İbrahim Gökçek died at an Istanbul hospital after almost a year on hunger strike protesting against the detention of his wife, Sultan. She was still in prison, rather than at his side, when he died in intensive care on Thursday, two days after abandoning his strike.
Gökçek, a bass guitarist, is the second member of the banned left-wing folk music band Grup Yorum to die in just over a month after launching hunger strikes over the Turkish state’s treatment of their band: 28-year-old Helin Bölek, a singer, died on 3 April after 288 days of fasting.
The government says Grup Yorum has links to the outlawed Marxist Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front, which has carried out suicide attacks and is designated as a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the US and the EU.
But the folk collective, which has operated with a rotating membership since the 1980s, says some of its members have been jailed and it has been prohibited from performing since 2016 on flimsy allegations.
On Friday prosecutors turned down a request to allow Sultan to attend her husband’s funera, her lawyer, Kerem Karakurt, said. Mourners who attempted to enter the Alevi prayer house in Istanbul’s Sultangazi district were refused entry by police, who used teargas to break up the crowd. Initial reports suggested that at least four people were detained, and the funeral was cancelled.
Politically motivated hunger strikes have a long history in modern Turkey, and were a far-left protest tool during the 1980s against repressive military-backed governments.
Today, after a decade of aggressive crackdowns against the opposition by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s conservative Justice and Development party (AKP), Turkey’s leftwing political groups are little more than a fringe movement. But with fewer and fewer options across the political spectrum for challenging the government, hunger strikes appear to be attracting renewed attention.
Four Kurdish politicians and about 3,000 prison inmates ended a 200-day hunger strike in May last year after the jailed leader of the outlawed Kurdistan workers’ party (PKK), Abdullah Öcalan, was allowed access to his lawyers.
Gökçek and Bölek began their hunger strike while in prison to pressure the government into lifting the ban and freeing detained band members. They were released in November 2019, but continued the strike on behalf of two members still incarcerated, including Gökçek’s wife. Both were forcibly taken to hospital on 11 March but discharged a week later after they refused treatment, the Ankara-based Human Rights Association said.
The band is known for protest songs in Turkish and Kurdish focusing on capitalism, imperialism, anti-Americanism and Turkish government policies, which they say penalise the poor.
Grup Yorum’s protest has drawn support from across Turkey’s music scene and internationally, including statements of solidarity from the American folk singer Joan Baez, who has performed with the band in the past.
“The real reason behind your arrest,” she said after a raid on a cultural centre used by the group in 2017, “is that your music and work touches people, mobilises them and encourages them, and the fact you are righteous in your thoughts. You should continue to be brave.”
“Don’t let İbrahim Gökçek die,” the popular Kurdish singer Mahsun Kırmızıgül wrote on Twitter last week. “The demands of Gurp Yorum, who have been making music since 1985, must be met. It’s an instrument, not a gun.”
