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The tomb of Kurdish singer Ahmet Kaya desecrated in Père-Lachaise cemetery

2021-11-15T15:52:00.305Z


Died in 2000, this committed and very popular singer had to flee Turkey where it was not possible for him to sing in Kurdish.


The tomb of Ahmet Kaya, a folk singer from Kurdistan and very popular in the 1980s and 1990s in Turkey, was desecrated on Saturday, November 13.

In a video posted on Youtube, we see several elements of the degraded grave, such as the reconstruction of the singer's face, and the ornaments present on the grave.

A desecration denounced in a tweet from the deputy mayor of Paris Paul Simondon.

Alexandra Cordebard, mayor of the 10th arrondissement of Paris, also expressed her emotion, declaring that her

"thoughts are with the relatives of Ahmet Kaya, singer and human rights activist, exiled in Paris because of his commitments, and to our friends Kurds

.

Tackling a grave is intolerable,”

she added on her Twitter account.

This desecration comes three days before the 21st anniversary of the death of the singer, who died on November 16, 2000 in the capital.

A date far from trivial, as the latter will have marked his life and his work with his unfailing political commitment.

Censorship and forks

Throughout his career, Ahmet Kaya fiercely criticized the Turkish government led in the early 1990s by Süleyman Demirel. Communist activist and fervent defender of human rights, his songs remain controversial and regularly censored by the regime, which accuses him in particular of being a member of the PKK, the workers' party of Kurdistan. He is still a very popular singer, close at the time to a certain Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was then mayor of Istanbul.

His career changes with his visit to the ceremony of the Turkish magazine press association in February 1999. When receiving his award for best singer of the year, he announces that a song from his future album will be sung in Kurdish. .

Scandal in the room, boos and even throwing forks in his direction.

Under media and political pressure, Ahmet Kaya fled to Paris a few months later, before a trial which saw him be sentenced in absentia to three years in prison, for "separatist propaganda".

He died in November 2000 of a heart attack, but his work remains significant in recent Kurdish history.

Source: lefigaro

All life articles on 2021-11-15

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