Source: Mehmet Özmen, “Gezi çapulcularının son umudu Homolar”( Gezi looters’ last hope is Homos), Yeni Akit, 19 September 2013, http://www.yeniakit.com.tr/haber/gezi-capulcularinin-son-umudu-homolar-5702.html

Yeni Akit is a conservative daily newspaper that engages in hate speech against LGBTI people and other groups. This is a verbatim translation. 

The organizers of the Gezi Park protests will meet with homos. Activists were taken from Kadıköy, Istanbul, to Diyarbakır for free yesterday night. They will meet LGBT delegates (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans) involved in activities in Diyarbakır. In the statement, “the looters” reported that they will meet various organizations, including an LGBT group, and stay at these individuals’ homes in Diyarbakır instead of at hotels. In the past few days, events in Taksim have spread to Kadıköy, and extreme marginal groups consisting of less than 200 left-wing activists have started protests. But because of the apathy of citizens towards these protests, a new strategy has been developed to increase the number of activists who attend.

In the statement of the initiative “We meet” (Tanışıyoruz), they declared the purpose of the trip to Diyarbakır. It said that they had contacted the participants of the Abbasağa Park, Yoğurtçu Park and Büyükdere-Yeniköy forums and stated:

“As a first step, we organized various forums and workshops aimed at understanding Kurds and Kurdish policy with the initiatives of the communal peace working group in Abbasağa and of the peace in Yoğurtçu, to which many academics, researchers and the experience of witnesses also contributed. We entered in a different world of language, listened to our past from a different point and talked about how those issues, which we had assumed were unrelated to us, affect individuals’ lives in the West. Each time the attendance to those events became more than we had expected, and this excited us more for the visit to Amed, Diyarbakır. We are organizing a travel to Amed consisting of a volunteer group of people from the forums. We are looking forward to talking to women, youths and LGBT people about Kurdish community and their struggle, and to finding a solution to live and work together in peace. We will not stay in hotels or guest houses but in the houses of local people in order to be a part of their life even if it’s for a short time. Like in Istanbul, we all together will organize forums in local neighborhoods of Diyarbakır and share our thoughts with each other. By doing so, we start knowing each other and becoming closer as taking concrete steps to each other…” The program of the Diyarbakır travel starts today and will end on Sunday. On the statement it was declared that there will be conversations and forums with the contribution of LGBT organizations and the youth movement.