A Doctor’s Trial in a Turkish Border Town

On April 24, 2017, Serdar Kuni, a 45-year-old Kurdish doctor accused of providing medical aid to Kurdish rebels, stood in a courtroom in Sirnak in southeastern Turkey. The courtroom overlooked buildings reduced to rubble and a deserted mosque with broken windows. Police posts, circled with barbed wire fences, had sprung up every few hundred yards. 




A Turkish flag flew on a hill above the town, staking out its territory after more than a year of intense fighting with Kurdish rebels seeking autonomy from Turkish rule. An estimated 50,000 of Sirnak’s 65,000 residents were yet to return home after having been displaced by the fighting.

The prosecutor sat with the three judges. The chances of a fair trial seemed slim, given that the debris of battle in the mostly Kurdish region was ubiquitous and the state of emergency after the July 2016 coup continued to be in effect.

The fighting between Turkish forces and Kurdish rebels renewed in the summer of 2015 after peace talks between the Kurds and the Turkish state broke down. Young Kurdish militants from the youth wing of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., inspired by the success of Kobani and Rojava cantons in Syria, built barricades in towns and cities across southeastern Turkey and created de facto liberated zones.

Turkish forces laid siege to rebel towns and imposed long military curfews, and their tanks shelled the towns without restraint. In the subsequent months numerous neighborhoods in Kurdish cities and towns like Diyarbakir, Cizre, Sirnak, Silopi, Nusaybin and Yuksekova were reduced to rubble in the fighting. The International Crisis Group estimated that at least 2,721 people were killed by April 25, 2017, including 393 civilians, 927 members of security forces, 1,257 P.K.K. militants and “219 youths of unknown affiliation.”

The Kurdish militants had retreated into the mountains by June 2016. Soon after, Turkey had to live through the failed July 2016 coup, which killed more than 250 people and injured many more. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan blamed the Pennsylvania-based Islamist cleric Fetullah Gulen and his followers in the Turkish military for the coup. A wide-ranging purge of suspected Gulenists followed.

Although the Kurds and Gulenists have traditionally had a hostile relationship, Mr. Erdogan’s government extended the purge and prosecution to Kurds as well as liberal Turks, who were critical of the military operations in Kurdish areas. In January 2016, more than 2,000 academics in Turkey signed a petition calling for the resumption of peace talks with the P.K.K. Turkish authorities jailed three signatories and fired or suspended 60 others from their university jobs.

In August 2016, a Turkish court in Istanbul ordered Ozgur Gundem, one of Turkey’s most prominent pro-Kurdish newspapers, to close its operations for “continuously conducting propaganda” for the P.K.K. The newspaper’s staff, as well as academics and intellectuals who volunteered to write for the newspaper, was arrested and charged with “creating propaganda for a terrorist organization.” Those arrested included Dr. Kuni’s colleague and president of the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey, Sebnem Korur Fincanci, who could face up to 14 years in prison if convicted.