HDP says Turkey has destructed 13 cemeteries of fallen Kurdish fighters

Authorities "have broken gravestones, covered writings on them. They have banned families from visiting their loved ones' burial places," the pro-Kurdish party's MP Irgat said.

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region (Kurdistan 24) - Turkey's opposition Peoples' Democratic Party on Friday revealed that authorities have destructed at least 13 cemeteries where fallen Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) fighters were buried.

In a parliamentary motion by MP Mizgin Irgat of the Kurdish province of Bitlis, HDP said numerous graves, gravestones or whole cemeteries had come under attack or were destructed in the last two years by the military or police at the behest of Ankara-appointed governors.

Urging the Parliament to look into the matter, Irgat reminded that only last week in Bitlis the army destructed a cemetery comprised of the graves of 267 PKK fighters killed while waging a guerrilla warfare against the Turkish state for Kurdish rights and self-rule.

Remnants of the fighters buried in the Bitlis cemetery were transferred from the area under curfew to Istanbul's Forensic Institute.

She said since the collapse of the 2013-15 peace talks between President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's administration and the PKK, similar cases were also recorded in the provinces of Mus, Diyarbakir, Sirnak, Hakkari, Mardin and Agri.

Authorities "have broken gravestones, covered writings on them. They have banned families from visiting their loved ones' burial places by announcing the surrounding areas as military security zones," she explained.

Reminding of a mob's attack in September on a funeral ceremony in the Turkish capital of Ankara for the deceased mother of the imprisoned Deputy Co-chair of her party, Aysel Tugluk, Irgat said, violations on the right to have a grave and a respectful burial continued.

"In the entirety of human history, even in the most brutal wars, short ceasefires have been announced for the sole purpose of retrieving the fallen [so they can be buried]. The respect for the dead would not be ignored," Irgat stated.

"The state of affairs we are witnessing is one that is testing communal sensitivities. If there is no consideration for those sensitivities, then it will not be possible to talk of compromise and co-existence," she said.

Turkish army regularly bombs and destroys PKK fighters’ graves and cemeteries in Kurdish provinces, and targets them in the mountains of the Kurdistan Region in neighboring Iraq where the group is headquartered.

Prosecutors, meanwhile, have launched probes into numerous HDP lawmakers for attending funeral ceremonies for fighters killed in clashes with the military.

In September, troops acting under orders of an Ankara-appointed governor in Bingol demolished the grave of a volunteer with Kurdistan Region's Peshmerga force, Sait Curukkaya who was killed during an offensive to capture the then Islamic State-held Iraqi city of Mosul in late 2016.

Curukkaya's brother then penned an open letter to the Turkish President Erdogan to protest the act.

 

Editing by Sam A.