The deputy mayor of Istanbul’s Kucukcekmece district – which is led by main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) – has been suspended from his duty following an investigation related to a playground renewal in the region.
The investigation is about the colours and shapes on the rubber surfacing of the playground allegedly resembling the colours of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) flag: yellow, green and red.
Kemal Cebi, mayor of Kucukcekmece municipality describedthe incident as unfair and has urged for an end to this nonsense. He said “We cannot remove these colours from our lives just because the PKK uses these colours. Are we not going to use stars because there is a star in the PKK flag?”
Turkish state’s wage against the three colours: yellow, red andgreen is nothing new. Formerly the colours of the traffic lights in Kurdish provinces had been changed to yellow, red and blue, just to differ from the yellow, red and green combination.
And recently the media watchdog in Turkey fined a TV broadcaster, which published the video of the 25th anniversary of Evrensel newspaper, on the charge of “praising and encouraging terrorism, invigorating or justifying terrorist organisations” because of a girl holding a scarf with patterns of yellow, red and green in the video.
