Turkish provincial mayor faces 486 years in prison for multi-lingual ideas

PanARMENIAN.Net - The mayor of Sur Municipality in Diyarbakır, who recently faced investigation for putting up multi-lingual signboards, has decried what he calls the government’s “hypocritical attitude” toward the use of Kurdish in public services, Hürriyet Daily News reported.

“We face a very strange situation. When the Prime Minister [Recep Tayyip Erdoğan] speaks Kurdish on TRT 6 [the state-owned channel that broadcasts in Kurdish] they call it a revolutionary development. But when we put multi-lingual signboards around the city our move was considered as a crime. Interestingly, some acts that are legal for the government are illegal for us,” Sur Mayor Abdullah Demirbaş told the HDN.

Maintaining his efforts to establish a multi-lingual municipality service since taking office in 2004, Demirbaş has faced dozens of investigations on the grounds that he breached the equality principle of the constitution. He was dismissed from his post by a Council of State ruling in 2007 over his attempts to provide municipality services in Kurdish, Assyrian and English languages in addition to Turkish, charged with committing abuse of office. A Diyarbakır court later acquitted the multi-lingual services of Sur municipality.

After being re-elected in 2009, Demirtaş remained under detention for five months, for alleged links with Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK). He was released due to health problems in 2010.

Demirbaş said they had conducted a survey in the Sur district, which confirmed that 72 percent in the area spoke Kurdish, 24 percent Turkish, 4 percent Arabic and 3 percent Armenian, Syriac or Zazaki.

“We did not offer multi-lingual services for Kurds. I offer services both in my mother tongue and another language that our people speak. So when we launched Kurdish language courses, we did the same for Armenian and Syriac,” he said.

“Language is a very basic right of a human-being. If a legitimate right is not assured legally, we have to fulfill it no matter whether it is a crime or not,” Demirbaş said.

Demirbaş said there are 74 ongoing prosecutions against him, most of them for multi-lingual municipal services, and that 486 years in total prison sentences are being sought as part of those probes.