Garen Yegparian
BY GAREN YEGPARIAN
That’s what happened. The lifeless corpse of Haci Lokman Birlik was DRAGGED behind a Turkish police vehicle with a rope which formed a noose around his neck. He was the brother-in-law of HDP (the pro-Kurdish party in Turkey) parliament member Leyla Birlik from Sirnak.
Here’s what has to happen. The U.S. media must be DRAGGED into reporting on these incidents which show the true face of the Turkish state. Initially, when I searched, only the New York Times, among the major U.S., had a report about the incident among the first twenty hits I got through a Google search. More seemed to pick up on it days later.
It’s also what happened in Texas in 1998 and 2008 when James Byrd and Brandon McClelland, respectively, were DRAGGED to death for being black men. So this horror is not unique to Turkey, but the state sponsorship of this obscenity is a Turkish feature. Instead of protecting its citizens, Turkey mutilates their bodies.
Imagine, officials initially DRAGGED out the argument that it was because Birlik’s body was booby-trapped, or that he had a suicide vest on. Naturally, it is the most sensible thing to do to drag a bomb around behind one’s vehicle right? They must think the whole world stupid!
It’s easy enough to imagine the equivalent being done to Armenians a century ago, except then we would have been DRAGGED behind a horse, not a motor vehicle. Everyone has seen the heads of decapitated Armenian corpses lined up on shelves. On other occasions, the heads of Armenians had been placed on tall spikes as a warning, to instill and maintain fear among the “rayahâ€
