Ankara-Turkey: Turkish High Court has sentenced 15 Kurd children to three to five year’s imprisonment on charges of hurling stones at police officers and chanting slogans in support of Kurdish national leader Abdullah Ocalan during a protest in the Kurdish province of Mersin.
These minors, whose ages range between 13 and 17, were arrested recently for participating in protests against the imprisonment of the Kurdish national leader who has been held in a solitary confinement for the last 11 years, and also in the support of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
The Kurdistan Worker Party (PKK) was founded in 1973 as the result of the continuous and systematic oppressions and the denial of the Kurdish nation by the occupying powers of Kurdistan. The PKK took up arm in 1984 since all the possible political and diplomatic means applied for 11 years in between 1973-84 proved exhausted. The PKK however declared its first unilateral ceasefire in 1993 since it believed the arm struggle hit its targets. Since 1993 to date the PKK has declared unilateral ceasefires in 6 different occasions and called upon Ankara to solve the Kurdish problem in a peaceful democratic procedure.
Following the initial comment of Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan that ‘’whether men, women or children, the security forces will react with disproportionate force’’, several amendments were made to the country’s anti-terror law, it is possible to charges children as terrorists and put them away for up to 50 years in jail. There are currently 2,622 minors serving time in Turkish prisons on the charge of terrorism.
In 23 of April 2009, an anti-terror police attacked and beat one of our children to death, the policeman was not punished:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEMuwkETXuU
In 2008, a policeman broke the arm of a Kurdish child in front of the cameras during the Kurdish festival Newroz:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UT9Gk3tkGsk