AKP to build moving police posts to patrol curfew areas

[Anthea]

Women in the city of Van, responding to the Turkish government’s proposal to build “mobile armored patrol posts” to police the Kurdistan region, said that the new policy was only a sign that the state was admitting defeat.

As a state of martial law continues in Kurdistan, one of the Turkish government’s latest projects is the “mobile armored patrol posts,” to be built in towns and neighborhoods that the government has declared to be under 24-hour curfew. According to Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, the proposed moving police stations will be deployed from the borders with Iraq and Iran as far as the districts of Uludere, Yüksekova, Beytüşşebap and Başkale. As the mobile posts are constructed at points of high elevation in the area, the AKP has also announced plans to send mine-scanning drones into areas that the state cannot enter.

Women in the area targeted for the new installations reacted against the installations, saying the Turkish state had declared war on its own citizens.

“This war is entirely a war against the people,” said Gülseren Kaya, one of the provincial directors for the Democratic Regions Party (DBP) in Van province.

“No matter how much they come up with curfews, the war they’re attempting to wage has come to nothing, and so they’re coming up with new projects,” said Gülseren. She noted that the state has also initiated a plan to turn certain local districts into provinces to facilitate military rule in those areas, in addition to militarizing the region.

She said that all of these measures “actually show just how much the army and the AKP government has lost. The AKP government is making these mobile armored patrol posts in order to capture the neighborhoods that they cannot enter.”

Nezahat Şükra, an activist with the Peace Mothers group in Van province, said that the people of the region would in no way accept the patrol posts.

“First they kill, then they use this excuse of ‘security’ to try to put up mobile patrol posts in the areas they want to capture,” said Nezahat. “But the Kurdish people have understood this and we do not accept it.

“What kind of security is this?” asked Nezahat, referring to the state’s killing of Kurdish residents and ongoing refusal to turn over the bodies of the dead to the families.

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