Former Kurdish Parliamentarian Goes To Prison For Making A Call For Civil Disobedience

Mahmut Alınak, former parliamentarian for the Democracy Party (DEP), who was sent to prison for  four months and five days for calling people to organize civil disobedience acts, went to prison again.

Holding a press release in front of the Kars Justice Hall before he went to the prison, the former parliamentarian for Kars and Şırnak provinces in the eastern Turkey said, “The court gave me a chance to pay a fine for my prison sentence, but I did not accept it.”

“I will feel the cold handcuffs in the depths of my soul, but since freedom has a cost, I will pay this cost and accept these handcuffs around my wrists as a medal of honor.”

Alınak did not pay the fine, preferred the hundred day prison sentence

Preferring to go to prison rather than pay the fine, Alınak was sent to the Kars Prison. He will stay in prison for hundred days for the charges of “praising the crime” and “provoking others not to obey the laws.”

Punishment for the call of civil disobedience

Kurdish politician Mahmut Alınak had to stay in prison for fifty days until September 12 for proposing to name the streets and parks after the past revolutionary figures and leftist pro-Kurdish activists such as Deniz Gezmiş, Vedat Aydın and Musa Anter, and for protesting the prison conditions of Abdullah Öcalan, leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), who is in jail for life.

Alınak had been convicted one more time for announcing the “Don’t let the young people die, so mothers will not cry” campaign and calling people to disobedience in “The Priorities of Democracy” panel held by the Caucasus University Student Association on June 4, 2006.

Alınak had made the following argument in his  speech: “Think what would happen if we did not regiser our children…Imagine millions from Amed to Istanbul, from Dersim to Kars, to Iğdır, to Ardahan are on the streets. Who can hold back this huge power? …They will not go to courts, they will not send their children to schools, they will not register their names and they will not register their houses. What would happen? The system would go bankrupt. Civil revolution without fighting with the police, the military. Get ready for those days.”

No laptop computer in prison

Alınak filed a complaint against Mehmet Ali Şahin, Minister of Justice, and Ekrem Bakır, Vice Director of the Penitentiaries, for misconduct in office because of the refusal of the prison authorities to let him have a laptop computer to work on his book. (EÖ/TB)