Ruling party calls blast victims martyrs, CNN Türk censor mourning relatives

CNN Türk censored the statement of a mourning parent of a victim of the recent blast in İstanbul, who says his son is not a martyr but a murdered one in opposition to Erdoğan and his government's discourse of martyrdom
Father Akbaş said: “I would not want my son to be a martyr, my son was murdered!”
Tuesday, 13 December 2016 07:47

Upon the fatal twin blasts in İstanbul that killed 44 and injured 166 people, CNN Türk censored the statement of father Salim Akbaş whose university student son Mustafa Berkay Akbaş was killed during the terror attack. Father Akbaş said: “I would not want my son to be a martyr, my son was murdered!”

Mourning father Salim Akbaş's words were censored by CNN Türk and Kanal D, two main Turkish TV channels owned by Turkish media tycoon Aydın Doğan. Doğan's media empire includes Hürriyet newspaper and Doğan news agency.

Father Salim Akbaş said the following:

“He was 19 years old, a medical faculty student. He came to İstanbul from Ankara just for 2 days after his exams. They just came for a visit. They were incidentally en route there by taxi. That is all. So coincidental, so simple, so easy; he is called martyr just for that. I would not want my son to be a martyr. My son was murdered. I do not want to say anything else. Mustafa Berkay Akbaş was a promising medical student at Başkent University. He dreamt to be a doctor. He dreamt to help such people. But now I am taking him with a funeral coach.  A guy with a missing report on Twitter. I wish terror ended just with condemnations. We have been condemning it for years. They will only leave flowers tomorrow; nothing else. I would not want my son to be a martyr. My son was murdered.”

ERDOĞAN’S DISCOURSE OF MARTYRDOM      

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) tend to resort to a rhetorical discourse of martyrdom in Turkey.

During numerous car bomb attacks, suicide attacks and blasts, nearly 450 people were killed only in the last one and a half years. After all fatal attacks of ISIS, and of TAK, the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons, a PKK (the Kurdistan Workers’ Party) split, Erdoğan and AKP have been inclined to glorify deaths without considering whether the murdered are police officers and military troops or civilians.

The discourse of martyrdom with reference to Islamic beliefs has been influential in Turkey that even pro-AKP religious cult leaders call those children who have been burned to death, and thus murdered, at their dormitories as fateful martyrs glorified in the presence of God.