Mumcu remembered 21 years on
Turkish journalists, many of them exiles in London, to speak at event this Friday
The aftermath of the explosion that killed Uğur Mumcu in January 1993
Uğur Mumcu
THE JOURNALIST Uğur Mumcu is to be remembered in London on the 21st anniversary of his assassination.
A ceremony, organised by the Ataturk Society in the UK, will be held in Dalston at Azerbaijan House, 228 Kingsland Rd, E2 8AX on Friday 24 January.
Uğur Mumcu was a Turkish investigative journalist for the leading Kemalist broadsheet, Cumhuriyet. He was assassinated by a bomb placed in his car, outside his home, in January 1993.
Shortly before his death, Mumcu was investigating how 100,000 firearms owned by the Turkish Armed Forces had ended up in the possession of Jalal Talabani, one of the Kurdish leaders of northern Iraq and, as of 2008, president of Iraq.
Twenty-five days after the death of Mumcu, General Eşref Bitlis, who had been investigating the same issue, died in a plane crash. Many speculated this too was sabotage.
In his 8 January Cumhuriyet article, titled Ultimatum, Mumcu had said he would soon reveal in a new book the ties between Kurdish nationalists and some intelligence organizations.
SERVICE IN DALSTON
The service, which will begin at 7pm, will see speeches from Abdullah Nihat Yılmaz and İrfan Taştemur. The nearest railway stations are Dalston Kingsland and Dalston Junction.
Mr Taştemur, who has worked as a journalist since 1977, spent two years in prison in Turkey after the 1980 coup. He currently works for the Yurt daily and is London correspondent for Sokak TV and a magazine, Bağımsız.
Mr Yılmaz has been a columnist for London’s Olay newspaper for five years. He left Turkey shortly after the 1980 coup, when trade union leaders were slowly being arrested. He himself had been arrested after earlier military interventions in 1961 and 1971. He has lived in London since 1982.
