TODAY marks seven years since the Roboski massacre in Turkey’s southeastern province of Sirnak, and seven years that the victims’ families have campaigned for justice.

On December 28 2011, 34 Kurdish villagers were killed by Turkish warplanes as they made their way across a mountain path from the Iraqi border after they had travelled to collect supplies to sell at market.

They were massacred in a 45-minute aerial bombardment.  F16 fighter jets rained down missiles on the two groups of villagers and their donkeys. Thirty-four out of the 38 were killed, 19 of them children. The bodies were so badly mutilated that their families had difficulty separating them from the mules that were killed alongside them.

When they arrived on the scene, locals called an ambulance but state forces who were also on the ground stopped them at the roadside, with no rescue operation. The villagers carried the dead and the dying on their backs as they desperately sought help.

Footage that was revealed during the investigations clearly showed that the men were unarmed and the only cargo they were carrying was barrels of oil from the Iraqi border – a practice that has been taking place for generations as families struggle to survive in the deliberately underdeveloped Kurdish region of Turkey.

Turkish mainstream media remained largely silent until official announcements on the killings had been made. Authorities  justified the murders by saying they believed the party were guerilla fighters from the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), writing off the victims as “collateral damage.”

The initial intelligence came from a US drone which reported high levels of radioactivity in the mountainous border region. However despite requesting more time to conduct investigations, Turkish forces ordered them to leave the area paving the way for the massacre.

This was a state murder. And seven years later nobody has been held to account with government investigations and a string of failed court cases in Turkey leaving the families struggling for justice. 

Large demonstrations took place in Turkey in protest at the killings. Thousands gathered in Istanbul’s Taksim Square before police attacked protesters, mobilising the TOMA water cannon and firing tear gas in a now all too familiar response to anti-government protests in Turkey, particularly when it comes to the Kurds.

But it is not the state or even members of Turkey’s military that have been charged. Instead the families of those who were murdered and the survivors have been put on trial.

Many have been charged with terrorism offences for slogans demanding justice as they hold weekly protests with authorities snatching photographs of children that were killed.

In January 2017, the Roboski commemoration statue in Diyarbakir was pulled down by government-imposed administrators and police smashed the plaques bearing the names of the victims.

Prominent lawyer for the Roboski families Tahir Elci, who also faced charges for saying the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) was not a terrorist organisation, was shot dead in 2015 during a press conference. The perpetrators have never been found.

Ferhat Encu, who lost nine relatives including his brother during the massacre, was elected as a People’s Democratic Party (HDP) MP in the June 2015 elections. 

He had been the spokesman for the families’ victims but is currently in Kandira F-Type prison after he was arrested for a 2016 speech in Turkey’s Grand Assembly when he accused Turkish warplanes of brutally killing 34 people in the Roboski massacre.

He was charged with “alienating the public from military service, terrorist propaganda, incitement to animosity, entering military prohibited zones, attempted murder of a public official for their duty.”

Encu was stripped of his MP status in February 2018 after being sentenced to four years and seven months on terrorism offences. 

However he remains defiant and vowed to continue the quest for justice, calling on lawyers and human rights defenders to “unearth the truth of those murdered in Roboski.”

Earlier this year the families were left frustrated again after the European Court of Human Rights rejected their case saying that they had not exhausted all the remedies through the Turkish courts – although they had already dismissed the families’ claims on a technicality.

In any case there is no longer an independent legal system or judiciary in Turkey, a situation worsened following June’s presidential and parliamentary elections which saw Erdogan tighten his authoritarian grip on power.

As the Roboski families’ quest for justice continues, another massacre of Kurds seems set to take place across the border in Syria. It is time the world opened its eyes to the war crimes committed with impunity by Erdogan and the Turkish state.

Erdogan is an Ottoman revivalist, positioning himself as a regional strongman. Turkey has been acting as an occupying force in Afrin, northern Syria despite being asked to leave by the government, and the backing he has received from Western governments and the silence from Nato and other forces has emboldened him.

Because of this support he is also able to move against opposition internally – journalists, academics and public-sector workers are among his targets as well as opposition politicians, many of whom face lengthy jail sentences merely for challenging his rule.

He is backed to the hilt by the West, including the British government which continues to trade and sell weapons to Turkey despite its appalling human rights record.

Britain has sold $1 billion (£790 million) of arms to Turkey since the failed coup of July 2016 and the subsequent clampdown, with Ankara remaining a “priority market” for the country’s weapons trade.

Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle has questioned the sale of arms to Turkey and warned that the government is unable to state that British weapons are not in use in Turkish military operations in Afrin.

It is likely that British-sold arms would be used in any new offensive in Syria and we must demand an end to a trade that supplies the world’s most brutal regimes with the tools to oppress its people and wage deadly assaults against minorities.

In December Turkish jets launched an attack on the Makhmur refugee camp in Iraq, home to thousands of Kurds who were forced to flee their homes in Turkey as their villages were burned to the ground in the 1990s.

And Yazidi people in the Sinjar region – who suffered a genocide at the hands of Isis in 2014, with thousands of women and girls still missing after being sold into sexual slavery –  were bombed in another Turkish assault.

Erdogan has been given a free hand to act with impunity. He is very much a creation of Western imperialism which does not wish to see the development of democratic forces and a free and independent Turkey as it would threaten its interests in Syria, Iran and Iraq where it seeks regime change.

We must support the families in their quest to see the perpetrators of the Roboski massacre to be brought to justice and for the freedom of Ferhat Encu and all political prisoners in Turkey. 

Steve Sweeney is international editor of the Morning Star.