Report: Turkish Heavy Metal Fans Face Music For Devil Horns Salutes
July 30, 2009, 15 years ago
IrishTimes.com has issued the following report from Nicholas Birch:
Five Turkish heavy metal fans got more than they bargained for in Istanbul last weekend when they made heavy metal salutes at a passing cavalcade.
“The tinted windows of one of the cars opened and a guy in dark glasses shouted ‘what the hell are you doing’,” says Yusuf Sengul, who was attending the first day of a heavy metal festival with his friends.Five minutes later, the men in black came back with police, bundled Sengul and four others into cars and took them to a police station.
“They said they were acting on the orders of the prime minister,” Sengul remembers. “We were laughing. We thought it was a joke.”
But it wasn’t. Accused of “disrespect of a senior official”, the five youngsters spent the rest of the day and night being taken from one police station to another.
“I unfortunately saw the state of some of our young people, and it was depressing,” prime minister Tayyip Erdogan told reporters the day after, before news of the arrests had appeared in the media. “This endless, uncontrolled moral erosion is really worrying. We must defend our family structure.”A former Islamist who heads a “conservative democrat” party that has been in power since 2002, Erdogan is well-known for his outbursts of intolerance.
Dozens of caricaturists who satirised him have been fined. His advisers lean on media patrons to remove journalists who take too independent a line.
But the arrest of the heavy metal fans shows signs of blowing up in his face. On July 27th, the opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP, held a press conference with two of the fans to condemn what had happened.
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