In a poster removal decision by a Turkish court, the early 20th century German Marxist theorists and revolutionaries Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin have surprisingly been defined as PKK members.
Turkish media outlets have reported that the eastern province of Bitlis' Criminal Court of Peace decided to collect and remove the posters prepared by the city's pro-Kurdish HDP-run municipality for International Women's Day on March 8.
The court decision stated that the posters included the pictures of three PKK members Sakine Cansız, Fidan Doğan and Leyla Söylemez. The three women, who were among the executives of the PKK terror organization, were contentiously shot dead in Paris on January 10, 2013.
The decision also included the strange definition of "unidentified, but understood as being members of the [terrorist] organization" for Luxemburg and Zetkin, whose pictures were also used in the poster. The decision is unexpected since both Luxemburg and Zetkin died several decades before the founding of the PKK.
The PKK, founded in 1978, is designated as a terrorist group by a large number of countries along with the U.S., the EU and NATO.
Luxemburg and Zetkin were among the leading figures of Germany's Spartacist movement and among the founders of Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in 1918 following the split in the German left, namely in the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) due to differences of opinion over continuing World War I. Following the unsuccessful Spartacist revolt, Luxemburg was killed by the paramilitary Freikorps in 1919, at least 60 years before the PKK's foundation. Zetkin died in Moscow in 1933, where she had fled following Nazi takeover in the same year.
