About Osman Baydemir: Osman Baydemir is a Kurdish politician, lawyer and human rights activist in Turkey. He is the current mayor of his home town of Diyarbak?r and member of the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP).
I have had it up to here with the prosecutions, the government's attitude, the judiciary, the media's stance and the majority of Turks who view the Kurdish people's justified cause through a nationalist lens.
I am at a crossroads; I have always been against armed opposition... I have chosen civil disobedience. But I will apologize to my people if there are funerals coming out of prisons. I will criticize myself and I won't be the mayor of Diyarbakir.
In primary school, every day and especially on Fridays, I was supposed to say, 'I am Turkish, and I am righteous and hardworking,' But all those things did not actually turn us into Turks. This system is somehow creating fake personalities.
All of my life I have stayed away from violence and the instruments of violence, and have seen a legal, democratic struggle as the only means to achieve change.
In Turkey, we have lived almost everything that could be lived; war and torture... The war concept was consumed to its limits. But there is only one way we have not tried: negotiations, peace, and talking.
