Green Left Party MP Ömer Öcalan was forcibly withheld and taken to a police station by Turkish security forces during their intervention in a commemoration on Sunday at the graveside of former Kurdish mayor Bazo Yılmaz who died in prison last year while seriously ill.
The gendarmerie disrupted the gathering at the cemetery in the Halfeti (Xelfetî) district of Şanlıurfa (Riha), held to remember Yılmaz’s passing, which occurred a year ago. Yılmaz, who was not granted release despite his severe illness, passed away in August 2022 at 67 years old.
The intervention came during Öcalan’s commemoration speech in Kurdish. The gendarmerie surrounding the crowd said that they would intervene, asserting that it was forbidden to make a statement in the cemetery.
The security forces attacked Öcalan and the participants of the commemoration when Öcalan continued his speech by saying: “Our friend was killed because was a political person. He was killed because he was a Kurd. And now we are being persecuted here.” Three people were arrested.
The Green Left Party announced on social media that there was an attempt to detain Öcalan during the commemoration and he has been forcibly taken to a police station.
Yılmaz, a former mayor of a town within Halfeti, was arrested in 2016 while serving as a council member in the Halfeti municipality. By February 2021, the Turkish Forensic Medicine Institute had issued a report claiming that he could remain in prison, and his request for release was denied. An appeal to the Constitutional Court against the report was also rejected. Yılmaz, who suffers from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), relied on an oxygen machine to sustain his life in prison.
In his commemorative speech at the grave, Öcalan said that the appointment of trustees disregards the will of the people and that those who had been removed from their positions and imprisoned had been subjected to great oppression, including Yılmaz.
Yılmaz’s arrest, while he was a local councillor, was part of the Turkish government’s first wave of trustee appointments in municipalities in Kurdish-populated areas after the short-lived peace talks to resolve the Kurdish issue in the country collapsed in 2015.
The trustee practices began in September 2016, resulting in the removal of dozens of mayors elected by the pro-Kurdish Democratic Regions Party (DBP) and their replacement with trustees. Many of the removed mayors and council members were arrested.
The practice continued after the subsequent local elections in 2019, when trustees were appointed in 48 of the 65 municipalities won by the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), and over a thousand local council members were removed from their posts.
