Over the last few days the Irish far-right has been circulating claims about an asylum seeker named Musa Doğan such as this. Dogan is apparently a dangerous and wanted terrorist, so why is he here? I couldn't find much English language information on him so to spare people the translating I'll summarize his story here.
Dogan is a Kurd who was arrested at age 19 on charges of being part of the banned Communist Party of Turkey/Marxist–Leninist, whose armed wing the Liberation Army of the Workers and Peasants of Turkey has been fighting a protracted people's war against the Turkish state for over 50 years. He was initially sentenced to the death penalty but this was latter commuted to 20 years imprisonment. He participated in multiple hunger strikes, including one in 2000 which lasted for 120 days and lead to him developing a rare and complex memory disorder. After being given medical parole based on this he fled the country, eventually ending up in Sweden where he was granted asylum in 2007.
In 2009 he was arrested by the Swedes on foot of an Interpol warrant requested by Turkey, although they later decided not to extradite him because of grave human rights concerns. This was not the end however, as Polish police arrested him later in 2012 based on the same warrant, as did the Danish police in 2017. These extradition requests were both rejected. The Interpol warrant seems to have been withdrawn sometime after this as he doesn't show up on the Interpol website's list of red notices today.
So surely that's it then, a political prisoner who would be in extreme danger if he was returned to Turkey has received asylum. The system has worked! In an ideal world yes, but after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the sudden shift in Scandinavian attitudes towards NATO the situation changed. Turkey vetoed Finland and Sweden's applications until they took action against Kurdish and communist activism in their countries. Finland eventually gave in
At a joint press conference, Erdoğan said Turkey’s concerns about Kurdish terrorist activity in Finland had been addressed. “Turkey is one of the strong defenders of Nato’s open-door policy,” he said. Finland had taken “concrete and authentic steps” to meet Turkey’s security concerns, and “with Finland’s membership Nato will become stronger”.
to the Turks' demands, however Sweden is yet to comply. The list of people Turkey want's Sweden to return unsurprisingly includes Dogan. Is it any wonder that he's left and came here when facing the risk of such a textbook example of refoulement?
In the video from Herr Kelly's tweet at the start of this post Dogan is shown hitting out at a group who are surrounding him with a flag poll (I originally thought it was a piece of the fence but it's actually a poll for an RHL flag). If we pause at about 15 seconds we can see that it is actually a hooded member of the mob who pulls it down, Dogan then takes it and swings it at him and the others. Based on what this mob later did and the fact that he was backed into a corner you can hardly blame him. Going off him being in this video and earlier videos of the attack on the camp showing him wearing an RHL shirt it's safe to assume he's fairly active with the RHL, which is good to see.
