For years, Turkey has been trying to put a stop to the Vigil for Öcalan that is held every day in Strasbourg opposite the Council of Europe. Their official diplomats have exhausted all legal routes, and now it seems that they are resorting to teenage hooliganism. At least that is the widely accepted explanation of what took place yesterday, and also last week.
A week ago, a group of young Turks came to the vigil and vandalised signs and placards. Yesterday, Turkish teenagers arrived with sticks and – to cries of ‘Allahu Akbar” – set upon the Kurds who defended the vigil – as shown in this video.
Police were called and people were detained – four Kurds and around ten Turks. An older Kurdish man who tried to calm the situation was hospitalised.
This appears to be another example of the long-established pattern of Turkish young men and boys being encouraged to attack Kurds with the aim of provoking a response that could result in the Kurds getting into trouble with the authorities. We saw similar provocations at the foreign ballot boxes for the Turkish election last year, and more recently at Newroz in Belgium, but those were more general. The attacks in Strasbourg specifically target an important Kurdish political action.
The Grey Wolves, the fascist youth organisation attached to Turkey’s Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) is one of the biggest far-right organisations in Europe, and the MHP is a close partner of President Erdoğan’s AKP. Many Turkish politicians are happy to be seen making the Grey Wolf sign. The organisation is officially banned in France, but is still publicly and increasingly active, and similar ideology and methods exist beyond official structures. Violent anti-Kurdish racism has become normalised in Turkey – most recently as part of an Islamised Turkish nationalism, despite the fact that the vast majority of Kurds are Muslims.
A public statement issued by the Conseil Démocratique Kurde en France (CDK-F) observes. “These repeated attacks reveal a deliberate desire by the Turkish state to transpose its repression and threats towards Kurds demonstrating peacefully in Europe. The intention of the Turkish state is obvious: to sow chaos around this permanent vigil in order to criminalise it and push the Ministry of the Interior and the Bas-Rhin prefecture to ban this legal demonstration.”
Those behind these attacks will have been encouraged by recent moves by the French government that have demonstrated little concern for Kurdish rights, including the deportations of three young Kurds to prison in Turkey.
The Turkish Consulate, Turkey’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, and visiting Turkish politicians have all tried to get the vigil banned, and twice in the past they appeared to have succeeded, but the vigil organisers appealed to the courts and the French judges ruled that the vigil was protected by rights of freedom of speech and assembly.
The vigil is held outside the Council of Europe because the Council exists to defend human rights, democracy, and the rule of law. It is there to remind the Council of their duty to protect Öcalan’s human rights – to remind them that a member of the Council of Europe should not be allowed to prevent a prisoner from meeting with their lawyers and family nor to hold them incommunicado for over three years – and the existence of the vigil is protected by human rights too. It is those rights that the Turkish government and their indoctrinated teenagers want to attack.