International Viewpoint reproduces a Sosyalist Demokrasi İçin Yeniyol article that puts the recent arrests of Ragip Zarakolu and Busra Ersanli into context:
It is an old reflex of Turkey’s state tradition to collectively imprison political figures who express the desires of the Kurdish people. Collective arrests started in 1959 with the imprisonment of forty-nine Kurdish intellectuals and turned into collective executions in the 1990s. Now—during the tenure of the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP – Justice and Development Party) of Prime Minister Erdoğan—they have taken the form of sensational mass detentions through the so-called KCK operations under which almost 8000 people have been arrested since 2009. Continue reading “Turkish government attempts to own the Kurds”