Who Is Selçuk Mızraklı and Why Was He Kept Inside for Seven Years?

Comrade, Who Is Selçuk Mızraklı and Why Was He Kept Inside for Seven Years?

Tuesday morning, 8 September 2026. Dr Adnan Selçuk Mızraklı was released from Edirne F Type Closed Prison. He had been taken into custody on 21 October 2019; the execution of his sentence of 9 years, 4 months and 15 days was completed. The first sentence he spoke at the gate was not about himself: "The one who should be standing in front of this gate before me is Selahattin Demirtaş." That same evening he was met by a large crowd at Diyarbakır Airport, and in his first speech he listed three demands: end the isolation, remove the trustees, implement the court judgments.

Comrade, this piece is written for you.

A name is going round in the news today: Selçuk Mızraklı. He has been released, he is to be met at the airport in Diyarbakır, he shared a ward with Demirtaş. All of this is true. But if you begin to know a person from the day of their release, you will see them only as a "victim." Victimhood is a fact, not an identity. Without understanding who this man is, what he did, what he disturbed and what he stood against, you cannot understand what was done to him either.

Come, let us open the file from the beginning. The order is this: first the man, then the election, then the thing he exposed, then what this institution called trusteeship actually is, then the seven-year legal process, and then the class lesson to be drawn from all of it.

Who is this man?

Adnan Selçuk Mızraklı was born in Siverek in 1963. When he was three the family moved to Eskişehir because of his father's work; he completed his primary and secondary education there. He graduated from Hacettepe University Faculty of Medicine in 1988. In 1991 he went to Diyarbakır, completed his specialisation in general surgery at Dicle University (1991–1996) and worked there as a surgeon for more than twenty years. He is married with three children.

So the person we are talking about was formed not as a politician but as a doctor. Keep this in mind; both the file he was tried under and the tradition he represents come from here.

His life in professional organisations is not ordinary either. He served as head of the Diyarbakır Medical Chamber between 2008 and 2010 and took on duties under the roof of the Turkish Medical Association. You need to know what the TMA represents in Turkey: after 1980 it is the organisation that has defended the line of social medicine most consistently among the professional chambers. Social medicine looks for illness not in the body of the individual but in the conditions in which the individual lives; it defines health not as a service commodity but as a social right. To be a doctor in Diyarbakır in the 1990s was to be a doctor in a place where this principle was not theory but daily practice.

From 2000 onwards he took part in the Democratic Society Congress (DTK); he worked on the DTK's Health Commission. He was involved in the activities of the Mesopotamia Foundation. In July 2017 he was arrested on the grounds of his DTK membership; about two months later, in September 2017, he was released. Do not forget this detail, because the same allegations will confront you again in the 2019 file.

In the elections of 24 June 2018 he was elected MP for Diyarbakır from the HDP. Nine months later his party nominated him for the Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality; when he was elected, he left parliament in April 2019.

31 March 2019: What happened at the ballot box?

Look carefully at who was facing whom in this encounter, comrade. Because this was no ordinary election.

A trustee had been appointed to the Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality in November 2016. The elected co-mayors Gültan Kışanak and Fırat Anlı had been jailed and Deputy Governor Cumali Atilla had been installed in their place. Atilla ran the municipality for two and a half years. Then in 2019 he went to the ballot box as the AKP's candidate for mayor.

So of the two people facing each other at the ballot box, one was the person the state had appointed in place of the mayor the people had elected; the other was the candidate of the line the people wanted to elect again. The election was, in the full sense of the word, a vote on appointment versus election.

The result: Mızraklı 62.93 percent; Atilla 30.99 percent. The electorate rejected the trustee by a margin of two to one.

Note that figure down. Five months later, the will of that same electorate would be annulled by a letter from a ministry.

What did he expose?

Mızraklı received his certificate of election, entered the municipality, and his first act was to open the accounts of the trustee period.

On 16 April 2019 he shared a video showing the executive floor. An area used as a storeroom had been turned into a private bathroom for the mayor's office, and the office itself had been refurnished with luxury furniture and decoration. What he said was this: "They have built themselves a palace with the people's money. We will show all this luxury and waste to the people." The bill for the renovation was reported in the press as 2,127,000 lira; by another account the mayor's office alone cost 750,000 lira. Comrade, do not think of these figures in today's money; we are talking about a period in 2019 when a minimum-wage worker in Diyarbakır earned 24,000 lira a year.

