İbrahim Gökçek, a member of the revolutionary folk music Grup Yorum who has been incarcerated in Silivri Prison has changed his ongoing hunger strike to death fast
İbrahim Gökçek, a member of the revolutionary folk music Grup Yorum who has been incarcerated in Silivri Prison has changed his ongoing hunger strike to death fast.
Communicating through his lawyer, İbrahim Gökçek who had started the hunger strike 200 days earlier on demanding justice and freedom, the Grup Yorum member stated his hunger strike had now turned into a death fast. His lawyer said İbrahim Gökçek had lost much weight and looked frail but was in high spirits. Gökçek also communicated that he will not stop until his demands for justice are taken into consideration.
The Turkish government has been on a war path with the independent musicians, artists, journalists and academicians but especially with the Grup Yorum who sing folk songs of struggle for freedom. The musicians favor human rights, minority rights and the right of minorities living in Turkey, especially of the Kurds, to be able to speak freely their own native language and express their art and music. Minorities do not enjoy such freedoms in Turkey as many have been lynched for speaking their mother tongue on the streets with rampant nationalism fed by the current AKP government.
The government of AKP led by the president Erdoğan does not allow any demonstration, or demand for human rights or minority rights or any other request for freedoms to be displayed publicly.
Grup Yorum’s members are in prison with fake charges or for the so-called “Terrorist propaganda”, a catch-all charge to silence any dissent in Turkey. The group’s music teaching workshop classes have been raided and destroyed by the Turkish police numerous times and their instruments and furniture wrecked by the same.
Sendika.Org News (M.B.)