Vandalism of Kurdish traffic signs continues with new attack in Diyarbakır

Vandals have defaced Kurdish traffic signs in Turkey’s Kurdish-majority province of Diyarbakır. The incident came days after a high schooler admitted to painting over the signs in the eastern Van province with nationalist slogans.

Monday July 29 2024 02:46 pm

Duvar English

An unidentified group on July 29 defaced pedestrian warnings in the southeastern Diyarbakır province.

Warnings "Hêdî" (Slow) and "Peşî Peya" (Pedestrians First) had been written on walkways with police supervision, in line with the Kurdish majority population in the province.

A car, a pickup truck, and a Ranger vehicle approached the area near the Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality, where traffic lights and a pedestrian crossing were located at around 3:20 a.m., According to Mesopotamia Agency's (MA) report.

A person with a gun got out of the Ranger vehicle and started controlling traffic. While two of the four people who exited the pickup truck kept watch, the other two defaced the Kurdish warning signs with brushes and paint.

Similarly, these warning signs were defaced in the Ofis neighborhood of Yenişehir district and several other locations. The defacement of the Kurdish road warning signs was also captured on security cameras.

In the eastern Van province, the pedestrian crossing sign "Pêşî peya" was painted over by unidentified individuals and replaced with the phrase "Turkey is Turkish and will remain Turkish."

Within the scope of “multilingual municipality activities,” the Diyarbakır and Van Metropolitan Municipalities added Kurdish warnings to the traffic warning signs on the roads in the city last week along with the Turkish ones.

The vandal was later revealed to be a 16-year-old high school student, who stated in an interview with the online news outlet Shortwave (Kısa Dalga) that he had consulted with a lawyer and an acquaintance at the counter-terrorism department (TEM) before engaging in the act.

“After I told him my plan, the man working at TEM said that I needed to be very careful even though the punishment would be small, but the Van Municipality could give me a headache if I got caught,” he said.

He continued, “The police said that they understood my nationalist emotions, they said I did well. They added that I should not be doing this in the eastern provinces, but they would help me as much as they can.”

Topics Dİyarbakır vandalism Kurdish Language nationalist DEM Party