26 November – 10 December 2024
Our calendar this week features the coordinated raids on homes and on the Kurdish Community Centre in Haringey, north London at 2am on 27 November – involving counter-terror units, closure of airspace, helicopters, dogs and a military-style occupation, which left the community angry and apprehensive. The closure of the centre and the road for over a week, with residents forced to seek police permission to go to their homes; the occupation of the area by hundreds of riot police in armoured vans to contain a protest vigil and hunger strike, reports of brutality and violence towards children and elders, provoked a series of demonstrations, joined by owners of local shops and restaurants shocked at the invasion of their community.
Six people arrested in the raids were charged on 9 December with membership of the Kurdistan Workers Party or PKK, a proscribed organisation, and a seventh was released without charge after being held for 11 days. The PKK is banned in the UK, although the campaign to free its leader Abdullah Öcalan, imprisoned in Turkey since 1999, has the support of trade unions and parliamentarians among others in the UK. While the Belgian courts recognise the PKK as a legitimate party to an internal armed conflict, the UK’s Terrorism Act 2000 makes no distinction between liberation struggles and terrorism. But whether or not the PKK’s proscription is justified – and there must be room, in a free society, to question its logic, to avoid a dangerous closed circuit of thought – the Met police accepted that there was no imminent threat to public safety. Why, then, such colossal, trauma-inflicting expenditure of police resources?
Such political policing is not a purely local affair. For the Kurdish community, it is significant that the police operation here happened days after 200 Kurdish activists were arrested in Turkey, where Kurdish parliamentary parties are systematically harassed. Turkish forces and their proxies inflict gross human rights abuses on Kurds in Turkey and Syria, and the toppling of the Bashar al-Assad regime makes the future for Syria’s Kurds even less secure, even as European governments freeze asylum claims. Diplomatic and trade relations with Turkey dictate silence over these abuses – and perhaps require the criminalisation of a peaceful community in the UK.
The Turkish state’s attacks on Kurds in Syria, and western complicity in them, are to be examined by a Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal in Brussels on 5-6 February 2025. Meanwhile, in the cause of racial justice, we support the demand for an end to the criminalisation of the Kurdish community.