Human Rights Advocate in Turkey: Denial Is the Continuation of the Genocide and Is Getting more and more Aggressive (EXCLUSIVE)

• 07.16.2017, 13:11
•  Region,  World,  Interview

armenianweekly.com

"Armedia" IAA presents an exclusive interview with a human rights advocate, a feminist, a member of the Committee Against Racism and Discrimination of the Human Rights Association of Turkey (Istanbul branch), Ayşe Günaysu on the human rights situation in Turkey.

- How would you assess the situation in Turkey after the Constitutional referendum in terms of freedoms and human rights?

- There is absolutely no democracy, no freedom, no human rights in Turkey since the declaration of State of Emergency. After the constitutional referendum the AKP government escalated the reign of terror, continuing to issue Executive Decrees – a practice of by-passing the legislative power, the parliament -  whereby hundreds of thousands of teachers, academics, health workers and other civil servants are laid off, to ban peaceful demonstrations and meetings, to jail journalists, and political party activists, among other gross human right violations. The situation deteriorates every day. The security forces’ most recent unimaginable, completely lawless, totally arbitrary move was the police raid on a meeting of prominent human rights organisations’ representatives and their detention on July 5, 2017. Öztürk Türkdoğan, the Chair of the Human Rights Association, rightly called what they did as “kidnapping, not detention”. The reason he called the police’s practice “kidnapping” is well described in the “Information Note on Human Rights Defenders Held in Custody and Activities They Engaged in”, issued by the Citizens’ Assembly, whose representative was among the detainees. Here are some excerpts from the Information Note:

• The police informed no one about the custody of human rights defenders which took place around 10:00 a.m. and did not let them speak to their relatives and lawyers. The official custody report misleadingly records the time as 14:30. It was revealed on the evening of July 5 by coincidence that they had been taken into custody.
• On Thursday,  July 6, after 30 hours of having been taken into custody, they were finally permitted to notify their relatives about the situation. It was announced that towards midnight they were sent in groups of two to different police stations on the Anatolian side, though exactly where they were held was not revealed.
• During the raid the police did not follow a proper procedure to determine the content (images) of devices such as computers and mobile phones which they seized
• Due to a restriction of access to the case file, lawyers were unable to obtain verbal or written information in police stations about the accusations against their clients and were only able to learn that it was a terrorism investigation from the reports the police prepared recording their visits.
• The custody period was defined as 7 days that started by 14:30 on July 5 according to official records (and has been extended for a further 7 days on July 11).
• There is still a restriction on the investigation file. Hence, it is unclear upon what accusations and evidence the investigation is based and on what grounds the human rights defenders were taken into custody.

- Do you feel any change of policy towards minorities?

- Yes, there is a change for the worse. State policies for the non-Muslim communities (we don’t call them “minorities”) have always been discriminative and oppressive since the foundation of the Turkish Republic, aiming to get rid of them by way of all sorts of intimidation. However, after the referendum important steps were taken to undermine their very existence. One very important example is the policy towards Assyrian properties. On June 23, Agos reported: “Inquiries by the Mor Gabriel Monastery Foundation [in Midyat, Mardin, the Assyrian’s historical Tur Abdin region] revealed that dozens of churches and monasteries had been transferred to the Treasury first and then allocated to the Presidency for Religious Affairs, known as the Diyanet, in Turkish. And the cemeteries have been transferred to the Metropolitan Municipality of Mardin.” The Governor’s Office afterwards revoked its decision to turn over the right to use the churches and monasteries to the Diyanet, but the crucial point remains: Assyrians still have not recovered their properties’ ownership. If Assyrian Genocide, Sayfo in Assyrian, had not been committed there would be more than one million Assyrians in Tur Abdin today, whereas they are only around 2 thousand now, and they are deprived of the ownership of their monasteries, churches, cemeteries which have been the property of Assyrians for centuries, and some of which are monuments dating back thousands of years, even before Christianity. The court cases opened by the Mor GabrielMonastery Foundation are still ongoing.

Recently the prospective amendments to the Turkish Grand National Assembly Regulations constitute another important step towards further worsening of government’s policies in relation to non-Muslim communities in Turkey.

- There are discussions in the Turkish parliament to adopt a law to punish those MPs, who will use the words Armenian Genocide and Kurdistan. What is your opinion in this regard? Is there a possibility that such a law will be adopted?

- Amendments have been proposed by the government and the ultra-nationalist MHP (Nationalist Movement Party) which include penalising the word “Genocide”. This is a drastic backwards move, as the unwritten ban on the word Genocide had been gradually undermined in the course of time in the past ten or twenty years. The word was started to be used in late 1990s publicly both in meetings and the opposition media. Now a dramatic reversal of the process is unravelling in this area too. Denial is the continuation of the Genocide and denialism is getting more and more powerful, more aggressive and more relentless. The planned ban on the word in the parliament means that the ongoing violation of the freedom of speech has reached its highest level, i.e. in the parliament. In other words the lawmakers themselves will be deprived of freedom of speech! And yes, this proposal will likely be adopted, as the present rulers of Turkey have demonstrated that they are ready to cross all thresholds, to go beyond all limits, and to violate all international human rights norms and standards.