But the mayor's office was the visible face of the matter. The real exposure was in the account book. During the trustee period the municipality's debt had risen close to 1 billion lira: 92.7 million to the State Hydraulic Works, 38.4 million to the electricity authority, 208.5 million lira in loans to banks. In the same period 1.08 billion lira of debt had accumulated in Van and 620 million in Mardin; three municipalities, 3 billion in total. Among the items entered in the records were 1,600 kilos of kadayıf and 92,000 lira worth of coffee cups.

Later a Court of Accounts report documented this: Diyarbakır Metropolitan's expenditure for 2018 was first shown as 876 million lira, and after correction it rose to 1.554 billion. Transactions worth 678 million lira had not been recorded in accordance with procedure. In a single year the purchase of goods and services jumped from 293 million to 690 million, personnel costs from 81 million to 170 million, and capital expenditure from 257 million to 606 million. In 2019, that is under the elected administration, total expenditure came back down to 709 million.

Now see this, comrade: what Mızraklı exposed was not a "waste scandal." It was the very nature of trusteeship itself. An administrator the people had not elected was transferring a budget the people could not audit into items the people could not see. A trustee is not an administrator who "takes the place of" the elected municipality; a trustee is the transformation of the municipal budget into a resource that cannot be held to account. Mızraklı lifted the lid on that resource.

Four months later he was removed from office.

What is a trustee?

You will hear this word a great deal; learn its meaning properly.

In civil law a trustee is the person appointed by a court in place of someone who is unable to manage their property or themselves. In Turkey the word took on another meaning after 2016: the governor or district governor appointed by the Interior Ministry in place of the elected mayor.

The legal basis is decree-law no. 674, issued during the state of emergency after 15 July (1 September 2016). That decree amended Article 45 of Municipal Law no. 5393: in place of a mayor suspended from office because of a "terror" investigation, instead of the municipal council electing a replacement from among its own members, it made direct appointment by the Interior Ministry possible. The state of emergency ended; the arrangement stayed.

Note this: suspension from office does not require a conviction. The opening of an investigation is enough. In other words, a prosecutor filing a case is sufficient to annul the verdict of 63 percent of the vote. Even if that same person is later acquitted, there is no provision for their return to office.

It was applied in three waves:

First wave (2016–2019): during the state of emergency, trustees were appointed to more than ninety municipalities held by the HDP and the DBP. Diyarbakır, Van and Mardin included.

Second wave (2019–2021): on 31 March 2019 the HDP won 65 municipalities. In the process that began on 19 August 2019 with Diyarbakır, Mardin and Van, by 2021 trustees had been appointed to 48 of those 65 municipalities. So the electorate said "we do not want trustees"; the answer was the appointment of trustees once again in place of three quarters of those elected.

Third wave (after 2024): following the elections of 31 March 2024, trustee appointments began again in Hakkari, Mardin, Batman, Halfeti, Tunceli, Ovacık, Van and this time in Esenyurt in Istanbul. The last example is important: once a method has been established, it does not stay in the region.

The historical origin of the institution should also be known. As Nuray Özdoğan wrote in Birikim, the trusteeship system carries the trace of the Inspectorates-General of the Republic's early years: a form of extraordinary administration, legislated in 1927, through which the centre governed the provinces directly. The records show that 90 percent of the appointments between 1930 and 1948 were concentrated in the Kurdish provinces. In other words, trusteeship is not the new but the renewed form of the suspension of local will in the Kurdish provinces.

And look at what it liquidates. When the trustees arrived, the first things closed were these: women's counselling centres, nurseries, multilingual municipal services, Kurdish-language theatre and cultural institutions, the women's co-chair system. Municipal employees were dismissed en masse. So trusteeship did not merely change a mayor; it took the municipality out of being an arena of social service and organisation and turned it into an apparatus for distributing tenders and posts.

19 August 2019: Removal from office

In the early hours of the morning the Interior Ministry published a press statement. Mızraklı in Diyarbakır, Ahmet Türk in Mardin and Bedia Özgökçe Ertan in Van had been suspended from office. The grounds were Article 127 of the Constitution and Article 47 of Law no. 5393. The accusation: the claim that municipal resources had been used to "support a terrorist organisation." The governors of the three provinces were appointed in their place; in Diyarbakır, Hasan Basri Güzeloğlu.

Let us add that Ahmet Türk was 77 years old that day, that he was first elected as an MP in 1973, and that he had been removed from office by a trustee before. Mızraklı, for his part, had held his certificate of election for four months.

