A prominent Turkish-Kurdish singer and filmmaker slammed a government-aligned media campaign urging artists to support the recent disbanding of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), saying the country’s deeper problem is corruption, not terrorism.
In a lengthy statement posted on X on Saturday, Mahsun Kırmızıgül said he had always supported peace and opposed violence, but warned that systemic corruption has caused far more damage to Turkish society than the PKK’s decades-long armed insurgency.
His remarks came in response to a Friday opinion column by Zafer Şahin, a pro-government journalist, who named several prominent artists, including Kırmızıgül, for failing to comment on what he called Turkey’s “historic step” to end terrorism. The column framed their silence as a lack of civic courage.
“Corruption is ten times more dangerous than terrorism,” Kırmızıgül wrote. “In this country, three times more money was stolen through corruption than was spent on the internal conflict. Anyone who steals the future of the people is no different than a terrorist.”
The singer said he had long advocated peace through his songs and films, including at times when doing so risked backlash. He accused some of his critics of opportunism and hypocrisy, adding that “when I was saying ‘we are all brothers,’ they didn’t even know where they stood.”
Kırmızıgül also said poverty, not silence, was the real scandal, pointing to the struggles of pensioners, academics, judges, doctors, teachers and soldiers.
This comes after the Turkish government’s recent messaging campaign following the May 12 announcement by the PKK that it would disband and lay down arms. The group said the decision was made during a May 5–7 congress in northern Iraq, in response to a February call by its jailed leader Abdullah Öcalan.
Turkish officials have described the announcement as the beginning of a new era and emphasized that the process will be monitored by Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization, the Iraqi government and the Kurdistan Regional Government, without third-party oversight.
While some commentators view the move as a landmark development, others have raised concerns about the lack of transparency and the government’s use of the narrative to pressure public figures into political alignment.
Kırmızıgül is a well-known singer, actor and director whose career spans music, television and cinema, with a reputation for addressing social issues through his work.
Rising to fame in the 1990s with his emotional folk-pop ballads, he later transitioned into filmmaking, directing and producing box-office hits that explored themes like migration, war and ethnic tensions in Turkey.
As a public figure with Kurdish roots and a long-standing emphasis on peace and coexistence, Kırmızıgül carries symbolic weight in national conversations on conflict, identity and justice, making his defiant response to the government’s narrative on the PKK disbandment especially significant.