US human rights report on Turkey reveals widespread abuses against Kurds
QAMISHLI, Syria (North Press) – The US Department of State human rights report on Turkey for 2022 reveals a litany of state-sponsored abuses, many directed against its Kurdish minority and others in areas it occupies in Syria.
The US report says that Turkey exhibits “significant” human rights abuses, including arbitrary killings, forced disappearance, torture, arbitrary arrest and detention, politically-motivated arrests, transnational reprisals, significant problems with judicial independence, support for Syrian groups that “perpetrated serious abuses”, severe restrictions on freedom of expression and press freedom, illegal refoulement of refugees, government targeting of ethnic groups, and more.
Since the attempted coup in 2016, the Turkish government has dismissed or suspended more than 60,000 police and military personnel, and over 4,000 judges and prosecutors, the report says. It has also closed more than 1,500 NGOs on “terror-related grounds.”
332,884 people have been detained and 101,000 arrested on charges of belonging to the Gulen movement, which the government blames for the coup attempt. 19,252 of them remain behind bars. At least 8,500 individuals are detained or imprisoned on suspicion of belonging to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a Kurdish militia which has fought a 40-year insurgency against Turkey’s government.
Ankara has also cracked down on journalists, particularly in Kurdish areas. In June, 22 media workers, 20 of them Kurds, were arbitrarily arrested in Diyarbakir, 16 of them were charged with membership in the PKK. “Nearly all private Kurdish-language newspapers, television channels, and radio stations remained closed on national security grounds under government decrees,” the US State Department writes.
Turkey remains a country deeply hostile to the press in general. The Media Law Studies Union, an NGO, followed 41 trials of 67 journalists last year, who received sentences totaling 299 years, including a life sentence.
The arrest campaigns have also disproportionally affected members of the People’s Democratic Party (HDP), a pro-Kurdish opposition party which has its stronghold in the southeast of the country.
According to the HDP, 5,000 of its members were arrested on politically-related charges. At the end of 2022, seven former parliamentarians and six co-mayors from the HDP remained in detention. Gulser Yildirim, a former HDP lawmaker, was held in prison in June without justification despite having completed her seven-and-a-half-year sentence.
Additionally, 54 of 65 elected HDP mayors have been suspended or not allowed to assume office since 2019. In its place, the government has sent presidential appointees to rule these cities and towns. 39 of the 54 HDP mayors were arrested.
In Jan. 2023, Turkish prosecutors submitted 40 summaries of proceedings to parliament requesting that parliamentary immunity be lifted for 28 lawmakers, 24 of which were from the HDP, including party co-chair Pervin Buldan.
Turkey is also accused of violating human rights in its conflicts abroad. The US State Department has evidence that Turkish military officers raped and sexually abused at least one Kurdish woman in Afrin region, northeast Syria. Cases such as these are widespread, according to local human rights activists.
The report furthermore says that the Turkish-backed armed opposition factions, also known as Syrian National Army (SNA), has committed systematic violations, including targeting Kurds and Yezidis, and civilians in general, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance, torture, sexual violence, expropriation of homes, looting, seizure of property, transfer of detainees to Turkey, use of child soldiers, and looting and desecrating religious sites. The report quotes an NGO assessment saying some of these abuses “were part of a systematic effort to enforce demographic change targeting Kurdish Syrians.”
On March 20, militants of Ahrar al-Sharqiya, a faction affiliated with the SNA, killed five Kurds and wounded others in Jindires, northwest Syria, for celebrating Newroz, a Kurdish national day.
The incident was followed by local and international angry reactions, calling for holding perpetrators accountable for the incident and removing the injustice in areas under the SNA factions’ control and demilitarize the region.
Thousands of Jindires and nearby villages poured took to the streets demanding perpetrators be held accountable and the expulsion of SNA factions from the region.