Kurdish activists

NATO summit Madrid

NATO has given the Turkish state the green light for genocide against the Kurds, after the deal struck between Turkey, Sweden and Finland, reports Peter Boyle.

Local government elections in Turkey will be on March 31. The Kurdish-led People's Democratic Party (HDP) is campaigning to win back municipalities whose HDP mayors were removed by the Turkish government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as part of a crackdown on the party.

Solidarity with the Kurdish freedom struggle was stepped up at an inspiring conference held in Melbourne over the June 30–July 1 weekend.

The conference, held at Victoria University (VU), discussed the bold experiment in radical democracy, feminism and ecology that is taking place in the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria (DFNS). Most importantly, the conference resolved: “It is a duty of supporters of the liberation struggle in northern Syria to make determined efforts to publicise its inspiring achievements and build practical solidarity with it”.

A Turkish court has handed down a two-year, nine-month and 22-day jail sentence to a Kurdish artist because of her painting of a Kurdish village being razed by Turkish security forces.

Zehra Dogan, an ethnic Kurd from Diyarbakir in south-eastern Turkey, was given the sentence by the Second High Criminal Court of Mardin province after having been arrested last July. The painting in question shows the destroyed cityscape of Nusaybin, with Turkish flags draped across blown-out buildings.

Protest against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Quito, Ecuador on February 4, 2016. Photo: Giran Özcan. Supporters of the Kurdish struggle took to the streets of Ecuador's capital, Quito, on February 4 to protest against Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who is in Ecuador on an official two-day visit. At the protest, one Erdoğan's bodyguards broke the nose of Ecuadorean member of parliament Diego Vintimilla.
At a protest outside the Turkish Consulate in Sydney on July 23, Kurdish activists and their supporters accused the Turkish government of complicity in the massacre in Suruc of 32 young socialists on their way to help rebuild Kobane, in the liberated area of Rojava in northern Syria.