By Kathryn Maureen Ryan
Impunity Watch, Middle East Desk

ISTANBUL, Turkey – A small but vocal minority of Kurds participating in the Occupy Gezi movement in Turkey since late May have been taking the opportunity to use the world’s attention on Turkey to raise awareness about the Turkish Government’s history of abuses against the Kurdish population.

Kurds make up roughly twenty percent of the Turkish population and are a large minority in many of the country’s major cities including Istanbul. The Kurdish population of Turkey is indigenous to the eastern and southeastern regions of the country, near the borders with Syria, Iraq and Iran. However, a large percentage of Kurds have fled their indigenous homeland into major Turkish cities in search of employment after Kurdish villages have been destroyed as a result of warfare and large scale infrastructure projects.

The Kurdish population in Turkey has faced decades of persecution from the government, which has launched systematic campaigns to suppress the Kurdish language and cultural expression. Most recently, thousands of Kurdish villagers have been displaced from their homeland as a result of infrastructure projects connected to the Southeastern Anatolia Project (The GAP Project) which is one of the largest hydroelectric infrastructure projects in the world.

The goal of the GAP project is to capitalize on Tigris and Euphrates headwaters which run though the highlands of Eastern Turkey in order to produce hydroelectric power for industrial development. The project involved the construction of 22 major dams which led to the displacement of several predominately Kurdish villages in the region; this inflamed the tensions between the Kurdish people and the government of Turkey.

Emre Elmekci, a Kurdish protester in his mid-twenties hopes that the Occupy Gezi movement will help the Turkish majority and the world understand the persecution and violence that the Kurdish population has faced at the hands of the Turkish population.  According the Elmekci, the violence that has been occurring in the streets of majorly Turkish cities over the past few weeks is “like the state violence that the Kurds have been facing for decades.”

The Turkish government’s violent reaction to the Occupy Gezi movement, a movement that was a reaction to the Turkish government’s design to destroy Istanbul’s last public green space in order to serve economic interests by constructing a commercial shopping center, is similar to the government suppression and displacement of the Kurdish minority in order to support industrial interests in Turkey.

For more information, please see:

Al Jazeera – Protesters #OccupyGezi to Save Istanbul Park – 14 June 2013

Al Jazeera – Protesting Kurds Finding Solidarity in Gezi – 12 June 2013

Kurd Net – Turkey’s GAP Project is an Ethnic & Cultural Genocide against Kurds – 31 March 2010

Kurdish Herald – Turkey’s GAP and Its Impact in the Region – September 2009