A court in the southern province of Antalya issued a ban on the distribution and sale of the book titled “Yıkılacak Duvarlar” (The Walls to Come Down) written by the former Co-Chair of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), Figen Yüksekdağ. Also, the issues of the book will be removed from stores and destroyed, according the judgment.
The judgeship deemed a poem about the 2015 conflict in the country’s Kurdish-majority regions “terrorist propaganda.” Also, the issues of the book will be removed from stores and destroyed, according the judgment.
The court defined the lines in a chapter of the book, titled “My Cloudy Head”, in which Yüksekdağ depicted the self-government resistance in Kurdistan as a crime. The lines said: “Humanity is in pain on the edge of nothingness, while the basements are burning, set on fire by darkness, and the babies in deserted houses are being shot in the head.”
The Antalya 6th Criminal Court of Peace claimed that members of the “terrorist organization”, meaning the PKK, were praised with the line “babies in deserted houses.”
Figen Yüksekdağ is the co-founder of the Socialist Party of the Oppressed (Ezilenlerin Sosyalist Partisi, ESP) and was its chair until September 2014. After resigning from office, she joined the HDP. In the same year, the ESP joined the HDP, which acts as an umbrella party for several small parties. At the second HDP congress, Figen Yüksekdağ was elected HDP’s co-chair on 22 June 2014.
Together with the other co-chair, Selahattin Demirtaş, and numerous other HDP deputies, she was arrested on 4 November 2016 at the instigation of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Since then, she has been held in custody in the Kandıra Maximum Security Prison.
The Ceylan Publishing House, which published the book, tweeted, “Our publishing house collective will make poems and novels of revolution and our theoretical roadmaps to meet with the readers under any condition!”
Source: Bianet and ANF