Turkey's probe into pro-secular tycoon goes beyond crude Kurdish joke
Rahmi Koc is under investigation after a widely condemned joke about Kurdish women, but critics say the case reflects deeper tensions over free expression and selective justice in Turkey.
Rahmi Koc, the multi-billionaire patriarch of Turkey’s wealthiest family to rise from the modern Republic’s first generation of entrepreneurs, is facing criminal charges over a tired trope widely seen as insulting to Kurdish women.
The joke shared by the 95-year-old during the opening of a new hospital built by his conglomerate in Izmir went something like this: A Kurdish woman goes to the doctor for an examination. The doctor asks her to undress behind a curtained screen. The woman responds, “Doctor, sir, you undress first.”
A video leaked online of Koc guffawing together with Binali Yildirim, a former prime minister from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), unleashed fury among Kurds.
Demonstrations have erupted in several cities, including Diyarbakir, the largest in Turkey’s Kurdish-majority southeast. In Istanbul, enraged activists projected the slogan "Jin, Jiyan, Azadi" (“Women, Life, Freedom”) onto the bridge closest to his Ottoman-era palazzo on the Bosporus. The slogan was popularized during the mass protests triggered in Iran by the September 2022 death in custody of Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini.
