A protest at Sydney Town Hall on May 16 called on the US President Joe Biden to break from the reactionary policies of the previous Donald Trump administration and stop supporting Turkey's massacre of Kurds.
Gule Rose, co-chair of the Democratic Kurdish Community Centre (NSW), the protest organisers, said that after Biden’s phone call with Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on April 23, the Turkish army launched an invasion into Iraqi territory with air and ground attacks on the Metine, Zap and Avashin areas in northern Iraq (Southern Kurdistan).
“The US and the European Union are implicated in Turkey’s state terrorism, through supporting the Turkish government’s implementation of a border regime on the lands of minority populations, such as the Kurds,” she said.
“These inhumane attacks have been normalised over several decades — they have led to consistent and violent instability in the region. With US and EU support, the Turkish state uses the Syrian and Iraqi airspace as it wishes, invades the lands of its neighbours and commits inhumane acts and violations outside its borders.”
The Trump administration had approved the Erdoğan government’s invasion of Rojava, Shengal, Makhmur and the whole of SouthernKurdistan and now the Biden administration is doing the same.
When US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Matthew Palmar visited Ankara in 2018, he announced that the US would offer a US$12 million bounty for information on the location of three senior Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) members Cemîl Bayik, Mirad Qarayîlan and Duran Kalkan.
On April 14, the US Ambassador to Turkey, David Satterfield, affirmed this bounty.
The US, European Union and Australia still list the PKK as a “terrorist” organisation even though it is clear that the Turkish state and the jihadi militia groups it supports in the region are the real terrorists.
“Calling politicians fighting for the freedom and well-being of the Kurdish people ‘terrorists’ and providing financial rewards for their murder is an immoral incentive against human dignity. This incentive supports the Turkish state’s war crimes and human rights violations inside and outside the country,” Rose said.
A representative of the Tamil Council of Australia, Johnny Dennis, also addressed the rally and expressed solidarity with the Kurdish liberation struggle.