Sırrı Sakık


Sırrı Sakık is a Turkish-Kurdish journalist and politician, and was a member of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey for the Peace and Democracy Party.

Background

Sakık is the brother of former Kurdistan Workers' Party commander Şemdin Sakık. His brother Abdulsamet Sakık, a Democracy Party politician who was the party's chair in Gaziantep, was assassinated on 3 November 1993. Sakık was involved in the tourism sector and was also a journalist for Cumhuriyet and Vatan.

Career

Sakık was first elected to the Grand National Assembly of Turkey in 1991 on a ticket of the Social Democratic People's Party. He was a founding member of the Democracy Party in 1993, and was one of the DEP deputies sentenced in 1994 to 15 years in prison for links with Kurdish militants, after their parliamentary immunity was revoked. He was later released, and played a role in the People's Democracy Party, being arrested after a 1996 incident in which masked men dropped the Turkish flag at its party congress and raised the PKK flag.
He was a founding member of the Democratic Society Party in 2005. He entered parliament again in 2007, technically running as an independent, but he was deputy chairman of the DTP. He was re-elected in 2011 for the Peace and Democracy Party , after the DTP was banned in 2009.
In 2012 he displayed a bullet in parliament, which he said had been sent to him as a death threat.
In the 2014 local elections he was elected as mayor of Ağrı. In March 2017 he was suspended from his office as Mayor by the Turkish Minister of the Interior. A trustee was appointed instead for Ağrı Municipality.