Vedat Aydın | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1953 |
| Died | 7 July 1991 (aged 37–38) |
| Cause of death | Murder |
| Body discovered | Maden, Elazığ |
| Resting place | Diyarbakir |
| Citizenship | Turkish |
| Occupation | Lawyer |
| Political party | HEP |
| Spouse | Sükran Aydın |
Vedat Aydın (1953 – 7 July 1991) was aKurdish politician in Turkey and human rights defender. He was married to Sükran Aydın.
He was born in 1953 in the village ofKazancı inBismil District of Diyarbakir Province.[1][2] He graduated from the Literary department of the Vocational School in Diyarbakir in 1979.[1] He became a founding member and delegate of theDiyarbakir branch of theTurkish Human Rights Association (IHD).[3]
At the annual meeting of the IHD in October 1990, he gave the first public speech inKurdish language in Turkey, which was forbidden.[3] The decision to make the speech in Kurdish was taken by the Kurdish delegates, but caught others by surprise.[4] Many other non-Kurdish delegates left the congress in protest while Aydin kept on with his speech, which was translated by Ahmet Zeki Okçuoglu into Turkish.[3] Aydin was detained and arrested inUlucanlar prison,Ankara.[1] After his release he was elected the head of thePeople's Labor Party (HEP) inDiyarbakir.[3]
He was killed in July 1991. On 5 July, armed men identifying themselves as police officers showed up at his home and forced him into a car. On 7 July his body was found under a bridge just outside the boundaries of the province Diyarbakir, in theMaden district of the province ofElazıĝ.[5] He was immediately buried at the Maden Municipality, but later anautopsy was done and after it was confirmed the body belonged to Aydın, he was reburied in Diyarbakir. His skull was fractured, his legs broken and about 15 bullets were shot in his body. 8 bullets were found in his body. No one was charged for the murder of Vedat Aydin. At his funeral in Diyarbakir on 10 July, the police firedlive ammunition into a crowd of thousands of mourning people. The police claimed stones were thrown from within the crowd, eyewitnesses denied this, though.[6][7] As a result, 7[6] to 13 people were killed[8] and up to 100 people were injured. Protests against these events took place in the next days Diyarbakir,Nusaybin,Lice,Uludere andBismil.[9] Nobody was charged with the killing of the attendants of the funeral cortege. On 4 December 1993 a delegation ofDEP parliamentarians came under an armed attack as they were on a mission inBatman trying to find out who killed Aydın. As a result, the MP for MardinMehmet Sincar and the local party leader of Batman were killed and MP for Batman Nizamettin Toğuç was injured together with three others.[10] The investigation into the murder of Vedat Aydın went on, but in the year 2009, 18 years after his murder, a court inMalatya decided to close the investigation about the murder of Aydin and returned the file to Diyarbakir due to lack of jurisdiction.[5]