11 October 2015
The South African Communist Party (SACP) condemns in strongest terms possible the systemic suppression of the Kurds and mass killings of people in Turkey. Yesterday, at least 97 people were killed and many others injured in a bombing in the Turkish capital, Ankara. The victims were among the people who had gathered for a peace march. The SACP expresses its sincere condolences to all the families that have lost their loved ones and wishes all those who were injured speedy and full recovery.
The SACP further expresses revolutionary solidarity with the Kurdish people.
The Kurds have suffered from oppression for a very long time, including a ban on their language and cultural assimilation under successive Turkish regimes. The suffering imposed on the Kurds by Turkey and several other countries in that Middle East region is not dissimilar to the sufferings experienced by Africans in South Africa under successive colonial and apartheid regimes.
This apartheid-type social, economic and political suppression of the people of Kurdistan by Turkey is the root cause of the problem of the bombing that took place yesterday. The Turkish government must be held accountable for yesterday's mass murder and the rest of the other murders committed by Turkish authorities in the history of the oppression of the Kurdish people. Between 1937 and 1938 approximately 70 000 people, mostly Kurds, were killed and thousands were forced to flee into exile in what many scholars characterised as a part of the Turkification of the Kurds, their land, basic wealth and resources.
What the Kurds need is freedom, including democratic decision-making and control of their own destiny in their entire land that has been partitioned between different countries - Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria - NOT WAR!!
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