Source : Orsola Casagrande - Global Rights | 23 September 2011

As hundreds are taken into custody, now is the turn of BDP mayors
They have begun with party members, then they have continued to arrest party members but they also begun taking party executives into custody. Weeks on and they are still arresting both party members and executives but now they begun to detain mayors as well.
The Turkish state repression machine is like a bulldozer, crashing everything it finds on its way. That is BDP (Peace and Democracy Party) people.
It was said, threatened. It was written. And it is happening with no voice rising in protest from the 'democratic' Europe.
Today has been the turn of three BDP mayors. Namely, Ramazan Uysal (mayors of Şırnak), Resul Sadak (Idil mayor) and Emin Toğurlu (Silopi mayor). They have been taken into custody along with the president of BDP in Silopi, Bahattin Alkış.
The Kurdish politicians have been detained on suspected links with the Kurdish Communities Union (KCK). The KCK has become the leaf fig behind which the Turkish state attempts to hide the constant repression of BDP and Kurdish activists. "Suspected links with the KCK" is repeated like a mantra to justify the unjustifiable: the preventing, through incarceration - i.e. through taking freedom away from thousands of men and women - of a healthy, frank political discussion over the Kurdish question but not only. Indeed what the Turkish establishment wants to prevent is any kind of political discourse which dissents with the main stream AKP (Justice and Development Party) Islamic discourse and agenda.

Prime Minister Erdoğan and his government do not want to address, let aside to talk about, the Kurdish question, they do not want to talk about the country's real problems, economical, social and political alike. They do no want to talk about the new Constitution. Ultimately, they do not want to talk about people's needs.

So they resort to violence and repression. The Kurdish people - and the representatives they have freely chosen in an election - are the main receptor of this violence because they are at the forefront of a political struggle to forward a discourse on a new model for the society in Turkey. This is what scares the government: proposing a new, viable model for the society in all of its sections actually undermines the government's project in which there is no room for a new, viable way of living together within established geographic boundaries. So the Turkish state drop its axes on the Kurdish people. The visible effect of this being the thousands of politicians and activists arrested.

Would the West, and Europe in particular, stand assisting in silence to this suffocating the right to talk, propose, discuss, ultimately to make policy?