Attack on Kurdish Community Centre
Posted: December 27, 2024
In a shocking display of the famous ‘British values’, the Met police launched a violent attack on the North London Kurdish community on 27th November. There were night raids on the homes of six people, with doors smashed, arrests made, and people beaten up, including elderly people and a 15 year old child. At the same time, the Kurdish Community Centre (KCC) on Green Lanes was stormed and occupied in a military-style operation involving helicopters, dogs and hundreds of cops.
The families of those arrested were not allowed back in their homes for a number of days, and the KCC was held for 8 days of what must have been a very expensive 24-hour police occupation. These violent state actions were done under the Terrorism Act, which we predicted was going to be abused in this manner when it was introduced by Blair 20 years ago.
Nobody who lives here feels they need ‘protection’ from the Kurdish community, as the police are claiming. Many of the Kurdish community came here as refugees from state repression in Turkey and are now facing something similar here in Haringey. The doors of the KCC, which the police have smashed, were always open and the centre is used not just by Kurdish people but also by many other people as a meeting space, social centre or café.
We join with the community in demanding the release of those arrested, a public apology from the Met police and Mayor of London and the delisting by the British government of the PKK as a ‘terrorist organisation’. This so-called ‘prevention of terror’ is in fact terrorising our friends in the community.
While the nearby Overground line has been renamed the ‘Suffragette Line’, this empty gesture means nothing when the Kurdish movement, which is democratic, ecological and feminist, is baselessly slandered as ‘terrorists’, just as the Suffragettes were a hundred years ago.
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