Before Presidential Elections, Kurds Seek a Courageous Candidate to Confront the Government
Just a few months before Turkey’s presidential election, Turkey’s Kurds are looking for a strong and courageous candidate to challenge the AKP government, after Kurdish-government disagreements and strained relations significantly. Last year, Turkish prosecutors called for the banning of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) – the third largest party in parliament – for alleged “terrorism” links, and just last week, a senior prosecutor asked judges to strip the HDP of government funding, leaving the party’s election campaign in limbo.
“We have six million voters (in the country of 85 million) and we want a courageous candidate to support the Kurds,” said Orhan Ayaz, who was elected mayor of Diyarbakir in 2019 but was not allowed to take office despite winning 72 % of the vote.
Criminalizing the Kurds
AFP confirmed that more than 60 other elected HDP officials suffered the same fate, with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government accusing them of “terrorism” and appointing HDP members to run towns and cities in their place. Thousands of HDP officials and supporters are behind bars, including former HDP partner leader Selahattin Demirtas, a co-speaker who ran against Erdogan in the 2016 elections from prison. Since the 1990s, nearly a dozen Kurdish parties have been banned or dissolved themselves in the face of prosecution.
According to AFP, the HDP won 12 per cent of the vote in the 2018 election – a share that could be denied the right to vote if the party is banned by June. The government accuses the party of “organic” ties to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a militia whose decades-long insurgency has been designated a “terrorist” organization by Washington and the European Union. The Turkish military also launched airstrikes on the PKK and its Kurdish allies in northern Iraq and Syria in response to a November bombing that killed six in the heart of Istanbul.
“These terrorist charges are criminalizing the HDP,” Ayaz said. “The PKK is a popular movement born of the pressure that the Kurds have suffered, and it has not fallen from heaven”. “We want a political solution.. The military road is not a solution, but you need a democratic system to silence the guns3.
Don’t be afraid
AFP confirmed that the vote of the Kurds, often described as the world’s largest stateless people, was often decisive in the recent Turkish elections, but Ayaz warned that the Kurds “will not support a party that does not support us,” and Erdogan’s Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has been in power since 2002, won 30 percent of the vote in Diyarbakir in 2018. A local businessman, who requested anonymity, warned that “the Kurds will not vote for their enemy,” but added that “they can remain neutral and that will be enough for Erdogan’s victory.”
Analyst Mesut Aziz Oglu said: Both the government and opposition parties fear being closely associated with the Kurds before the elections. The head of the Dijla Center for Social Research (Ditam) said: “The government – all governments, from the beginning of the republic until today – fear the Kurds and all their policies are based on this fear.. We don’t want to separate from Turkey,” he said, “but the opposition leaders don’t want to be seen with the Kurds either.
Abdullah Zeitoun, 34, a lawyer with the Diyarbakir Human Rights Association, fears tensions will rise during the election campaign. “This government does not tolerate any minor criticism,” said Zeitoun, who finds himself involved in more than a dozen political-related judicial cases.
