Abdullah Demirbaş Abdullah Demirbaş Abdullah Demirbaş (born 1966, Diyarbakir, Turkey) was the former mayor of the municipality of Sur in the city of Diyarbakir, Southeast Turkey, of the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP). After graduating in sociology at Firat University in Elazig, Abdullah Demirbas worked as a philosophy teacher from 1987 to 2007, contributing to setting up the Mardin Branch of the Turkish Union of Teachers. When he was elected as Mayor of Sur in 2004, he made a commitment to his electorate to serve them in their own languages. On the 6.10.2006 the Sur municipal council decided that since the population
Bekir Coşkun in 1987 and moved to "Hurriyet" in 1993. In an article written some weeks before the July 2007 General Elections, he described AK Party supporters as "men who scratch their belly" (). After Abdullah Gül's victory in the presidential elections of 2007, Coşkun stated, "he will not be my President", upon which the Prime Minister Erdoğan retorted by saying "he should abdicate his citizenship and leave the country if he doesn't consider [Gul] as his President". This led to an outcry among supporters of secularism in the country that people who didn't share AK Party's ideology would no longer be