Kurdish party MP sentenced to 6 years in Turkey jail
A lawmaker from Turkey’s main pro-Kurdish party who was elected to parliament this month was sentenced Friday to six-and-a-half years in jail for membership of a “terrorist organisation,” local media said.
Lezgin Botan, a member of the People’s Democratic Party (HDP), was convicted along with a former HDP lawmaker and four members from a teachers’ union who all received similar sentences, the Dogan news agency said.
They were convicted of being members of the Kurdish Communities Union, which is linked to the PKK, the militant separatist Kurdistan Workers Party outlawed by Ankara. Two others arrested with the group in 2011 were acquitted.
The arrests were part of a nationwide dragnet on suspected Kurdish separatists and militants and led to the arrests of senior officials, journalists and lawyers.
Tensions eased after the government and PKK, which took up arms in 1984 demanding an independent Kurdish state, entered talks in 2012.
But a fragile two-year-old ceasefire fell apart in July, with the PKK resuming attacks on the security forces and the government hitting back with airstrikes and ground operations against the group’s bases in southeastern Turkey and northern Iraq.
Bolstered by his party’s overall majority in a November 1 election, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has kept up his “anti-terror” offensive on the group, while journalists and lawyers accused of ties to the PKK have been hit with a raft of charges.
Over 40,000 people have died since the PKK’s insurgency began. Over the years, the group has narrowed its demands to greater autonomy and cultural rights.
Anthea: all the people who died fighting for independence died for nothing
would my friends have fought and died if they had been told they were giving their lives for greater autonomy and more cultural rights?N O
They died so that their children, grandchildren and all those who follow, could live in a
FREE INDEPENDENT KURDISTAN
