Announcement of imam in Turkey about ‘no’ campaigners: ‘Strangers are in town'
All across Turkey, members of political parties and civil society groups have been campaigning for the upcoming referendum on AKP’s controversial constitutional amendments.
As the voting date – April 16th – nears, reports about discrimination and attacks against opponents of the proposed new constitution have frequented.
Most recently, a group of members of Atatürkçü Düşünce Derneği (Association of Kemalist Thought) visited a village in Ayvalık district of Balıkesir province. As the group members walked in to the village, which is dominantly dwelled by AKP constituents, the imam of the village made an announcement from the mosque to give a warning to the villagers.
According to the reports of Oya Uğral from OdaTV, the imam, who also happens to be the guard of the village, called out to the villagers from the speakers of the mosque and said: “Strangers have come! Don’t open your doors!”
The group, among which there were also medics, legal experts, agricultural engineers, and veterinarians, had been visiting towns and villages in Ayvalık to offer consultancy and solution for the residents’ problems not only regarding health but also legal issues.
Branch head of the organization, Ahmet Üzgeç, gave further details about the incident: “It was an act that did not reflect the hospitality of Turkish villagers. The discriminative discourse used by people from the ‘yes’ side reflects the point we have reached. Our villagers have no fault in this. And, later, we also talked to the person who made the announcement, too. We don’t go to the villages with party flags. In line with a decision we made last year, we have been trying to solve a range of problems of villagers. And, we encountered such act for the first time among the 16 villages we have visited in Ayvalık… We are trying to tell the locals the truth.”