“You don’t have to be a Kurd to defend the Kurds against injustices”, is in the habit of declaring Ömer Gergerlioglu, 55, inexhaustible defender of human rights in Turkey. Himself Turkish, rather conservative, he defended both veiled women banned from entering universities and the civil service in the 1990s, as well as radical left revolutionaries on hunger strike.
A target for the authorities
The criticisms of this ex-president of the conservative human rights association Mazlum-Der (2007-2009) quickly make it clear a target for the authorities.
In 2017, by presidential decree, he was dismissed from his post as pulmonologist in a public hospital and removed from the public service.
Sensitive to the issue of cultural and democratic rights of the Kurds, in 2018 he was elected deputy of the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP), which also brings together the left.
Also read. In Turkey, an offensive against the pro-Kurdish party
Sentenced, since, to two and a half years in prison for “terrorist propaganda”, for having relayed a simple press article on Twitter, he was stripped of his parliamentary immunity Wednesday, March 17, at the time when opened a lawsuit to dissolve the HDP.
“I do not recognize this illegal and unjust decision, I will not leave Parliament until the Constitutional Court has ruled on my case”, he then declared, reached by phone.
Dislodge from parliament in pajamas
On Sunday morning March 21, as he left his Assembly office to go to the toilet to do his ablution before prayer, the deputy, father of three children, was arrested and placed in police custody, before being arrested. be released a few hours later.
The goal was to dislodge him from Parliament. But the images of this slayer of injustices, arrested in pajamas during his ablutions, make people cringe, including in circles close to power.
– .
