Turkish provincial mayor faces 486 years in prison for multi-lingual ideas

The mayor of Sur Municipality in Diyarbak?r, who recently faced investigation for putting up multi-lingual signboards, has decried what he calls the government’s “hypocritical attitude” toward the use of Kurdish in public services, Hürriyet Daily News reported.

“We face a very strange situation. When the Prime Minister [Recep Tayyip Erdo?an] speaks Kurdish on TRT 6 [the state-owned channel that broadcasts in Kurdish] they call it a revolutionary development. But when we put multi-lingual signboards around the city our move was considered as a crime. Interestingly, some acts that are legal for the government are illegal for us,” Sur Mayor Abdullah Demirba? told the HDN.

Maintaining his efforts to establish a multi-lingual municipality service since taking office in 2004, Demirba? has faced dozens of investigations on the grounds that he breached the equality principle of the constitution. He was dismissed from his post by a Council of State ruling in 2007 over his attempts to provide municipality services in Kurdish, Assyrian and English languages in addition to Turkish, charged with committing abuse of office.(...)