Statement from Van Metropolitan Municipality Mayor Abdullah Zeydan

Following the trustee appointments in recent weeks, all eyes turned to Van Metropolitan Municipality Mayor Abdullah Zeydan, whose restoration of banned rights was overturned by a decision from the Diyarbakır 5th High Criminal Court. 

Zeydan met with the public in the city square to make a statement. 

In his speech, Zeydan said, "While we were expecting the government to uphold democracy, we have witnessed it once again attempting to usurp the will of the Kurdish people and the peoples of Turkey," and continued with the following remarks: 

"While we were expecting the government and the ruling power to learn lessons from the public's reaction to this trustee regime—which is a system of theft and corruption—and hoping they would abolish this system of theft and corruption, we witnessed them attempting to usurp the will of the people of Van, whom they could not defeat through democratic means at the ballot box on election day, once again through a judicial conspiracy and a judicial trap.

The people of Van once again defended their will, democracy, justice, and the law in a dignified manner with a magnificent resistance. The magnificent resistance of the people of Van led to great solidarity with the people of Van. Everyone in Turkey with a conscience, from the far left to the far right, almost all political parties, all democratic mass organizations, and our 85 million citizens stood by the people of Van against this seizure of the certificate of election, this seizure of will, and this attack on democracy and justice.

Almost 85 million citizens gave a joint message to the mentality that tries to usurp the people's will through judicial conspiracies and traps. The Supreme Election Council also made the fair decision that it should have. While we thought this process was closed and were expecting the government to stop usurping the law, democracy, and the people's will with the stick of the judiciary and the stick of security forces, and to respect the people's will for the sake of achieving the social peace that Turkish society needs, and while we were expecting them to uphold justice, law, and democracy, we witnessed them attempting to usurp the will of the Kurdish people and the peoples of Turkey once again without learning any lessons from all these processes.

We have always said that the trustee regime is an attack on the will and existence of all peoples living in Turkey, especially the Kurdish people, and an attack on democracy and the law. We have always said that the trustee regime is a system of theft and corruption. Our people are direct witnesses to this. If our people did not believe that the trustee regime and these trustees were thieves and that this trustee regime was a system of corruption, they would not have handed over all 14 out of 14 municipalities in Van to us."

Following Abdullah Zeydan's statement, the intervention by law enforcement against the crowd that wanted to march from the city square to the DEM Party provincial building while chanting slogans caused a brief period of tension.