Diyarbakır City Protection and Solidarity Platform held a press conference about Diyarbakır Prison, No. 5, which is intended to be turned into a museum.

Amed Bar Association president, Nahit Eren, read the joint statement, underlining that Diyarbakır Military Prison No. 5, which was opened on 4 July 1980 [just before the 12 September 1980 military coup], was the centre, especially after the coup, of serious human rights violations that will never be erased from the memory of the Kurdish people.

Eren said: "Diyarbakır Military Prison No. 5 is one of the most important places that will mediate the truth and confrontation mechanism in the country."

Eren said: "This prison, where people who think differently, especially Kurds, were imprisoned, is a living memory center where human rights violations occurred. Therefore, it is essential to keep this memory alive in order to expose the reality of what went on there, ensure confrontation and build a right approach based on human rights."

Pointing out that the idea of turning Diyarbakır Prison into a museum was brought onto the agenda from time to time by the ruling authorities in the past, Eren said: "We have recently learned that the prison was tendered to a private company to be converted into a 'Memorial and Ethnography Museum'."

Eren continued: "Civil society, professional and business organizations demand that Diyarbakır Military Prison No. 5 be transformed into a 'Human Rights Museum', based on its historical reality and as a place of truth and confrontation. For this purpose, we want those who witnessed and lived those years, victims and civil society organizations in the city to be included in the project phase."