Turkey’S Main Opposition Party’S Youth Branch Visits Greek Pm

- Representatives of the main opposition Republican People’s Party’s (CHP) Youth Branch visited Greek’s new Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras in Athens and handed him a letter written by the family of a Gezi victim.

CHP Youth Branch head İrfan İnanç Yıldız, deputy chairs Nazlı Kiran and Sinan Öztürk and Foreign Relations Commission head Gökçe Gökçen paid a visit to Tsipras in the early hours of Feb. 11, right after Tsipras’ government received a vote of confidence in parliament.

Greeting the Turkish youth representatives by saying “Kardeş” (sibling) in Turkish, Tsipras said he intended to visit Turkey and would want to once again meet the representatives when he’s there.

“You have been a source of musing for youth in Turkey and Europe. We are here to form an international peace, labor and democracy bloc” said the CHP youth branch representatives.

Tsipras responded by saying they were expanding the leftist movement with the youth’s energy.

“You have that energy” Tsipras told them.

The representatives also handed Tsipras a placard showing photos of Turkey’s Gezi Park victim Berkin Elvan and Greece’s 2008 clashes’ victim Alexandros Grigoropoulos, and a letter written by Elvan’s parents to Tsipras, which stressed the importance of friendship, brotherhood and solidarity.

The 15-year-old Grigoropoulos was killed by a policeman’s bullet on the evening of Dec. 6, 2008, in Exarchia, a central Athens neighborhood of bars and cafes. Within a few hours of his death, riots spread from the Greek capital to several cities across the country, with police apparently powerless to prevent youths from smashing, looting and burning stores in violence that continued for two weeks.

Elvan sustained a head injury from a gas canister as he went to buy bread during a police crackdown against Gezi Park protesters in Istanbul on June 16, 2013. Elvan had turned 15 while in a 269-day-long coma, which ended with his death on March 11, 2014.

The CHP youth branch also visited Minister of Productive Reconstruction, Environment and Energy Panagiotis Lafazanis and held a meeting with the ruling Syriza’s Youth Branch that lasted for three hours.