Killing of Kurd in Turkey sparks discrimination accusations

The murder of a 20-year-old Kurdish man in Ankara has launched a wave of accusations of discrimination in Turkey over the mistreatment of the ethnic minority.

Barış Çakan was visiting a park with a friend in Ankara’s Etimesgut neighbourhood on Sunday night when he asked three men to turn down the volume of the music playing from their car during the evening call to prayer. The friend told police that an argument ensued and Çakan was stabbed in the heart and killed, according to a statement from the Ankara governor’s office on Monday. Three suspects were arrested.

Initial news reports quoted a family member as saying that Çakan had been attacked because he had been listening to Kurdish-language music. While Çakan’s father said in later interviews that the assault was not triggered by Kurdish music, the racial overtones of the killing have led to an outpouring of anger on social media, particuarly after a friend and another relative stepped forward on Tuesday to say the family had been pressured to cover up the reason for the fight.

Hundreds of messages of solidarity have appeared under the hashtag #BarisCakan, as well as comparisons with the killing of African American George Floyd at the hands of US police, which sparked the protests currently raging across the US over institutional racism.

“Those who plant the seeds of hatred and enmity in the public and those who ban even the discourse on peace, this is the result,” pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democracy party (HDP) official Meral Danış Beştaş said in a tweet, referring to the policies of the ruling Justice and Development party (AKP).

The HDP says 45 mayors out of a total of 65 municipalities that the party won in local elections in March 2019 have been removed from office to date, with at least 21 imprisoned over accusations of links to the outlawed militant Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK).

In reaction to Çakan’s death, Giran Ozcan, another HDP official, quoted Martin Luther King Jr with the words “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” referencing the killing of both Floyd and Iyad Halak, a Palestinian man with autism who was shot and killed by Israeli police in Jerusalem last week.

Comments from Interior Ministry spokesperson, İsmail Çataklı, who said that the crime was not racially motivated, and that focusing on the racial dynamic is the work of “provocateurs”, have also led to allegations of state hypocrisy over the treatment of Turkey’s Kurdish population.

Several high-level Turkish officials, including President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, have issued statements condemning racist violence in the US in the wake of Floyd’s killing.

Around one fifth of Turkey’s 80 million-strong population is Kurdish. Since the creation of the modern state in 1923 various Kurdish insurgent groups have fought for independence from Ankara: until the 1990s the language and many cultural practices were outlawed. In Turkey today, Kurds still face widespread discrimination.

The peace process between Erdoğan’s government and the PKK broke down by 2015, engulfing the south-east of the country in violence which has killed at least 4,869 people, according to data compiled by the International Crisis Group.

Last week, a library named after Kurdish intellectual Celadet Bedir Khan in the southeastern city of Siirt was demolished and Kurdish-language signage taken down and replaced with Turkish.