Republican News · Thursday 31 January 2002

Boycott Turkish holidays call

Picketers leafleted the Holiday World Experience travel fair at Dublin's RDS last Saturday calling on the 50,000 people who visit the fair to boycott travel to Turkey is protest at the appalling lack of human rights in that country.

After Israel, Turkey is the biggest recipient of US military aid. Forty-five people have so far died on hunger strike in Turkish jails in a protest over moving political prisoners to isolating regimes in high security F-Type prisons.

A group of Turkish men, presumably from the Turkish Tourist Board and Turkish Airline companies, which were exhibiting at the exhibition, came out to the picketers, to tell them that there were no human rights abuses in Turkey. They told the leafleters that they had no right to protest about Turkey and that in Turkey, they would all be in jail, or dead. The final riposte was that those leafleting were all communists and would be better hanged.