Turkey pop stars sing for Kurdish child killed by army

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region (Kurdistan24) – Turkey’s two best-known musical luminaries Tarkan Tevetoglu and Sezen Aksu released a duet on Friday in memory of the Kurdish child Ceylan Onkol who in 2009 was killed by an army mortar in Diyarbakir.

Hundreds of radio stations across Turkey played the duo’s song “Ceylan” simultaneously at 11:00 a.m.

Kurdistan24’s Ankara bureau said the song is from a new album by the German-born Turkish superstar Tarkan and Aksu, a songwriter who composed the lyrics and the music.

The killing of Ceylan which happened on Sep. 28, 2009, in the Speni village of Diyarbakir’s northern Lice district initially found little attention in Turkey’s national media.

According to Ceylan’s mother, Saliha, a mortar shell from a nearby Turkish army base killed her 12-year-old daughter while herding the family’s livestock.

Two weeks later, as the opposition media and columnists pressed for answers from the government, a brigadier general from the General Staff denied any military involvement.

Instead, he pointed fingers at the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), also active in the area.

At a press conference, the general accused the reports on Ceylan’s death of being a part of a “concerted, asymmetric, comprehensive propaganda warfare” against the Turkish armed forces.

Judicial authorities failed to make progress in the case for years as Ceylan’s family launched a suit against the state.

In January 2015, a local court in Diyarbakir declared itself unwilling to pursue a lawsuit against the Turkish state by Ceylan’s family.

The court still ruled the state must pay the family 28,000 Turkish liras, an equivalent of USD $12,000 at the time, but it rejected a demand for moral compensation.

Editing by Karzan Sulaivany