Ferhat Tunç

Ferhat Tunç

Ferhat Tunç (born March 14, 1964 in Babaocağı, Tunceli as Ferhat Tunç Yoslun ) is a musician and human rights activist of Kurdish origin as well as a politician of the BDP party ( Barış ve Demokrasi Partisi ), who advocates a solution to the minority issue of the Kurds and Alevis and for the special interests of the population of Tunceli ( Kurdish / Zazaisch Dêrsim ).

Childhood and youth

Ferhat Tunç was born on March 14, 1964 as the first child of an Alevi - Kurdish family in the Tunceli province in eastern Turkey. He grew up listening to Alevi folk songs from his grandparents in the rural mountain region, and his talent for singing was already evident in elementary school . When his father, who worked as a guest worker in Germany , bought a house in Tunceli when Ferhat was at secondary school , the six siblings and their mother moved to this city, which is a center of the Alevi and Zaza (regionally known as "Kırmancki") speaking minority among the Kurds in Turkey represents. In his high school years possessed Ferhat Tunç even as a "little Ozan of Dersim" for a certain regional awareness and succeeded his father in 1979 to Germany, where he attended the Adult Education Center in Rüsselsheim German learned.

Artistic career

In 1982 his debut album "Kızılırmak" was released in West Germany. In the same year he met the musician Darnel Summers in Frankfurt am Main , founded his first band with him and other musicians and toured the Federal Republic of Germany and neighboring countries. In 1984 the album "Bu Yürek Bu Sevda Var İken" was released after he had started a vocal training at the music school of the University of Mainz , which he broke off six months later to continue his life as a touring musician. In 1985 he returned to Turkey for the first time, where he also wanted to better learn his "mother tongue" Zazaisch, which was neglected due to the political situation. In order to build a new musical existence, he joined the musician Hasan Hüseyin Demirel , who wanted to set up a new music production company in the famous Istanbul-Unkapanı, and lived with him and the now famous singer Emre Saltık in a modest apartment in Istanbul . Tunç recorded his album “Vurgunum Hasretine” within a week, but initially couldn't get any company to publish it, as the actually moderate content was too explosive due to the tense political situation in Turkey. After Tunç's unsuccessful attempts in Germany, Demirel managed to find a distributor in Istanbul who brought the album onto the market, which brought Tunç's artistic breakthrough. In 1988 he met Ahmet Kaya , who was practically the first and only opposition voice to be officially tolerated. Subsequently, there were joint concerts and tours with him, several times in Germany.

Political influences on Tunç's work

Already in his childhood, Ferhat Tunç came into contact with a musical culture enriched by hints of political opposition through Alevi music, moreover in the "Kurdish" region of Dersim, a region that is geographically isolated from mountain ranges and culturally through homogeneous Alevism the Turkish army had massively suppressed the Alevi Kurdish uprisings in 1937/1938 , whereupon a Turkish named city "Tunceli" was expanded. This eventful history of uprisings, war, flight and expulsion in Dersim, as well as belonging to the minorities of the Alevi religion, the "Kurdish" population and the Zazaese mother tongue are reflected in musical compositions, authorship, song texts and in political and social activities of the artist.

In the 1970s, with its violent and bloody confrontations of left and right-wing social currents, Tunç, like many other Alevis, developed strong sympathies for the communist movement and its Turkish icon İbrahim Kaypakkaya . In Tunceli, as the stronghold of the political left, jokingly called “Küçük Moskova” (Turkish for “Little Moscow”), the atmosphere was downright revolutionary , and Ferhat Tunç, who was living in Germany at the time, saw himself as a revolutionary singer and his music as a Tool for the revolution. The military coup in Turkey in 1980, with its wave of arrests and killings for many thousands of leftists, intellectuals , workers and peasants, delayed his return to Turkey, as did the fact that his appearances in the Federal Republic were predominantly in front of an audience from the left-wing Turkish-Kurdish spectrum Made persecution by the military government in Turkey possible.

After arriving back in Turkey in 1985, he was interrogated, harassed and tortured in Ankara for a week . There he found a society that was still changed by special laws and mass processes. In his concerts and albums he always integrated some songs from the languages ​​Zazaki and Kurmanji , which were banned in Turkey until 1991 , which made his political texts more socially explosive. Concerts gradually turned into the central social “meetings” of opposition members. Tunç meanwhile supported workers strikes, struggles for the democratization of Turkey and the hesitantly emerging environmental movement of Turkey. He was arrested several times, concert bans and stays in police custody.

