Turkey: A parliamentary question by a Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) MP regarding an event organised by the government-appointed trustee in the Kurdish-majority city of Diyarbakır (Amed) was handed back by the speaker of the Turkish parliament.

In the event in question, a bus belonging to the municipality of Giresun on the Black Sea drove through the neighbourhoods of Diyarbakır as part of an ‘off-road festival’ in May, with a picture of an armed man on the back, and words that read, ‘Giresun alone is enough to deal with you.’

The armed man was ‘Topal Osman’, a militia leader and one of the perpetrators of the Armenian and Pontic Greek genocides after the Balkan wars in the mid-1910s.

Diyarbakır’s trustee was appointed by the authorities in place of the elected mayor Selçuk Mızrakı who had been removed by the Turkish interior ministry in 2019 and arrested. The ‘off-road festival’ was jointly organised by the trustee of Diyarbakır and the mayor of Giresun.

In her parliamentary question to the ministry of the interior, Tosun said, “The people in Diyarbakır are saying that the appointed city and district trustees demonstrate discriminative and colonialist approaches in many of their actions,” and asked whether the ministry was aware of this.

The speaker of the Turkish parliament Mustafa Şentop stated that the question reflected her ‘personal opinion’, and that it was ‘not the kind of question to ask’.

Şentop went on to say that Tosun’s question could be asked once it had been revised.

Topal Osman: Revisited by Turkish ultra nationalists

Topal Osman, who served as the commander of the special bodyguard regiment of the founder of the Turkish Republic Mustafa Kemal, was killed in a clash in 1923 after being accused of instigating the murder of an MP.

On 9 June after the protests against the display of Topal Osman’s picture in Diyarbakır, Devlet Bahçeli, the leader of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), submitted a legislative proposal for the legal restoration of Topal Osman’s honour.

Bahçeli said in the introduction to his proposal that Topal Osman ‘lived like a great patriot all through his life and made unprecedented contributions to the independence struggle of the Turkish nation.’

Notably, Topal Osman has been referred to in the state media as a ‘hero of the Turkish war of independence’.