There were protests in Diyarbakır lasting weeks; the municipal building was surrounded by police barricades. Record this image in your memory: a municipal building the elected mayor cannot enter, in which an appointed governor sits behind a barricade. This is the picture of trusteeship.

Arrest, trial, seven years

Now I will give you a table. This table is not the record of a legal process, but of something that imitates a legal process.

Date	What happened
July 2017	Arrested on the grounds of DTK membership; released in September 2017
24 June 2018	Elected HDP MP for Diyarbakır
31 March 2019	Elected Mayor of Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality with 62.93 percent
16 April 2019	Made public the trustee's executive floor and the municipality's debt balance sheet
19 August 2019	Suspended from office by decision of the Interior Ministry; the governor appointed as trustee
21–22 October 2019	Taken into custody in a dawn raid, handcuffed behind his back; jailed the next day
9 March 2020	Diyarbakır 9th High Criminal Court: 9 years, 4 months and 15 days for "organisation membership"
15 July 2020	Appeal rejected
April 2020 – September 2021	A separate "propaganda" case was opened (including an action against an execution in Iran); acquittal
February 2022	Transferred from Kayseri to Edirne F Type; the same ward as Demirtaş
December 2022	The 3rd Criminal Chamber of the Court of Cassation overturned the judgment (right of defence, digital evidence)
29 November 2023	Retrial: the same sentence
9 October 2024	The Court of Cassation upheld it; the sentence became final
2025	Application for probation rejected
8 September 2026	Sentence completed; released from Edirne

Look at what the file rests on, comrade. What is in the indictment? The statements of a secret witness (Ümit Akbıyık); the declaration of another witness that Mızraklı had operated on a wounded PKK member; membership of the DTK Health Commission; activities of the Mesopotamia Foundation; attendance at funerals; social media posts.

His lawyer Muhsin Bilal said this after the Court of Cassation upheld the sentence: at the retrial all the main accusations collapsed; what remained was the statement of a single secret witness, unsupported by any document. What is more, although the court had ruled that the witness be heard in the presence of the defence, the witness was heard in the defence's absence. As early as 2019 Human Rights Watch had written that the evidence in the indictment "did not support the claim of a connection to terrorism or of a crime having been committed."

One thing needs particular emphasis: the accusation of performing surgery. That a surgeon's operating on a wounded person brought before him can be counted as a crime is the defeat of the oldest principle of medical ethics — the obligation to treat without regard to who the patient is — at the hands of criminal law. The Ankara Medical Chamber described the arrest as being based on "fabricated allegations"; the TMA announced today that it welcomes the release "with satisfaction". Doctors' organisations have spoken this plainly because the matter is seen not as the matter of a politician but as a case opened against the medical profession itself.

That the Court of Cassation overturned the first judgment and then upheld the same sentence the second time round is instructive as well. The overturning decision accepted that the right of defence had been violated; the retrial produced the same result; this time the Court of Cassation upheld it. In other words, the law corrected the flaw it had itself identified and did not change the outcome. If a trial arrives at the same place even once the procedural error has been remedied, it is not procedure that determines the outcome.

The trusteeship narrative and the facts

This file will come to you in two languages. Let us put them side by side.

The trusteeship narrative	The facts
"Municipal resources were being transferred to a terrorist organisation."	Under the trustee, debt rose to 1 billion; the Court of Accounts found 678 million lira of irregular accounting; under the elected administration expenditure fell by half.
"Suspension from office is a temporary measure."	The courts did not review the measure because they deemed it "temporary"; in practice the temporariness lasted until the end of the electoral term.
"The law has given its judgment."	The Court of Cassation overturned the first judgment; the retrial imposed the same sentence; the only remaining basis is an undocumented secret witness statement.
"We respect the will of the electorate."	A mayor elected with 63 percent was able to serve four months; trustees were appointed to 48 of 65 municipalities.
"The trustee brought services."	Women's centres, nurseries, multilingual services and cultural institutions were closed; employees were dismissed en masse.
"This is a security matter specific to the region."	In 2024 a trustee was appointed to Esenyurt in Istanbul.

The question beneath every row is the same: In whose hands is the budget? Under whose audit? For whose benefit?

The class lesson: what is trusteeship the name of?

Now let us come to the real point, comrade. If you read trusteeship only as "pressure on Kurdish politics," you read it correctly but incompletely. Marxist analysis takes one more step and asks: which material relation does this apparatus regulate?

