Huseyin Çelebî was a pioneer of the Association of Students from Kurdistan (YXK) in Europe and a writer. His mother was Turkish and his father was Kurdish.[1]

Following the Dersim Massacre in 1938, his family emigrated to central Anatolia. Later, they emigrated again to Istanbul before eventually moving to Germany in the 1960s.

He was born to a family from Dersim in 1967 in the city of Hamburg in Germany to a Turkish mother and a Kurdish father. He attended high school in Hamburg, and then went to the Fachoberschule for Social Pedagogy and started his studies at the beginning of 1986.[2]

Because of his father's political activism, Çelebî became interested in politics. At the age of 7, he went with his father and a family friend to a demonstration against the deportation of 169 Kurds from Turkey to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.[3]

Çelebi was one of the first members of the Kurdistan Students’ Union (YXK) in Europe.[3]

In 1988 he was arrested and prosecuted in the Kurdish Trial in Düsseldorf for membership of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK),[4] and in 1990 he was released. Huseyin Celebi joined the Kurdistan Freedom Movement in the summer of 1991, and was killed in 1992.

Legacy

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The Huseyin Çelebî Literature and Poetry Festival has been organised by the Kurdistan Students’ Union (Yekîtiya Xwendekarên Kurdistan - YXK) since 1993.

The 2017 Huseyin Çelebî Literature and Poetry Festival in London was dedicated to the memory of the British-Kurdish filmmaker Mehmet Aksoy, and was the first time the festival was held outside of Turkey.[5][6][3]

Resources

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Biography in German at the YXK web page Archived 2020-09-25 at the Wayback Machine

References

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  1. ^ "Hüseyin Celebi Literature Festival". huseyin-celebi.blogspot.co.uk. Retrieved 2017-10-21. Hüsein: Çelebi wurde am 22. September 1967 als Sohn einer türkischen Mutter und eines kurdischen Vaters in Hamburg geboren, wo er bis zu seinem 18.Lebensjahr aufwuchs.
  2. ^ "Hüseyin Celebi". www.nadir.org. Retrieved 2017-10-21.
  3. ^ a b c Society, People’s Printing Press. "Revolutionising Kurdish identity through art". Archived from the original on 2017-10-20. Retrieved 2017-10-21.
  4. ^ ""Ich spucke auf Ihre Glatze"". FOCUS Online (in German). Retrieved 2020-10-17.
  5. ^ "Literature Festival in London dedicated to Mehmet Aksoy". ANF News. Retrieved 2017-10-21.
  6. ^ Question, Kurdish. "25th Huseyin Celebi Literature and Poetry Festival in London". Retrieved 2017-10-21.