THE BATTLE AGAINST BAYDEMIR

"You might as well stand and fight because if you run, you will only die tired."
~ Vern Jocque.

The battle against Osman Baydemir continues, but today he provided a list to prove the Ankara regime's discrimination against Amed. From Bianet:

Baydemir relisted the evidence of "negative discrimination" that he had presented to the Prime Minsterial Office in August 2005:

*We have been waiting for the solid waste project for a year. We prepared a project according to EU standards and criteria. It should have been in third place among all projects, but was put in eighth place. Thus, it was not accepted into the 2007-2009 programme.
Five files on municipal companies have not been taken to cabinet to be approved.

*We aimed to use an area of around 670,000 square metres for the city. Although there was provision for green space, the project was rejected by the Treasury and the land was not alloted to us.

*We moved the Wood Market out of the city and were forced to buy land for the complex. Normally, municipalities are given land for such projects, but unfortunately we had to pay.

*The Tigris Valley Project has become a concrete, applicable product, but the State Planning Agency has not approved it.

*Despite our insistence, the Regional Development Agency was not founded in Diyarbakir.

Baydemir has promised to send an updated version of the report to all members of parliament.

But Baydemir had more proof of the discrimination of the Ankara central government against the Kurdish-dominated municipalities, as outlined in a letter to the EU, dated March 2007:

The Southeast Anatolia Region is one of the two socio-economically most underdeveloped regions of Turkey, which are heavily populated by Kurdish citizens. Population of the cities such as Diyarbakir and Batman has almost tripled due to the protracted situation of conflict related to the Kurdish problem, and urban life and services in most of the provinces located in the region have been paralyzed.

[ . . . ]

Turkey's excessively centralist governmental structure, most of whom do not have political representation in the national parliament due to the 10% national election bar, can express their democratic demands and participate in decision-making processes in and through the municipalities. However, the legal and administrative pressures over the municipalities in the region have recently increased significantly. Especially the municipalities who are members of the Democratic Society Party have been subjected to countless investigations, court cases and penalties. As basic constituent elements of local democracy of the region, our municipalities have been put into a dysfunctional situation due to such practices of the central government.

Now, of course, there are Kurds and pro-Kurdish Turks in the TBMM whose voices will be heard, but that is the only difference between today and March, when Baydemir wrote his letter.

More details on the discrimination of Ankara against the Kurdish-dominated municipalities can be found in the report that accompanied Osman Baydemir's letter to the EU. The letter and the report provide a rebuttal to Erdoğan's words yesterday, after an investigation was opened against Baydemir:

Erdoğan responded to Baydemir yesterday during his party's parliamentary group meeting. “No one can dare abuse our people in a certain town. We have never applied discrimination among our citizens,” the prime minister said. He said their three red lines were ethnic, regional and religious nationalism. “The AKP will not let this society's fault lines be broken,” he said.

AKP's entire record for the last four years is nothing but one continuous exercise in discrimination against the Kurdish people. The discrimination continues in the legal action that is still ongoing against Kurdish singer, Ferhat Tunc:

At a concert in Alanya (district of Antalya, southern Turkey) on 22 July last year, singer Ferhat Tunc had said, "Just as every soldier who dies in this country is counted as a child of this country, so every guerrilla who is killed is a child of this country. My heart burns for every dead soldier, my heart bleeds for every dead guerrilla."

Tunc is being tried under Article 7/2 of the Anti-Terrorism Law for this comment, and is first due in court on 4 October at the Izmir 10th Heavy Penal Court.

In addition, the Malatya Public Prosecution has begun an investigation into Tunc for "spreading propaganda for the Maoist Communist Party (MKP)". AT a concert on 12 August 2006, he had dedicated a song to "the 17". The fact that members of the audience chanted "Dersim [the old name for Tunceli] is proud of you" has been interpreted as proof for his crime.

As for the description of "Maoist," it's a Turkish propaganda ploy that's already been hacked here.

It's clear that the Ankara regime has turned its back on the Kurds.