First: the municipality is the nearest tap of capital accumulation. Tenders, zoning, land, rent, subcontracting agreements, personnel recruitment. In Turkey a significant part of construction and service capital is fed directly by municipal budgets. An elected administration is obliged to keep this tap open to audit, to the council, to the opposition, to the press. A trustee, on the other hand, means an unaudited tap. The 678 million lira of unrecorded accounting the Court of Accounts found is not an "oversight"; it is the apparatus's function.

Second: trusteeship is the institutional form of the transfer of public resources to clientelist networks. Sixteen hundred kilos of kadayıf may sound comic; it is not. That item shows that the municipality has been turned from an institution of service into an institution of hospitality and the distribution of loyalty. In Mardin, 1.4 million lira from the municipal budget was spent on hosting party officials. This is small but conclusive proof of what the trustee was there for.

Third: what trusteeship liquidates is the municipality's common character. Nurseries, women's centres, cheap bread, services in the mother tongue, theatre, cultural centres: these bring no profit, but they lighten the burden of reproduction in poor neighbourhoods and bind people to one another. It is no coincidence that these are the first things closed when a trustee arrives. Because this is where the material ground of organisation lies. To purge the municipality of services that produce no profit is at the same time to disorganise the neighbourhood.

Fourth: trusteeship is a permanent form of government in the guise of a "temporary measure." The state of emergency ended in 2018; the municipal article of decree-law no. 674 remained. The measure became the norm. This is the selective permanence of the state of emergency: the law is not suspended for everyone; it is suspended for those who organise, who object, who demand accountability. In Diyarbakır in 2019, in Esenyurt in 2024, tomorrow in a workers' town on strike.

Fifth and most important: Mızraklı's crime was demanding accountability. Leave the witness statements in the indictment aside and look at the order of events. In April 2019 he opened the trustee's account book; in August 2019 he was removed from office; in October 2019 he was jailed. A mayor making public the balance sheet of the trustee period before the Court of Accounts does is the thing the apparatus fears most: audit. Criminal law worked here not to punish a crime but to deter auditing. So that the next elected mayor thinks twice before opening the account book.

Comrade, the conclusion that follows is this: trusteeship was born as an apparatus of the "Kurdish question" but it operates as an apparatus of class. It takes public resources out of audit, liquidates common services, dries up the material ground of organisation and punishes those who demand accountability. None of this is ethnic; all of it is class. That it is being tested in the Kurdish provinces is because resistance is most organised there.

Being a doctor, demanding accountability

There is one more detail we do not want to skip.

Mızraklı's medical practice is not a piece of "professional" information in this file; it is the political line itself. The Diyarbakır Medical Chamber was one of the institutions that documented, during the curfews of 2015–2016, that the wounded in Sur and Cizre could not be reached and that ambulances were not let through. This is exactly where the TMA's line of social medicine was tested: a doctor looks not at the patient's identity but at their wound. This principle has never meant "impartiality"; on the contrary, it has meant standing with the weakest.

That one of the allegations he was tried for was "operating on a wounded person" is symbolic for this reason. The state defined the doctor's obligation as a crime. The reason Mızraklı has been so strongly claimed by doctors' organisations is that the case is seen as an attempt to redraw the boundaries of the medical profession.

What he did as mayor was a continuation of the same thing: making a diagnosis. Looking at the trustee's account book and naming the illness. This is a surgeon's work.

What happened today, what will happen tomorrow?

On 5 September, announcing Mızraklı's release, Demirtaş wrote this: "For the last five years I was in his care, and he in mine. Now he is in yours." The night before his release Mızraklı shared three words: "Tomorrow, again, with hope and love."

In the morning, at the gate of Edirne F Type, his family was waiting, along with DEM Party spokesperson Ayşegül Doğan, deputy group chairs Gülistan Kılıç Koçyiğit and Sezai Temelli and MPs Cengiz Çandar, Saruhan Oluç and Serhat Eren; in their hands was a banner reading "There is no half freedom — freedom for Demirtaş." The first sentence Mızraklı spoke at the gate was for someone else: "The one who should be standing in front of this gate before me is Selahattin Demirtaş. He is the beloved of this people." As Demirtaş's ward companion of five years, he also conveyed his message: "Whatever happens, democracy; whatever happens, peace; whatever happens, a solution."

