Turkish journalist and author Celal Başlangıç died Friday evening at the age of 68 from cancer at Cologne University Hospital, his relatives confirmed.
Celal Başlangıç who started his career in 1975 at the Ege Ekspres newspaper, joined the Cumhuriyet daily and became the head of the Adana bureau and the domestic politics section in the years following the September 12 military coup 1980.
In 1989, Başlangıç caused a sensation when he revealed that several Kurdish villagers in Cizre/Şırnak had been forced by Turkish soldiers to eat their feces. When Cumhuriyet refused to publish the article for fear of state revenge, Başlangıç threatened to resign. The newspaper then published Cizre’s torture case on its front page. His insistence that the public be informed of the reality of the war in Kurdistan paved the way for the punishment of those responsible. Years later, he wrote the following in a text published by Bianet: “This was certainly not the first incident in which Kurdish villagers were forced by security forces to eat feces. But it was the first time those responsible were punished for their actions – although it happened after a long process. Even though national and international courts had no doubt about the accuracy of our reporting, it could never be ignored in the corridors of the General Staff that I was considered a ‘traitor’.”.
In 1995, Celal Başlangıç was one of the co-founders of the Evrensel newspaper and a year later he co-founded the Radikal newspaper. He has written columns for T24, Gazete Duvar, Bianet and Haberdar and is the author of several books, including “Kanlı Bilmece” (Bloody enigma) about the war in Kurdistan. In the mid-2010s, he regularly visited the Kurdish provinces. “It’s about solidarity with the people”, did he declare. It was the era of curfews and military siege that followed the proclamation of self-government, which was a democratic alternative to “presidential system” totalitarian proposed by the AKP.
In 2019, Başlangıç was sentenced to fifteen months in prison for “terrorist propaganda” for having demonstrated his solidarity with the pro-Kurdish daily Özgür Gündem, banned by emergency decree in October 2016, by symbolically becoming the “editor-in-chief” by Ozgur Gundem. The journalist then lived in Cologne. Since 2017, he had created the exile television channel Artı TV and the online newspaper Artı Gerçek, for which he had already worked in Turkey. In 2021, he learned from German police that his name appeared on a “execution list” of more than fifty opponents of Erdoğan.
Source: Kurdistan-au-feminin.fr
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