Peace Day: We Need New Policies

The Union of Turkish Chambers of Engineers and Architects(TMMOB), the Labour Party (EMEP) and the Chamber of Environmental Engineers (CMO) has said that at a time where conflict and death were continuing in the Middle East and in Turkey, the government needed to change its policies.

Tüzel: Do not equate Kurdish representatives with terror

Levent Tüzel, chairperson of the EMEP, based the lack of peace on the fact that since the foundation of the Republic, there has never been equality of rights and that constitutional and social conditions had not been provided.

Referring to the General Staff’s association of the Democratic Society Party (DTP) with terrorism, Tüzel added: “As long as this exclusive and excluding attitude continues, there will neither be democracy nor social peace in our country.”

Soganci: We need to go beyond 12 September

Mehmet Soganci, chairperson of the TMMOB, said that peace in Turkey would come with “a peaceful solution to the Kurdish question and a rejection of the 12 September constitution [created by the military junta of the 1980 coup].”

Pointing out that the world had turned into a battle field since September 11 and that peace was now a pressing international issue, he added: “A solution of the Kurdish question within a comprehensive framework of democratisation is essential for our country.”

Soganci listed the TMMOB’s suggestions as:

• Abolishing the 12 September constitution
• Getting rid of hurdles in political representation
• Rectifying living conditions in the Southeast which have been affected by a politics of violence
• An end to human rights violations
• Investigations into unsolved murders
• Provisions for the return to villages
  

Uysal: Cut the military budget

Burcak Kahraman Uysal of the CMO emphasised the negative effects that war had on the world:

• Around half of the world’s population does not have clean water and canalisation
• Again around half of the world lives on less than two dollars a day
• The poorest 48 countries together are less wealthy than the richest three people in the world
• Around one million people are illiterate
• Around 40 million people are struggling with AIDS
• A third of all children in the world are suffering from malnutrition

Uysal pointed out that living beings and living spaces were damaged by weapons and that the global arms expenditure was 1.2 trillion dollars and called on the government to reduce military expenditure and to use the money in education, health, environmental and infrastructural investments and natural disaster crisis management instead. (AÖ/AG)