Mothers of the soldiers and Kurdish-Turkish members of Parliament call for their immediate release

The Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) has been very disturbed by the news that the military prosecutor has taken up proceedings against eight Turkish soldiers who were abducted by PKK fighters in northern Iraq in October and released there on 4th November as the result of pressure from the regional government of the Iraqi federal state of Kurdistan. They are being charged with "leaving the country illegally without passports”. "This charge is absurd”, said Dr Kamal Sido, Near-east correspondent of the GfbV, "The Turkish soldiers had no choice but to go with their captors after they had been abducted.”

The eight Turkish soldiers are at present in the military prison of Van in South-east Anatolia. The military prosecutor is investigating the question as to whether they passed on information to the PKK during their captivity. The question is further being asked as to whether wrong behaviour led to their being captured. This offence alone leads in Turkey to a prison sentence of at least one year.

The Turkish-Kurdish members of Parliament, Aysel Tugluk, Osman Özcelik and Fatma Kurtulan, call, together with the mothers of the soldiers for their immediate release. Public opinion is heated on this question.

"The Turkish media are conducting a dreadful hate campaign against the eight soldiers and the Kurdish-Turkish members of Parliament who are calling for the release of the soldiers”, says Sido, describing the situation.

They are being charged with treason. Turkish politicians are also involved in this hate campaign. Thus the Turkish Deputy Prime-Minister, Statesminister and Ex-Minister of Justice, Cemil Cicek, declared in the media that as a Turkish citizen he did not accept that the soldiers "went away” with the terrorists. In such a situation a Turkish soldier must be prepared to die. The Chairperson of the left-nationalist workers’ party, Isci Partisi, Dogu Perinçek held it to be desirable that the soldiers should have come back dead. Then they could have been celebrated as martyrs.

The release of the eight soldiers had been mediated by the regional government of the Iraqi federal state of Kurdistan, which regarded the event as an act of humanity. The Iraqi President, Jalal Talabani and Massud Barsani, President of the Iraqi federal state of Kurdistan, had intervened personally, reported the GfbV representative in Iraqi Kurdistan, Aziz Hassan Aziz.