The Spokesman of our Initiative and musician Şanar Yurdatapan and Prof. Dr. Baskın Oran made a criminal complaint against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The two names also filed lawsuits of moral indemnity, symbolically for 1 TL each.
In the speech he gave on January 28th, the President described 170 people, who expressed their demand to end the military operation against Afrin and for conflicts to be resolved through dialogue, “traitors,” “insolents,” “vulgars” and “so-called artists.” Erdoğan further stated that the letter written by the 170 intellectuals was a “hypocrisy,” “fraud,” “opinion clownery,” “human shielding the terrorists” and “complicity in separatist terrorist organization activities.”
Yurdatapan and Oran indicated that the speech of Erdoğan, targeting intellectuals who made a call for peace, involve hate speech. The two names further stated that with this speech, the President has committed the crime of “insult” and “incitement of people towards hatred and hostility.” Yurdatapan stated that the ‘existence of an open and close potential danger against public security’ immediately reveals itself with Erdoğan’s speech, saying, “Pro-AKP trolls* took action and threatened signatories of the letter. The comments under the petition campaign started on change.org website to denaturalize the 170 intellectuals is the concrete evidence of this.” “It is a public violation of freedom of expression and science for the President, who has the highest government authority, to denigrate artists and intellectuals expressing their opinions. Such freedoms are protected by the Constitution,” stated Oran.
* In Internet slang, a troll is a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting quarrels or upsetting people, by posting inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog) with the intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal, on-topic discussion.
For the statement made by Yurdatapan at the courthouse before their criminal complaint; https://goo.gl/SSHv5H
13.02.2018
bianet.org