Saturday 31 July 2021
A Racist Crime?
Kurdish family is killed in Turkey
Attackers break into a house in Konya and kill seven members of a Kurdish family. While human rights activists agree that it is a racist crime, the government in Ankara vehemently denies it and points to a longstanding family feud.
In Turkey, an allegedly racially motivated, fatal attack on a Kurdish family causes horror. Armed attackers broke into the family’s home near Konya city on Friday, killing seven people and attempting to set the house on fire. Human rights activists spoke of a racist crime. The government rejected this portrayal as “provocation” and spoke of a longstanding hostility between two families.
Members of the Dedeoglu family were attacked and seriously injured in May. A few days ago, one of the family members who had now been killed had told the news website “Gazete Duvar” that neighbors had threatened the family and said they would “not allow Kurds to live here”. The entire family feared for their lives, especially since the police and judiciary did not take action against the attackers at the time.
Contrasting representations
The family’s lawyer, Abdurrahman Karabulut, told Arti TV that it was an “absolutely racist attack”. The authorities are “partly responsible for what happened”. The vice-chairman of the Turkish Human Rights Association, Eren Keskin, wrote on Twitter that she had been informed of the threats against the family: “The youngest member of the family told me: ‘We are very scared’.”
However, according to the Turkish Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu, a long-standing hostility between two families was behind the crime. Calling the murders a racist act was “a provocation,” he told reporters. “This attack has nothing to do with the Turkish-Kurdish question.” Establishing such a connection is “just as dangerous as the attack itself”.
Land dispute or hatred of Kurds?
For the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP), however, the murders fit the pattern: “In Konya we saw a terrible example of the racist attacks that have been going on for some time,” said HDP co-chair Mithat Sancar. He made the “hateful and provocative” discourse of the authorities responsible for “this massacre”.
A week and a half ago, a Kurdish farmer in the Konya region in Central Anatolia was killed by attackers who, according to witnesses, had threatened him that Kurds were not wanted in the village. The prefecture of Konya had rejected a racist background and spoke of a dispute over cattle and land.
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