepeti apologised via Twitter and cut ties with the supplier of the product.
