DTP Members Forced To Walk The 70 Km To Their Opening

Hamit Geylani, the Democratic Society Party (DTP)deputy for Hakkari, an eastern Turkey province where the Iranian and Iraqi borders meet, told bianet how they had to cover the 70 km distance for the opening DTP’s Derecik branch office in 13,5 hours. The eight hours of the trip was made on foot.

The reason for the forced walk was military’s decision not to allow any vehicles in the direction of their destination for security reasons. In addition to Geylani, Van deputy Özdal Üçer and the mayors of Hakkari and Yüksekova were among the 700 DTP members who went to the opening.

Geylani summarized what had happened in following sentences: “They told us that they had received intelligence about a bomb attack. They said they had received orders to stop all the vehicular traffic. We said this was not the way to provide security. If there had been a security problem, we would not have gone, either. However, there were vehicles coming from the opposite direction, one after another. In other words, there was no problem.”

Since they could not get to their destination using their vehicles, the group members decided to walk the rest of the distance to Derecik, with the military vehicles in front of them.

When they got closer to Derecik, this time they were told, says Geylani, that only the two deputies could go. “We refused it. We said we had come with the people and we would have gone with the people. We finally reached Derecik at 12 at night, on vehicles provided from Derecik. Today (September 2), we did our opening and came back without problems.”

“Political obstacle”

Geylani said that after he had talked with Minister of the Interior Beşir Atalay, the Hakkari governor had called him to tell that it was the soldiers who had taken the security measures.

“It is obvious that this was a political obstacle.”      

Geylani said that they had been preventing opening of a DTP branch in Derecik, where close to half of the population consists of the village guards, a paramiliter groups employed by the military.

“Hakkari is one of the provinces where the DTP is the strongest. Therefore, it is not possible that there will be locality in Hakkari where the DTP will not be able to set up an organization. They have been preventing our initiatives for a long time. I called the Şemdinli district administrator and the Hakkari governor, reminding them that this was their right.

It was bombed in the weekend

“Derecik is a place without a shopping quarter. We rented a place for our branch, but later the inhabitants were provoked to attack our new place. In order to protect the neighborhood inhabitants, our friends rented another place. When the opening day was finally known, the other place was bombed. I went to see what happened. It was also burned all the way down.”

“At last, we had a great opening. We emphasized that everyone needed peace and democracy.” (TK/TB)