Month: May 2022

Erdogan is the real terrorist!.. Nudem got 19 years jail for singing in Kurdish… Imprisoned Kurdish singer requests release due to multiple health problems

By Stockholm Center for Freedom May 27, 2022 via thefreeonline

Imprisoned Kurdish singer Nudem Durak has called on Turkish authorities to release her from prison, saying she suffers from multiple illnesses and wants to sing as a free woman once again, the Bianet news website reported.

Turkish authorities have increasingly restricted the use of Kurdish in recent years. Hate crimes against Kurds for speaking their language have also increased.

Terrorist President Erdogan, always uses the “terrorist PKK” label, demanding that innocent protestors exiled to Sweden and other European countries be extradited to face trial and life imprisonment (like Nudem who got the “terrorist PKK” label and 19 years jail for singing in Kurdish). Erdogan demands the extradition to Turkey as part of an agreement to sign NATO membership permit, and to demonstrate again that his racist, macho, imperialist, fascism works. Meanwhile Turkish people suffer over 70% inflation as a direct result of Erdogan’s economic edicts favouring the corrupted Elite, like him and his family. ..see: Prominent Swedes call on gov’t not to hand over dissidents to Erdogan…

Durak suffers from osteoporosis and Graves’ disease, an immune system disorder that attacks the thyroid glands. The disease can also affect the quality of the voice. Speaking to her family on the phone, Durak said she was afraid of losing her voice and wanted to sing to the public one last time.

“I’m afraid I won’t be able to sing again. I’m frequently breathless, and if I’m released on time I can seek proper medical care. Then I’ll have a chance of keeping this sickness under control,” she said. “In prison, this isn’t possible. I don’t want to lose my voice.”

Durak also asked other singers to show their solidarity. “Artists need to support each other,” she said. “They can visit artists in prison and exert efforts to make their stories heard.”

Durak was arrested in 2015 and sentenced to 19 years in prison on terrorism charges for performing songs in her native Kurdish language.

Durak told Al Jazeera before her imprisonment that “singing in Kurdish is my heritage from my ancestors. … My only crime is creating art.”

She was jailed for ‘membership in a terrorist organization’, the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a standard charge applied to thousands, and ‘spreading terrorist propaganda’ after singing at an event to mark Nevruz, the Kurdish new year.

Former Pink Floyd musician Roger Waters in February urged for Durak’s release.

Durak’s acoustic guitar was broken by guards during a cell inspection in 2017.

Waters sent his black Martin acoustic guitar, signed by rock legends including Peter Gabriel, Robert Plant, Pete Townsend, Noel Gallagher and Mark Knopfler, to Durak to highlight her plight.

“We have an absolute responsibility to support her and the hundreds of thousands of others who continue to suffer her fate with false imprisonment all over the world, not least in the United States and the United Kingdom,” he said.

The Free Nudem Durak campaign can be found on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

In November 2016, as part of Peter Gabriel‘s Voice Project, Pussy Riot‘s Nadya Tolokonnikova highlighted Nûdem Durak’s situation as someone ‘imprisoned for art’.^[8][9]

In 2020, an international campaign calling for her release was started by Angela Davis, Noam Chomsky, Ken Loach, David Graeber, Peter Gabriel and Roger Waters, among other well known artists.

Kurds in Turkey are often pressured not to speak their native language. Authorities frequently claim that people speaking in Kurdish are actually chanting slogans in support of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is still classed as terrorist by the US for political expediency reasons.

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insert: Most articles on Turkey’s nazi style racist repression are still tagged with the sentence: “The PKK has been leading an armed insurgency against Turkey’s security forces since the ’80s in a campaign that has claimed the lives of some 20,000 people”.

This despite a long legalization campaign and despite abandoning separatism and changing its ideology to municipal anarchism and holding two long unilateral ceasefires.

The label “PKK terrorist” is applied indiscriminately with zero proofs like singing or speaking in Kurdish. Tens of thousands of prisoners spend years in torture conditions just awaiting trial and long absurd ‘exemplary’ sentences.

The ceasefires worked because they were planned and endorsed by the leader and philosopher Ocalan, still imprisoned in isolation without trial after all these years.

The second ceasefire was broken by Erdogan himself who launched a military blitz campaign, destroying Kurdish cities like Cizre and Nusaybin in Turkey, when Kurdish parties threatened to hold the balance of power.

Turkish authorities have increasingly restricted the use of Kurdish in recent years. Hate crimes against Kurds for speaking their language have also increased. All Kurdish language media suppressed, etc..

Prohibitions against the use of Kurdish in Turkey go back many years. Kurdish language, clothing, folklore, and names had been banned since 1937. It is estimated that there are up to 20 million ethnic Kurds in Turkey, although it is illegal to count them.

The words “Kurds,” “Kurdistan” and “Kurdish” were among those officially prohibited. After a military coup in 1980, speaking Kurdish was officially forbidden even in private life.

