GFTU BGCM 2019 Minutes

will be hearing from our guest speaker and from Bro Manuel Cortes who led a

delegation to Turkey recently.

The Kurds remain the largest stateless community anywhere in the world.

They were pledged a homeland during the imperialist carve up of the Middle

East over a century ago and they were betrayed, not for the last time. The

failure of the Kurds to attain a nation state spread mainly across Iran, Iraq,

Syria and Turkey where 20 million Kurds now live, mainly in the south east of

the country. They have suffered long political oppression and cultural

oppression which has really escalated in Turkey over recent years, particularly

following the collapse of the peace talks between the Government and the

Kurdistan Workers Party, the PKK (more of that in a moment) in an attempt to

resolve the so-called Kurdish question. Political repression saw the banning of

Kurdish political parties and more recently the arrest and imprisonment of

proKurdish politicians from the People’s Democratic Party. Thousands have

been killed in the conflict with a million believed to be displaced in the south

east where the population live under military curfews and the humiliation of

military checkpoints.

Following the last BGCM where we were all privileged to hear some really

powerful and impassioned addresses regarding the Kurdish situation, in July

2017 we held a cultural festival at Quorn Grange to raise awareness and funds

towards the Freedom for Abdullah Ocalan – Peace in Kurdistan Campaign

which was established soon after the PKK’s leader’s abduction and

imprisonment in 1999. The short trial found him guilty of attempting to

overthrow the Government and sentenced him to death. Turkey abolished the

death penalty in 2002 as part of the plans for accession to the European Union

and under pressure from the national organisations his sentence was

commuted to life in prison without parole. He has remained in isolation as the

only prisoner ever since and denied access to visitors, including his family and

his legal team.

Their cultural history is a rich one and the Kurds have managed to maintain a

common culture and language over the centuries, a culture incorporating

poetry, music, language and a strong culture of story telling and folk tales and it

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