DITIB’s sneaky rally: Playing the victim again

A show Turkish President Erdogan wished to put on during an opening ceremony in Cologne today as part of his highly controversial visit to Germany has not been permitted, but the DITIB wants to abuse this ban in a similarly attitude like they did in 2017.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is scheduled to attend the opening ceremony of a Religious Affairs Turkish-Islamic Union (DITIB) mosque in Cologne today. Cologne City Council did not permit the event DITIB wanted to hold outside the mosque for the opening, and it was announced that only Erdogan and some 500 invitees would be allowed to attend the ceremony.

Mayor of Cologne Henriette Reker said the council didn’t permit the large scale event DITIB wanted to hold outside because the organization failed to meet the standard security precautions for events of such scale.

TO SAY “THE OPPOSITION WAS PERMITTED BUT WE WEREN’T”?

People from Kurdistan, Turkey and Germany will be holding a mass protest rally in Cologne today, while the show DITIB wants to put on seems to have deliberately failed to meet the security standards demanded by the city council.

In 2017, Erdogan and the AKP had several rallies banned because they didn’t comply with the security measures the German authorities demanded, and the fascist administration used these bans for propaganda.

DITIB declared 25.000 attendees to an area with a 5.000-person capacity, and that is the reason why the city council did not permit the event. City Council officials asked DITIB to update their security charter twice, but they failed to meet the requirements in both instances.

This is reminiscent of the rallies the Union of European Turkish Democrats, AKP’s Germany branch, attempted to hold in 2017. It had later been revealed that the reason these rallies were banned was because all of them either declared too many attendees for the selected venues, or the venues lacked basic safety measures like a fire escape. The AKP had used these bans as propaganda in the 2017 constitutional referendum, arguing that “the whole world is against them”.