The day's programme reads like a political genealogy: he travelled from Edirne to Istanbul; his schedule included a visit to the sociologist İsmail Beşikçi and a visit to the grave of Sırrı Süreyya Önder. Towards 9.30 in the evening he was met at Diyarbakır Airport. Among those who met him were the Co-Mayor of Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality Serra Bucak, DEM Party MPs Meral Danış Beştaş, Cengiz Çandar and Rüştü Tiryaki, and YENİ Party MP Sezgin Tanrıkulu. During the day the DEM Party Co-Chairs Tülay Hatimoğulları and Tuncer Bakırhan and YENİ Party Chair Özgür Özel called him on the telephone; the TMA announced that it welcomed the release "with satisfaction."

The airport speech, comrade, deserves careful reading. There is not a single sentence of complaint about the seven years; what he said was this: "Seven years have passed. I know how to count, and I know their hours very well too." Then he made a doctor's sentence: "Peace repairs; conflict batters, destroys, cripples." He demanded an end to the isolation on İmralı, the removal of the trustees and the implementation of court judgments: "The law needs to be strengthened and to be trustworthy." For those still inside: "Until all our friends in the dungeons are free, our heads will remain bowed. We will not leave them alone." And the closing: "Let us now sow peace in this soil, nourish its mercy with love, and let abundance burst forth from these lands."

So in his first speech after seven years he listed three concrete demands: end the isolation, remove the trustees, implement the court judgments. These are not the wishes of a victim; they are the continuation of the programme he held on the day he was removed from office.

It would be wrong to read this release as an "amnesty" or a "softening." Mızraklı was not pardoned; he served his sentence to the end. His application for probation was rejected in 2025. What has happened today, then, is not the state taking a step back but a sentence running out on the calendar. What his lawyer said after the Court of Cassation upheld the sentence holds today as well: "This decision shows that the discourse of normalisation is an illusion."

We are in the days when Turkey is talking about a "process." Comrade, the measure of the process is not statements. The measure is this: is Demirtaş inside? Are the trustees in place? Is the municipal article of decree-law no. 674 in force? Can an elected mayor return to office when acquitted? As long as the answers to these four questions do not change, the release of a surgeon is the result not of the process but of the calendar.

So what do we demand?

None of the following changes the order; all of them defend today's position. When a position is lost, the first to be crushed is the least organised.

1. Repeal the trusteeship provision added to the Municipal Law by decree-law no. 674. Return to the principle that the council elects a replacement from among its own members for a suspended mayor. The will of the electorate cannot be suspended by a prosecutor's file.

2. No suspension from office without a final conviction; those acquitted must return to their posts. The justification of "there is an investigation" should not be enough to annul the verdict of 63 percent of the vote.

3. Hold the trustee periods to account. The 678 million lira of irregular accounting documented by the Court of Accounts in Diyarbakır, the debts in Van and Mardin, the hospitality expenditure: responsibility for these must be established before the courts. Demanding accountability is not a crime; failing to give an account is.

4. A secret witness statement must not on its own be the basis of a conviction; a statement taken in the absence of the defence must not count as evidence. This was the only remaining basis of the Mızraklı case; tomorrow this method will be applied to everyone.

5. Release Selahattin Demirtaş and everyone held inside despite an ECtHR judgment. The sentence Mızraklı spoke at the gate is not a courtesy; it is a sentence of programme.

6. And directly to us: the nurseries, women's centres, cultural institutions and multilingual services liquidated by the trustees were not merely "municipal services"; they were the material ground of organisation. That ground has to be built not only by winning municipalities but with our own hands in the neighbourhood, the workplace, the professional chamber and the union. The one thing that cannot be closed down when a trustee arrives is what the people have built themselves.

A last word

Young comrade, if only one thing from this piece is to stay in your mind, let it be this:

Selçuk Mızraklı was elected with 63 percent of the vote, opened the trustee's account book, was removed from office four months later, spent seven years in prison and was held inside until the last day of his sentence.

Trusteeship is not a "temporary measure" but a permanent class apparatus that takes public resources out of audit and punishes those who demand accountability. It was born in the Kurdish provinces; in 2024 it reached Esenyurt. What determines where it will stop is not the law but the strength of resistance.

And like medicine, demanding accountability is an obligation too. An order that counts treating the wounded as a crime counts demanding accountability as a crime as well. Defending both is part of the same work.

A surgeon left Edirne today and returned to Diyarbakır. The account book he closed seven years ago is still open. What will close it is not the courts but those of us who learn to read that book and organise the demand for accountability.

That is why his file is your file.

In comradeship