On 17 March, a top prosecutor filed a case with Turkey’s Constitutional Court demanding the closure of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), as well as a five-year political ban on more than 600 party members. Around the same time, HDP parliamentarian and prominent human rights advocate Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu was forcibly removed from parliament, and later detained.
These proceedings came just weeks after Turkey’s failed military operations in northern Iraq against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in February and the arrest of more than 700 members and supporters of the HDP in a single day (14 February) on dubious charges of “terrorism”.
The HDP is the country’s third-largest party, receiving six million votes in the last general election in 2018. It has faced mounting repression ever since it first won seats in parliament in 2015, preventing President Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) from maintaining a single-party majority.
Since 2016, more than 10,000 HDP parliamentarians, elected officials and party members have been imprisoned, and some 6,000 are still in prison today. Arrests have become so frequent, and so widespread, that the party has “lost its ability to keep count” the HDP press office told openDemocracy.
In July 2015, following the electoral success of the HDP, as well as the military success of the Kurdish forces against ISIS in northern Syria, Turkey halted its peace negotiations with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
In November of the same year, Turkish authorities claimed that several neighbourhoods and towns in the Kurdish region had come under the control of the PKK. It declared 127 areas special security zones closed to civilian access, and then launched a full-scale military operation against the civilians in these areas. According to NGOs and local sources, thousands of people were killed and over a million people’s rights to life, education, travel and health were violated during this period.
In May 2016, the Turkish Parliament voted to remove parliamentary immunity from more than 150 MPs then under investigation for criminal offences, including 55 from HDP. This vote came after a sharp increase in applications by prosecutors to investigate HDP members of parliament. Later that year, the party’s co-leaders, Figen Yüksekdağ and Selahattin Demirtaş, were imprisoned on charges of “leading a terrorist organisation”. They remain in prison to this day, along with dozens of other former and current parliamentarians.
The imprisonment of HDP personnel was followed by an attack on locally elected officials. In September 2016, Decree no. 674 allowed provincial governors – who are not elected by the people, but appointed by the interior minister and the president – to take direct control of municipalities suspected of supporting “terrorism”. As a result, democratically elected mayors who played important roles in representing their local population’s needs and political will were suspended, removed and replaced by state-appointed officials called kayyums.
More than 100 mayors elected in 2014 and 2019 were imprisoned on charges of “terrorism” and replaced by kayyums. The first action of many of these kayyums was to remove the Kurdish name of the town from the municipal government sign. This was followed by the closure – without explanation – of municipally funded community facilities, including women’s centres offering support to victims of domestic violence, crèches and cultural centres.
Turkey’s history of state terror
The assault on the HDP is only the latest iteration of a decades-long campaign of violence and persecution against the Kurdish freedom movement, and progressive movements in Turkey in general. The government’s efforts to criminalise the HDP and the popular opposition amount to a move from authoritarianism to fascism.
For decades, the Turkish state has used the existence of the PKK as a pretext for repression of the Kurdish community as a whole, and of anyone who supports their struggle for basic rights within Turkey.
While the PKK undeniably represents the militant wing of the Kurdish movement, it should not be forgotten that its insurgency against the Turkish military started in 1984, following the 1980 military coup that harshly criminalised all democratic forms of opposition, including Leftist and Kurdish organisations, student groups and labour unions.
As a result of the coup, many of the founders and early sympathisers of the PKK were imprisoned in the infamous Diyarbarkir Prison in south-eastern Turkey, and experienced long sentences and dehumanising forms of torture.
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Ozlem Goner Arthur Pye | Radio Free (2021-04-21T00:00:00+00:00) Banning the pro-Kurdish HDP in Turkey is a move towards fascism. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2021/04/21/banning-the-pro-kurdish-hdp-in-turkey-is-a-move-towards-fascism/
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