Gendarmes in southeast Turkey verbally and physically assaulted lawyer Ahmet Atış for speaking in Kurdish with clients, the Mezopotamya news agency reported on Friday.
The incident took place on Wednesday at a gendarmerie station in Şanlıurfa where Atış was representing a group of textile workers detained for going on strike. After completing the questioning, he began conversing with his clients in Kurdish, to which a gendarme reacted, “I don’t understand, speak in Turkish.”
Atış reminded the officer of the legal grounds for meeting with his clients, which triggered the insults and physical attacks, the report said.
He obtained a hospital report documenting his injuries and has filed a criminal complaint against the perpetrators.
Atış is a member of the Association of Lawyers for Freedom (ÖHD), a group frequently targeted by the authorities for its advocacy for Kurdish civil and political rights.
A nation-state established on the idea of the singular prevalence of the Turkish identity, the Republic of Turkey was for a long time in denial about the existence of Kurds and their language as a minority.
Although the policies of denial were abandoned and restrictions on the use of the Kurdish language were relatively eased in the early 2000s amid Turkey’s progress in European Union accession reforms, the expression of Kurdish identity in contexts not approved of by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) still triggers detentions, mistreatment and prosecutions.
The human rights situation in the country’s predominantly Kurdish east and southeast significantly deteriorated following the breakdown in 2015 of peace talks between the state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), an insurgent group designated as a terrorist organization by Turkey and much of the international community.
