Terrorism-accused Kurdish actor aims for fresh break in France
Kurdish documentary maker Aram Ikram Tastekin, one of thousands of Turkish citizens who fled to Europe to escape purges in his country, remembers a brief moment when Kurds were free to speak their minds. "We felt so good because the fighting had stopped and everyone could talk," said the 29-year-old actor, speaking in Paris, on the eve of Friday's visit by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Turkey's Kurdish Spring, as it was dubbed, began in 2013 when Turkey and Kurdish rebels agreed to a ceasefire, but the deal came to an abrupt end in mid-2015. As the rebels resumed their three-decade campaign of attacks, Erdogan launched a major offensive to try to flush them out of the country's southeast. Tastekin, a well-known figure in the majority-Kurdish city Diyarbakir, was on the ground to witness some of the worst fighting between the army and supporters of the banned Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) -- labelled a terror group by Turkey, the US and EU. As a Kurd who refused to perform his military service on conscience grounds, he observed and filmed bloody clashes in December 2015 before being arrested and held for four days. He was released without charge but from then on, he says, he was a marked man. That feeling only intensified after he released a documentary about the fighting and received a letter informing him he was under investigation for "terrorist propaganda". "They told me I was showing the army in a bad light and making propaganda for the PKK," the soft-spoken thespian, who sports a beard and mop of black curls, told AFP at a centre for artists in exile. "I told them the only propaganda I do is of my own ideas!" After a botched July 2016 coup blamed on loyalists of Erdogan's arch-nemesis, US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, the crackdown on government opponents, intellectuals and artists intensified. For Tastekin, the worst blow came when dozens of mayors from the pro-Kurdish People's Democratic Party (HDP) -- whose co-leader Selahattin Demirtas is in jail -- were arrested on charges of "terrorist" links and several Kurdish cultural centres shut down. Tastekin was suspended from his job as a drama teacher in Diyarbakir's pro-HDP Lice municipality, along with most of the staff. Two months later, when the authorities published the names of those who had been fired, his name topped the list. - Shunned - The dismissal and the investigation made him toxic in the eyes of other employers, including a school that had previously offered him a well-paid job. "They said: 'We're sorry but we cannot work with you,'" he said. His sister, a teacher in Diyarbakir, also lost her job in the mass purge of tens of thousands of academics, judges, prosecutors and military personnel accused of links to Gulen or the PKK. In December, Tastekin -- who faces a lengthy jail sentence if charged and convicted of terrorist propaganda -- travelled to Paris on a month-long cultural exchange. With life back in Turkey looking increasingly grim he hopes to stay in France to study and work on a Kurdish-language musical. But he already misses home and longs for a day when Turkey will be "really democratic". "In Turkey the government always says 'We're one people, one flag'. Always one, one, one. But there are many cultures and religions in Turkey, not just Turks. "There are also Kurds, Arabs and Armenians, and they also have rights."