Nevertheless, his musical career is also characterized by economic success and professionalism. With his Turkish folk music and his Özgün or protest music, he does not limit himself to extremely left-wing audiences, but rather ensures his high popularity and good sales figures by being accompanied by his own permanent band at the concerts, through television appearances and music clips . Tunç finds support from intellectual friends like Akın Birdal , Yaşar Kemal , Eşber Yağmurdereli or Yılmaz Erdoğan . He himself supported pieces by artists living in exile such as the Kurdish rock musician Ciwan Haco or the Armenian Aram Tigran from Syria .

In a statement on political censorship in Turkey, he gives the circumstances and reasons for his endeavor to openly address taboos of the Turkish state in his music for over 25 years : “ The Kurds play a major role in this problem because I myself [ I was ] a Kurd , the Alevis play a big role because I am an Alevis myself, the people from Dersim play a big role in this truth because I was from Dersim. Certainly - this collection, being Kurd, being Alevit and being from Dersim puts me in a situation as a musician or as someone who publishes his ideas or his opinion, that's why [...] I get difficulties from the government and from the Turkish state. […] There are certainly many problems in Turkey. For example, I've been experiencing this for years when I was a child: I couldn't speak my mother tongue [...] now because it was forbidden. I can not experience my faith [ as ] an institution […] because I was banned as an Alevite […] and now I want to be able to understand all of this and through me millions of people who know [ that we ] have had such a problem and now no longer want to have, no longer want to experience. "

Career and engagement in politics

Ferhat Tunç ran for the 2007 parliamentary elections as an independent candidate of the DTP , as they entered the race with so-called "Bin Umut Adaylari", but was not put on the party's electoral list because Şerafettin Halis was elected as a candidate, who in turn with 30% of the Votes in the province of Tunceli was elected to the Grand National Assembly. Ferhat Tunç took an active part in the DTP election campaign.

He was arrested several times, including when the PKK kidnapped a soldier in the Kutudere area and Ferhat Tunç demanded his release. However, he was charged with alleged contacts with the PKK and was detained for several days.

For the parliamentary elections in Turkey 2011 he ran again as an independent candidate for Tunceli, but won again no mandate.

On September 25, 2018, he was sentenced to one year, eleven months and twelve days in prison for propaganda for a terrorist organization. In his defense statement, he did not indicate that he did not regret praising those (the YPG and the YPJ ) who fought against IS in Kobane.

Awards

• 2010: Freemuse Award from the human rights organization Freemuse for its commitment against the censorship of music.

Discography

• "Kızılırmak" (1982)
• "Bu Yürek Bu Sevda Var İken" (1984)
• "Vurgunum Hasretine" (1986)
• "Ay Işığı Yana Yana" (1987)
• "Yaşamak Direnmektir" (1988)
• "İstanbul Konserleri-1" (1988)
• "Vuruldu" (1989)
• "Gül Vatan" (1990)
• "Ateş Gibi" (1991)
• "İstanbul Konserleri-2" (1992)
• "Firari Sevdam" (1993)
• "Özlemin Dağ Rüzgarı" (1994)
• "Kanı Susturun" (1995)
• "Kayıp" (1997)
• "Kavgamın Çiçeği" (1999)
• "Her Mevsim Bahardır" (2000)
• "Şarkılarım Tanıktır" (2002)
• "Nerdesin Ey Kardeşlik" (2003)
• "Sevmek bir eylemdir" (2005)
• "Ateşte Sınandık" (2006)
• "Cığlıklar Ülkesi" (2009)
• "Dersim" (2012)
• "Kobani" (2016)

Web links

• Official website / biography

References and comments

1. ↑ Euro Court Fines Turkey For Fining Singer Due To Speech İn Concert. Retrieved June 30, 2016 (tr-TR). 
2. ^ Turkey: Legal breakthrough in favor of prosecuted singer Ferhat Tunç. February 10, 2015, accessed June 30, 2016 (British English). 
3. ↑ Interview by Ferhat Tunç on the occasion of the "Freemuse award winners 2010" on March 25, 2010 in London, URL: Archive link ( Memento of the original from November 18, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , http://vimeo.com/10954560 
4. ↑ ^{a b c} The truth is taboo , Interview by Ole Reitov with Ferhat Tunç, recorded and produced by Mik Aidt / "Freemuse", recorded March 3, 2009 in Stockholm, Sweden, in connection with the "Music Freedom Day events" in of the concert hall "Konserthuset", URL: Archive link ( Memento of the original from April 5, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4mqIGjEtY0 . 
5. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Steffen Riecke, Ferhat Tunç [short biography], Orient, Deutsches Orient-Institut in Hamburg, 44 , (2), 2003, 181–188, cf. Homepage, URL: Archive link ( Memento of the original from December 17, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . 
6. ↑ DEFENSE OF FERHAT TUNÇ: 'Those Acting in Accordance with Current Political Power Betray Arts Itself' . In: Bianet - Bagimsiz Iletisim Agi . ( bianet.org [accessed September 25, 2018]).
7. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from November 18, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.