GFTU BGCM 2019 Minutes

was this which we wanted to reflect and celebrate on the day. As I recall, the

weather was not awfully kind to us, but we had a fantastic turnout. The festival

consisted of workshops, documentaries, music, fantastic music, wonderful food

and some very, very powerful guest speakers. As I say, a little more of those

later on. The importance of poetry, music, art, song, dance within the heritage

of any peoples is absolutely critical. If you destroy the culture, if you destroy

the history, you airbrush a whole community out of the annuls of history and I

think we have seen across a number of repressed nations, repressed peoples

that it is through the arts, through music, through culture that they manage to

retain their identity.

As I said, there were some brilliant, brilliant short films, some fantastic

interaction and it was really well supported by the Kurdish community and by

the wider community around the East Midlands. We had some incredible guest

speakers. We had Simon Dubbins of Unite, the International Director of the

Freedom for Ocalan Campaign. We had Reimar Heider who is the

spokesperson of the International Initiative Freedom for Ocalan – Peace in

Kurdistan who speaks powerfully and brilliantly in his third language, probably

more so than most of us speak in English, but he has also translated several

books on Abdullah Ocalan and they are all worth checking out. We had

Stephen Smelley, Deputy Convenor at Unison in Scotland. Importantly, we had

Dilek Ocalan, the niece of Abdullah Ocalan, who gave a really powerful

address to all those assembled and there is a slight poignancy to that, because

less than eight months later in March 2018 she was sentenced to two years

and six months in prison for spreading terror propaganda during a speech she

gave at a funeral. As I have said, we will have other speakers.

We have got a particularly powerful speaker who is going to talk about the

current situation, but, if I may move to other international activities, in October

we attended the CEFTUS gala dinner. That is the Centre for Turkish Studies

which provides an open platform for issues regarding Turkey and the region

and brings together Turkish, Kurdish and Turkish Cypriot communities of the

UK. We took a delegation there and, again, there were some powerful

speakers and some good interactions.

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