The new Turkey |
23-nov-20 |
Nov 22 2020 02:22 Gmt+3. |
The date is October 29, in the Duranlar (Awyan) village in the southeast’s Yüksekova, Hakkari. It’s around six in the afternoon. Şerali Dereli leaves his house to tend to his horses like he does every day. His health has not been good, so he barely goes outside for anything else. The mare and its young foal need walking every day. Every evening, Dereli takes them out and puts them back, at the same time every day. The barn is 50 metres from the house. On this October 29, bullets rain down on Şerali Dereli, and his mare, and his mare’s foal. They all die on the lands where they were born, by their home, in their own village. His son Ali Dereli told their story to the Kurdish news agency Mezopotamya:
Slander him they did. The Hakkari Governorate issued a statement days later, saying the incident happened during an operation against a large group of narcotraffickers. The Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) spoke about Şerali Dereli’s death in parliament. An argument broke out in the general session, where ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) deputy Cahit Özkan said the following, noting that Dereli had been a smuggler: “The individual was surveilled by anti-smuggling units on horseback, after he was spotted out in the country with the horses. He refused to answer to a warning, so the units intervened and it was seen that the person in question lost his life.” Pro-government media went further and made Dereli a drug mule. Sabah newspaper ran the headline “HDP support for drug mule” when HDP deputies attended Dereli’s wake. Without a crime scene investigation, or an investigation at all, isn’t it interesting how sure the governor, the deputy and the media were of what happened? This was not the first death in the Dereli family. In 1983, then-19-year old Abdülhalit Dereli, Şerali’s brother, was also killed by soldiers. If the soldiers who killed Abdülhalit had not been protected, if they were given the penalty they deserved, probably Abdülhalit’s little brother Şerali would not have died 37 years later. Impunity for killing Kurds has a long history in this country. Kurdish lives are robbed of their worth. Violence against the Kurd is legitimised. Deputies, the governor, the media, all work together to rationalise the killing of a Kurdish villager. Before the incident is investigated, before the way Şerali Dereli died is brought to light, they say he was smuggling, that he was a drug mule. They can say these things. Let’s say Dereli was a smuggler, where is the law that says smuggling is punished by death? There is also the important possibility that those who throw around such accusations against a man who was silenced forever in death have never thought of; maybe so the last modicum of conscience they have doesn’t wither away: Maybe Şerali Dereli was innocent. |
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