Tim Ireland/AP/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.Standing outside the BBC headquarters in London, thousands of Kurds demonstrated in early March to ‘break the silence in the media’. They claimed there was a massacre happening in south-east Turkey. Demonstrators told me that the [international] media keeps quiet about it, and that Turkey is not held properly to account.
They were referring to the resumed decades-long conflict between the Turkish government and the outlawed Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK). Since June 2015, hundreds of thousands of Kurds have been displaced, hundreds of civilians killed, and entire neighbourhoods levelled to ground, as was the case in Nusaybin, a city in Mardin province. The destruction in Nusaybin can only be compared to those seen in war-torn cities in neighbouring Syria. This devastation continues as I write this article.
Meanwhile, in late May the Turkish parliament approved a bill to strip MPs of their immunity from prosecution. It is said to affect all but four of the 59 MPs from the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party or HDP. The charges against them are mainly related to terrorism.
