GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

ZINAR DEMENI: Thank you. A special thanks to the GFTU for inviting the Kurdish

MP and us to be here and I am also very happy that I will be taking part in organising the Kurdish Festival on 30 th July and I think that is going to give us a

further opportunity to not just hear about what is happening in Kurdistan, but

also enjoy some Kurdish food, music and culture as well, so I ask everyone if

they could make it please come and join us there.

Obviously I came to live in the UK in 1980 after one of the military coups. I arrived in the UK on 24 th December 1980 and I thought that things looked

pretty bad then. Then we came to see the things in the 1990s where 4,000

Kurdish villages were destroyed, thousands of people were killed and,

according to Turkish official figures, there were 17,000 arbitrary killings, so

people just disappeared, we do not know where they have gone and we still do

not know where they have gone. Then we moved on. We had a succession of

armed conflicts where Mr. Öcalan, the PKK, the founder of the Kurdish Political

Party who have initiated a peace process. Actually myself personally thought

this is going to be the end of the conflicts, so we are going to have finally some

peace in the region.

As our MP explained, with all the false promises Erdoğan made, when it came

to the stage people started not to believe him in what he was doing, they voted

for other political parties and they reduced his majority. He decided to have a

change of heart again, go back to where he was and start waging a new war,

trying to rally the nationalist vote behind him. The only way he thought he could

get an overall majority was to bring back terrorising people again, stop people

talking about the situation and so on.

I do not want to take too much of your time. People say, “What can we do?

How could we help?” I have worked in the UK for 36 years and I came back

1½ years ago fulltime trying to see how we could coordinate and trying to raise

awareness in the UK about the situation in Kurdistan, because it is an appalling

situation. If I say to you we had up to one million people made homeless last

year alone, nobody is going to believe it, but if you look at the United Nations

Human Rights Report issued only about six weeks ago they said half a million

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