JINHA

NEWS CENTER – Five professors, including Judith Butler, have signed a petition calling for the immediate end to the Turkish state’s attacks on its own Kurdish citizens.

Notable thinkers and academics Robert Hockett, Anna-Sara Malmgren, Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler and Joshua Cohen have signed a petition to U.S. President Barack Obama. The petition calls on Obama to publicly call for the immediate cessation of indiscriminate attacks on Kurdish towns in Turkey.

The petition, signed by around 1500 people so far, compares Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s violent blockades of Kurdish areas to Bashar al-Assad’s barrel bombings of his own citizens.

The Turkish state’s blockades “are causing avoidable and unacceptable civilian suffering, they are wrongful and illegal under domestic and international law, and—we fear—will only exacerbate existing tensions within Turkey, possibly pushing it towards full-scale civil war,” says the statement, which also notes that the AKP government has ruthlessly targeted those “in Turkey who explicitly seek diplomatic conflict-resolution” for imprisonment and assassination.

“We therefore respectfully request that you consider both publicly calling for and privately urging upon President Erdoğan: (a) the immediate cessation of the indiscriminate shelling by government forces of Kurdish neighborhoods in eastern and southeastern Anatolia, (b) the immediate lifting of the blockades –Orwellianly referred to as ‘curfews’– of those neighborhoods, and (c) the immediate opening of these same neighborhoods to journalists of all nationalities and political persuasions, who collectively still constitute the most effective form of ‘sunlight’ where exposing abuses of governmental power is concerned,” the statement says.

The petition is available in full at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/petition-on-behalf-of-turkeys-kurds

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