Turkish singer jailed for criticizing Erdogan


This Turkish music video is called Zuhal Olcay – Pervane.

Translated from Dutch NOS TV today:

Turkish singer jailed for insulting Erdogan

The Turkish singer and actress Zuhal Olcay has been sentenced to ten months in prison. A Turkish court found her guilty of insulting President Erdogan during a performance in 2016, reports the Hürriyet newspaper.

During the performance, Olcay replaced a number of words in a song with Erdogan‘s name. “Recep Tayyip Erdogan, it’s all empty, it’s all a lie, life will end one day and then you’ll say: I had a dream”, Olcay sang. In addition, she is also said to have made an insulting hand gesture.

In her testimony, Olcay contradicted that she had evil intentions. Erdogan‘s name simply fit in the meter and rhyme scheme. The hand gesture was meant for someone in the audience, she said.

National security

Insulting the president is a crime in Turkey with a maximum of four years in prison. According to the government, this type of punishment is necessary for the stability of the country and to protect national security.

The 60-year-old Zuhal Olcay is a laureate TV, film and theater actress in Turkey. As a singer she released a number of successful albums. Last December she performed in Amsterdam.

1 thought on “Turkish singer jailed for criticizing Erdogan

  1. Pingback: Erdogan regime persecutes Turkish pro-peace students | Dear Kitty. Some blog

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.