Kurds in Turkey face growing hostility

Last week at the Istanbul Jazz Festival on July 15, a crowd of concertgoers booed and jeered the singer Aynur Dogan offstage for performing Kurdish songs.

While some of the audience sang the Turkish national anthem to drive the singer offstage and shouted at her to sing Turkish-language songs, other audience members showed their support by cheering her name and applauding. She left the stage as the crowd became louder.

The incident happened just one day after clashes between PKK (Kurdistan Worker’s Party) and Turkish soldiers killed 13 people.

Some concertgoers were dismayed to see the display of anti-Kurdish sentiment, though the artist herself notes that concert organizers invited her there to perform Kurdish songs.

“Fascism is everywhere,” said writer Bağış Erten, who was at the concert. “There are people who direct the anger they feel at the PKK toward all Kurdish people,” said another attendee, echoing the view that the crowd’s anger was a response to violent clashes between Turkish soldiers and PKK fighters.

The incident was yet another incident revealing deep social tension between so-called “White Turks”—historically wealthy and more Westernized, with access to better education—and minority cultural and ethnic groups in Turkey, particularly Kurds.

Violent attacks on the Kurdish minority have been escalating since the armed clash between separatists and Turkish soldiers on July 14. Three hundred people reportedly attacked the headquarters of a prominent pro-Kurdish political party’s headquarters in Istanbul, while simultaneously an armed mob of 500 attacked a group of Kurdish workers a thousand kilometres away.

Recently, to protest against state-sanctioned Imams, for example, some ethnic Kurds have been praying in the streets outside of mosques on Fridays, particularly in the city of Diyarbakir in southeastern Turkey. This act of civil disobedience is made in support of the Kurdish BDP Party, Kurds’ right to use their own language in state-funded mosques, and integration into state-funded mosques, among other civil rights.

Moreover, some Kurds participate in such demonstrations in support of Abdullah Öcalan, founder of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) and political prisoner. The PKK was involved in the leadership of an armed uprising to establish an autonomous Kurdish state, and remains on several countries’ lists of terrorist organizations.

Aynur Dogan is not the first Turkish musician caught in a socio-political conflict. In 1999 another popular singer, Ahmet Kaya, was publicly attacked for attempting to record and publish a Kurdish-language song. Other musicians and celebrities hurled tableware at Kaya while he delivered an acceptance speech for receiving a an award for his music. He left Turkey after a series of death threats and died in exile.

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In this video, the singer Aynur Dogan leave the stage amid cheers and boos from the crowd. While a minority of the audience voiced their support for her performance, the jeers became overwhelmingly loud, and Aynur was forced off the stage.