Human Rights Action: “Come and have tea with Kurds from Afrin, Mr. Gabriel!”

Human Rights Action: Friday, January 26, 2018 – from 11 am to 1 pm – in front of the Foreign Office, Werderscher Markt 1, 10117 Berlin

The Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) has invited Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel to have tea in front of the Foreign Office in Berlin. On Friday, the human rights organization will set up a table there – with tea sets and chairs – so that a group of Syrian Kurds will be able to talk to the German Foreign Minister in a similar atmosphere as the Turkish Foreign Minister during his meeting with Gabriel in Goslar on January 6. In the course of the meeting, the human rights activists want to urge Gabriel to do everything possible to put an end to the war Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is leading against the Kurdish region of Afrin in the north of Syria.

“We will also urge Gabriel to demand Turkey not to use “Leopard” tanks and weapons systems from Germany against the peaceful Kurdish regions in the neighboring country,” said Kamal Sido, the STP’s Middle East Correspondent. “In view of Turkey’s war of aggression against the Afrin region, Gabriel must revise his promise that the German arms company Rheinmetall will be allowed to modernize these tanks.”

Since January 20, the Afrin region is under attack by the Turkish army and by Turkish-backed radical Islamist militias and mercenaries from Syria and other countries. According to reports from the region, at least 35 civilians have already lost their lives – and 106 were injured. Although Afrin has been almost completely cut off from the outside world for several years (due to the Turkish border blockade in the north and the Islamist militias to the south), nearly one million people were able to lead a more or less normal life there. Around 500,000 civil war refugees have found shelter there, most of them from Aleppo.

Header Photo: SPD Hamburg via Flickr