Vedat Aydın

Kurdish rights activist

During the IHD's annual meeting in October 1990, Vedat Aydın delivered the first-ever public speech in Kurdish in Turkey, a language then forbidden. The Kurdish delegates had planned this move, but it caught many other attendees off guard. Numerous non-Kurdish delegates walked out in protest, yet Aydın continued his address, which Ahmet Zeki Okçuoglu translated into Turkish. Authorities detained and arrested him, holding him at Ulucanlar prison in Ankara.

Assassination

Following his release, Aydın was elected head of the People's Labor Party (HEP) in Diyarbakir. He was killed in July 1991. On 5 July, armed men who identified themselves as police officers came to his home and forced him into a car. Two days later, on 7 July, his body was found under a bridge just outside Diyarbakir Province, in the Maden district of Elazığ Province.

He was initially buried at Maden Municipality, but after an autopsy confirmed the body was his, he was reburied in Diyarbakir. His skull was fractured, his legs broken, and about 15 bullets had been fired into his body, with eight bullets recovered. No one was ever charged with Aydın's murder. At his funeral on 10 July in Diyarbakir, police fired live ammunition into a crowd of thousands of mourners.

Authorities claimed stones were thrown from the crowd, but eyewitnesses denied this. Between 7 and 13 people were killed, and up to 100 were injured. Protests erupted in the following days in Diyarbakir, Nusaybin, Lice, Uludere, and Bismil. No one was charged for the killings at the funeral.

On 4 December 1993, a delegation of DEP parliamentarians investigating Aydın's murder came under armed attack in Batman. The MP for Mardin, Mehmet Sincar, and the local party leader of Batman were killed; the MP for Batman, Nizamettin Toğuç, and three others were injured. The investigation into Aydın's murder continued, but in 2009, 18 years after his death, a court in Malatya decided to close the investigation due to lack of jurisdiction and returned the file to Diyarbakir.

Did You Know?

• His body was found under a bridge in the Maden district of Elazığ Province, just outside Diyarbakir Province, on 7 July 1991.
• At his funeral on 10 July 1991, police fired live ammunition into a crowd of thousands, killing between 7 and 13 people and injuring up to 100.