Attack on Kurdish musician Ahmet Kaya’s grave in Paris

Click to read the article in Turkish / Kurdish

The grave of Ahmet Kaya, who died in exile in France's capital city of Paris 21 years ago tomorrow (November 16), has been attacked. The grave of the late musician is located in Paris' Père Lachaise Cemetery.

The perpetrator or perpetrators have been unknown. However, the ones who visited the grave posted a video and said that the attack was recent.

About Ahmet Kaya

Ahmet Kaya was a Kurdish folk singer born in Malatya on October 28, 1957.

On February 11, 1999, during the televised annual music awards ceremony at which he was to be named Musician of the Year, Kaya said that he wanted to produce music in his mother language Kurdish. He also announced that he had recorded a song in Kurdish (Karwan, released on the Hoşçakalın Gözüm album in 2001) and intended to produce a video to accompany it.

Following this announcement, he faced massive opposition, even an attack with forks, from some other artists and celebrities in the event.

First, pop singer Serdar Ortaç started singing a song with modified lyrics to boost nationalist feelings, then, people in the ceremony started singing 10th Year March. Later, Kaya was attacked by celebrities.

His wife Gülten Kaya describes the attack as "All of a sudden, all of those chic women and men turned into monsters, grabbing forks and knives and throwing them at us, insulting, booing. Imagine the atmosphere changing in just five minutes, almost a Kafkaesque transformation."

The incident led to a prosecution case which made him leave Turkey. In March 2000, he was sentenced in absentia to three years and nine months in prison on charge of "spreading separatist propaganda."

He died from a heart attack in Paris on November 16, 2000 at the age of 43, and is buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

In late 2013, when President Abdullah Gül was the President, Kaya posthumously won the Presidential Grand Award in Music "for his ability to bring people from different backgrounds together through his music, his unique style and his discourse." (RT/SD)