Turkey Waging ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ Campaign Against Kurds

nrttv – media  2016-06-28 – People’s Democratic Party (HDP) Co-chair Figen Yuksekdag said on Sunday (June 26) the Turkish government is carrying out a campaign of “ethnic cleansing” against ethnic Kurds in the country’s southeast. Yuksekdag spoke on the sidelines of a panel in Italy and said thousands of people have been forced to leave their homes due to military operations in the mainly-Kurdish southeast, Turkish Hurriyet Daily News reported.

“An ethnic cleansing war is being conducted against the Kurdish people,” she said. “Lots of deaths and exiles have taken place; 600,000 Kurds have been forced to migrate from the lands they had been living in. But Kurds haven’t abandoned their lands.”

The HDP co-chair further said the Turkish army has used heavy arms and weapons in the provinces where the government has kept a siege on various towns.

A two-year ceasefire that Turks and Kurds had hoped would bring an end to a three-decade conflict between Ankara and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) collapsed in July.

Turkey’s Kurdish southeast, considered by Kurds to be the northern region of a greater Kurdistan, has been plagued by on-going violence and curfews since a two-year ceasefire collapsed over the summer.

The HDP’s other Co-chair Selahattin Demirtas said on April 20 that the Turkish government has committed war crimes by killing civilians in the southeast.

“Everyone responsible for this massacre will absolutely be tried one day. They need to know they cannot escape this. The president continues to give the same orders (such as) shelling civilian areas by the armed forces, which is a direct violation of the Geneva Convention and a crime against humanity,” he said. www.mesop.de