1,483 DTP Members Detained for 1 Year without Indictment

An indictment has still not been announced even though a whole year has passed since the beginning of the operations against Kurdish politicians, local executives and rights defenders. The operations had been initiated after the local elections in March 2009.

Co-Chair of the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) Selahattin Demirtaş criticized the situation in yesterday's (13 April) party meeting.

"The operations carried out against our party are continued as a political operation. Our friends and colleagues are included under false statements and forged evidence".

During his speech, Demirtaş had posted a banner at the front of the podium reading "1,483 BDP members still detained".

"We saw nothing but cruelty from AKP"

The operations started on 14 April 2009. The detainees are kept in prison till the present day because they are suspected of "membership of the KCK", the Peoples' Confederation of Kurdistan as the umbrella organization of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), and of "establishing a PKK settlement".

"Our friends in detention are a priority topic. We are putting our maximum efforts into this. So, we are struggling for democracy in every area. Life might be normal for everybody else. This term of [the ruling Justice and Development Party] AKP might be a time when people fill their pockets with the money generated by democracy. But as far as we are concerned, we have seen nothing else but cruelty from AKP during the past eight years. Not one single area of freedom created by AKP was for the benefit of the people".

Operations

The first operations were carried out on 14 April 2009 in 13 different cities and resulted in the detention of a total of 40 people. Among the detainees were executives of the Democratic Society Party (DTP), which was closed by the Constitutional Court later on, and lawyers of imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan. DTP had emerged from the local elections held on 29 March as a strengthened political force. The government had particularly lost ground in the pre-dominantly Kurdish region of the South-East of the country, though they claimed the opposite.

Another ten people were arrested on 14 September, among them Diyarbakır Municipality City Council President Şeyhmus Bayhan, Bağlar Deputy Mayor Hacı Erdemir, Kayapınar Deputy Mayor Sebahattin Dinç, Büyükşehir Municipality Deputy Secretary General Hüseyin Bayrak, H. Hüseyin Ebem from the DTP Headquarters, former President of the Provincial Assembly Kerem Duruk, Chairman of the Assembly of the Democratic Society Congress Alaatin Aktaş and the director of the DTP Headquarters.

On the DTP party congress in September 2009, more than 100 members and executives were behind bars. A further 22 members of the Confederation of Trade Unions of Public Employees (KESK) that had been detained in the end of May were released in November.

More than 80 people were detained in the course of operations carried out in eleven different cities in December. Criticism had been voiced in the media when 35 people had been shown queuing up hand-cuffed in front of the courthouse. Among them were Diyarbakır Sur District Mayor Abdullah Demirbaş, Hatip Dicle as spokesman of the Democratic Society Congress (DTK) and former Democratic Party (DEP) MP and Muharrem Erbey, Deputy President of the Diyarbakır Branch of the Human Rights Association (İHD).

Further operations were carried out in a total of eleven cities in February 2010. More than 100 people were taken into detention, most of them local executives of the BDP.

24 people who were arrested in the first wave of detentions applied to the European Court of Human Rights in the end of March. (EÜ/VK)