By Charles Glass-Taki's Magazine17/08/2010
This is no time to be a journalist, especially if you happen to be a Kurd. Under assault from Turkey and Iran, Kurdish journalists are imprisoned, tortured and intimidated. An Iranian revolutionary court sentenced one Kurdish journalist, Adnan Hassanpour, to death last year for alleged espionage. The death penalty was also passed on his cousin, Abdolwahed Batimer, head of the environmentalist Green Mountain group. Their crime appears to have been granting an interview to the Voice of America, and evidence against them at the trial included such seditious objects as a Kurdish flag, videocassettes in the Kurdish language and photographs of them with their families in neighboring Iraqi Kurdistan. The cousins appealed their sentence twice, which finally resulted in a reduction of sentence to thirty-one years. By Iranian standards of injustice, which include the death penalty for minors and execution by stoning for convicted adulterers, the cousins fared better than most. However, journalists in the Kurdish regions of Iran are under warning to avoid certain subjects and withhold information reinforcing the case for Kurdish autonomy.
Turkey’s record on Kurds and Kurdish journalists is, if anything, worse than Iran’s. Apart from the old war against the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) that ended nearly twenty years ago with about 30,000 Kurds dead, the government has kept a close watch on its large Kurdish minority. While legal reforms led at last to toleration of the Kurdish language and a Kurdish television channel in 2009, only one Kurdish newspaper was permitted to publish. Its experiences have no doubt discouraged other contenders. (From the time of Moustafa Kemal Ataturk, the leader who saved Turkey from becoming a western colony after the First World War, Kurds were officially labeled “mountain Turks,” and their language was prohibited until the 1990s.) The first Kurdish paper allowed under the moderate liberalization of the language laws, Azadia Welat, has come in for exceptional government scrutiny and regular bannings. It has lost six editors in four years. They have either been imprisoned or placed in such fear of their lives that they left the country. One editor, Ozan Kilinc, received twenty-one years in prison for mentioning the imprisoned former leader of the PKK, Abdallah Ocalan, and for not using the word “martyr” to describe Turkish soldiers who died in Kurdistan. The latest editor to come under official sanction, Vedat Kursan, allegedly disseminated “terrorist propaganda” for which he received a total of 166 years behind bars. He’ll be 202 then, and Turkey will probably still be on the waiting list for European Union membership.
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Who Killed Kurdish Journalist Sardasht Osman?
By Charles Glass-Taki's Magazine17/08/2010 00:00:00
