\n Turkey's top court on Thursday ordered compensation for the families of 33 people, mostly from the country's main religious minority, who were burnt alive in 1993 by radical Islamists.\n<\/p>\n
\n On 2 July 1993, 33 intellectuals, most of them Alevis, were killed in the Madimak Hotel in Sivas, where they had gathered for a festival, in a fire started by a crowd of radical Islamists.\n<\/p>\n
\n Alevis are attached to secularism and their religious practices differ from those of the traditional currents of Islam.\n<\/p>\n
\n The attack became a symbol of discrimination and violence faced by Alevis.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"The court has ruled that the right to life was violated in procedural terms,\" Gunal Kursun, the lawyer for three descendants of victims, told AFP.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"This means that the state failed in its obligation to conduct an effective investigation in this case... This violation justifies a retrial.\"\n<\/p>\n
\n The ruling concerned the procedural protection of the right to life, which requires the state to investigate deaths effectively and hold those responsible to account.\n<\/p>\n
\n Relatives filed the suit in 2014, arguing that the proceedings had not been conducted effectively and that the arson should be treated as a crime against humanity, which would prevent the use of a statute of limitations.\n<\/p>\n
\n The compensation, the amount of which will remain unknown until the publication of the reasoned judgement, \"cannot constitute full reparation for these families\", Kursun stressed.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"For genuine reparation, all those responsible, including senior officials and political leaders, must be brought to justice.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"The state has failed in its duty to prosecute its own officials,\" he added.\n<\/p>\n
\n One of those present at the Madimak Hotel was writer Aziz Nesin.\n<\/p>\n
\n He was working on a translation into Turkish of Salman Rushdie's \"The Satanic Verses\", whose publication in 1988 prompted death threats against the British writer from Islamic extremists.\n<\/p>\n
\n Nesin survived the fire but died of a heart attack in 1995.\n<\/p>\n
\n Thirty-three people were sentenced to life imprisonment for the Sivas attack but some perpetrators were never tried and benefitted from the statute of limitations, human rights advocates say.\n<\/p>\n
\n Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan granted amnesty to two of those sentenced to life for the massacre, in 2020 and 2023.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Turkey's top court on Thursday ordered compensation for the families of 33 people, mostly from the country's main religious minority, who were burnt alive in 1993 by radical Islamists. On 2 July 1993, 33 intellectuals, most of them Alevis, were killed in the Madimak Hotel in Sivas, where they had gathered for a festival, in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[553],"tags":[],"ji_location":[],"class_list":["post-162285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-feed"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n