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Erdogan already jails hundreds for criticizing him on line.. He is already one of the world’s greatest liars, presenting his regime as innocent while jailing hundreds of thousands of innocents, invading occupying and ethnically cleansing his neighbours, banning the Kurdish language, even jailing people for singing in it, promoting ISIS and al Qaeda terrorists and converting them into his own mercenaries, subjecting his populatioin to 70% inflation to protect his elite, etc etc etc

One of the most commonly-made objections to Western liberal democracies passing censorship laws is that tyrants and dictators will then cite them as justification for their own, much more draconian censorship laws.

That is exactly what is happening in Turkey, with President Erdoğan and his nationalist allies in the Nationalist Movement Party proposing a new law that will criminalise spreading ‘fake news’ and ‘misinformation’ online – by which they mean, of course, anything criticising the Government of President Erdoğan. Ahval News has more.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ruling party and his nationalist allies presented legislation to parliament introducing jail sentences for persons spreading so-called fake news on the internet.

In December, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan labelled social media as one of the main threats to democracy, saying his Government would criminalise spreading fake news and disinformation online.

The digital censorship law foresees jail sentences of between one and three years for anyone who is deemed to have publicly disseminated false information regarding national security, public order, or general public health that creates anxiety, fear, or panic among the population or disturbs public peace, according to local media including the Diken news website.

Erdoğan’s Government is seeking to tighten its grip on the media and throttle dissent, a process that has accelerated since the introduction of a full presidential system of government in the summer of 2018.

The governing Justice and Development Party (AKP), which is acting with the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), has said that the law would be similar to legislation and regulations in Germany, France and the United States.

In Germany, provisions do not block access to social media and do not include criminal sanctions other than fines, Yaman Akdeniz, a professor of law at Istanbul Bilgi University, said in an analysis on May 19th for Article 19, an organisation promoting freedom of expression. In France, the law only targets election misinformation rather than criminalising disinformation per se, while U.S. measures are aimed at countering foreign propaganda and disinformation in particular with regards to elections, he said.

Turkey ranks 149th of 180 countries for media freedom, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said in an annual report at the start of May. Authoritarianism was gaining ground in Turkey, threatening media pluralism, and all possible means were used to undermine critics, RSF said.

Worth reading in full.

Stop Press: This is a powerful argument against the U.K. Government passing an internet censorship law. But instead of defending the Online Safety Bill against these and other criticisms, Nadine Dorries has posted a video of herself rapping about it on TikTok.

By Toby Young  /  28 May 2022 • 13.00

  Posted on May 24, 2022 by Chiapas Support Committee via thefreeonline Leave a Comment at original

By: Raúl Zibechi

With his usual lucidity, William I. Robinson wonders if the worldwide wave of protests and mobilizations will be capable of confronting global capitalism (https://bit.ly/3MjvBsl). In effect, there has been an endless chain of protests and popular uprisings since the 2008 crisis. He recalls that in the years before the pandemic there were more than 100 large protests that brought down 30 governments.

He mentions the gigantic mobilization in the United States after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, which he defines as: “an anti-racist uprising that brought more than 25 million people, mostly young people, into the streets of hundreds of cities across the country, the largest mass protest in the history of the United States.”

In Latin America the uprisings and revolts in Ecuador, Chile, Nicaragua and especially Colombia, had an extension, duration and depth rarely seen on this continent. The Colombian protest paralyzed the country for three months, showed impressive levels of popular creativity (such as the 25 resistance points in Cali) and ways of articulation between peoples, in the street, below, absolutely unprecedented.

Robinson recalls that the dominant classes pushed the cycle of mobilization back at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the ‘70s, “through capitalist globalization and the neoliberal counter-revolution.” That was in the north, because in the global south they did it with pure bullets and massacres.

Continue reading “Zibechi: the limits of protest as a form of struggle”

“In the Dark Nights there is always the warmth of the fire!”

2022/05/27 by Giannis Michailidis on darknights via the freeonline

After 8.5 years in prison, after all these arbitrary actions against me, I decided to put an end to my 11 years of suffering, by putting a stop to the practice of pre-trial detention, or the additional punishment of escape through legal loopholes.

After 5 more months of pre-trial detention, I start a hunger strike for my release. This choice, with the deep motivation of the much desired freedom, I intend to support it with the same consistency that I have supported my choices so far and for which I am being persecuted.

“Woe to those who will accept prison as a condition of life, and from the brightest sunlight, the smallest ray” – The rallying cry of the Alikarnassos prison uprising

For 11 years I have experienced state vengeance against choices in line with my values and ideas.

The difficult journey, from which I choose to share some blatant vengeful acts of arbitrariness against me, began in the distant 2011, when an arrest warrant was issued against me for the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire case, for which I was eventually acquitted as there was not the slightest connection between me and the charge against me.

It was the incrimination of a relationship of solidarity with wanted anarchists that put me in their place when they were arrested.

After 2 years of being on the run, I too am now walking through the heavy doors of prison, as the existence of a warrant that entails a decade of incarceration has led to certain choices and consequent mistakes.

The comrades who were arrested at the time in the bank robbery in Velvento, Kozani, were tortured by the police, which is common, and then the Ministry of Public Order published photos of our swollen faces, provoking a public reaction. Of course, no police officer was accused of this by the blind Greek justice system.

Continue reading “Greece: Giannis Michailidis – I Announce a hunger strike for my release”