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ŞANLIURFA (DIHA)
- Handan Çağlayan, the Deputy Chairwoman-General of
the Democratic People's Party"DEHAP", has been
sentenced to 7 months in jail for speaking Kurdish
at the electoral campaign of her party before the 28
March local elections, while 6 months imprisonment
was imposed upon DEHAP Şanlıurfa Chairman Ahmet
Dağtekin for the same ground.
The Halfeti Court of General Criminal Jurisdiction
had brought the action against, for Handan Çağlayan
and Ahmet Dağtekin addressed in Kurdish at the time
of a DEHAP meeting held in Yukarı Göklü Town,
Halfeti, Şanlıurfa, on March 23, 2004; Çağlayan and
Dağtekin both have been imposed imprisonment on the
ground of having contravened with Article 58 of the
Law no; 298 of Political Parties, which bans to use
another language apart from Turkish in electoral
propaganda. Çağlayan was penalized with a fine of
YTL 513 and 7 month's imprisonment, while Dağtekin
was sentenced to 6 months in jail and a pecuniary
offence of YTL 440.
Only greeting was in Kurdish
Handan Çağlayan qualified the penalties as
anti-democratic, because in the meeting said she did
not speak Kurdish but just made a Kurdish sentence
to greet the women who do not know Turkish at all.
Stating she had wanted to establish a dialog with
women as a defender of woman human rights and in a
way beyond her political parties, Çağlayan said
"Most of those women do not Turkish, so before
started to address them I said just 'Xwûşkên bi
hurmet! Ez we slav dikim (Dear sisters, I am
greeting you)' to them and then continued with my
speech in Turkish"
The law is opposite to the EU criteria
DEHAP Şanlıurfa Chairman Ahmet Dağtekin also
characterized the penalties as anti-democratic,
adding that the law runs counter to the EU
criteria." There are more than 20, 000,000 Kurds in
Turkey. The mother tongue of all them is Kurdish.
A person or a political party that claims to be the
volition of a people must address to the people in
its own language. That is the only way to be able to
set a dialog. Again, if some policies are being
produced by means of what the people's expectation
is, politics should be done in the language of that
people; because, languages are the wealth of the
country.
These are all the reasons why the law [of Political
Parties] constitutes an obstacle on the way of
Turkey's becoming richer and more developed.
DIHA
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