GFTU BGCM 2019 Minutes

To end my speech I would like to add that the country has gone backwards to

1993 in terms of its undemocratic oppressive militarist regime. If this despotic

oppressive regime cannot be stopped, history may well repeat itself and it is

possible that we will see another genocide, as with the Armenians in 1915.

Fascism will not be demolished. Mr President, dear friends, dear colleagues,

Fascism will not be demolished if we do not resist it, but if we unite our forces

and cooperate with each other, it is my strong believe that we can crush

Fascism as it has been crushed before in Spain, Germany and Italy, so why not

in Turkey? Thank you very much for listening to me. I would like to say if you

have any questions I am going to answer with my broken English, in fact with

my six month English. Thank you very much for listening. (Applause)

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much, Osman, for that very detailed and moving

speech telling us what the situation is. Please tell all of your friends, all of your

colleagues that the solidarity of the affiliates of the GFTU in the UK is with them

and send our best wishes and we will continue to lobby and do what we can to

help you. Thank you for coming. (Applause) Now it is time for Manuel Cortes,

EC member, to give a report on his visit to Turkey.

BRO MANUEL CORTES (Executive Committee): President, sisters, brothers, I think

I want to start off by saying a very big thank you to all of you for giving me the

privilege and the opportunity to go along in what was a very prestigious

delegation to Kurdistan and Turkey to find out what was going on on the

ground. Just looking at what Osman just said brought back some of the

memories of what we saw when we were there and he is absolutely correct

when he said that there is no democracy, no democracy whatsoever left in

Turkey. The reality is that very recently they had elections and because the

opposition beat the ruling party within Turkey’s biggest city, Istanbul, they have

now said that they are going to run the elections again, because they did not

get the result that they wanted and what Erdoğan has done is that he used the

excuse of an attempted coup to carry out a coup of his own. When you go into

Turkey now you will find very quickly that the jails are full of judges because

they would not pass sentences that Erdoğan wanted. The judges were actually

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