“Kurdish Political Movement Arrests: Turkey’s Crackdown Before Crucial Elections”

Police agents arrested more than a hundred people from the Kurdish political movement on Tuesday morning accused of being part of the network of the PKK armed group. The arrests come less than three weeks before the crucial elections on May 14, which Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan faces against in polls after two decades in power. For this reason, the main Kurdish formation in Turkey, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), has maintained that the arrests are politically motivated.

Among the detainees are several journalists from the newspapers New life y Being yourself (the only one published in Kurdish in Turkey) and the news agencies Jin News and Mezopotamya, including the owner of the latter. There are also at least half a dozen lawyers, activists from various social organizations and even theater actors. Among the detained politicians are the HDP vice-president, Özlem Gündüz, a member of the central committee and “dozens of militants”, denounced the Kurdish party in a statement.

The arrests occurred in simultaneous raids in 21 provinces of the country under the coordination of the Diyarbakir Prosecutor’s Office (the main Kurdish city in Turkey). According to the letter from the Prosecutor’s Office, quoted by the Turkish news agency DHA, the detainees are accused of “providing legal protection”, “making propaganda” and collaborating in “60 street acts” of the PKK, a group included in the list of terrorist organizations. of Turkey and the European Union. Several of the lawyers are considered suspected of having promoted, together with an association, the diversion of funds from various municipalities controlled by the HDP to the armed organization (practically all the municipalities obtained by this party in the last local elections have been intervened by the Ministry of the Interior in recent years). Others arrested are accused of having helped the children of four families take to the mountains to join the PKK.

The Diyarbakir Bar Association has declared that the detention of several of its members is “illegal” and “arbitrary”, has accused the Prosecutor’s Office and the supervising court of “abusing” their prerogatives and has denounced that they have skipped all the procedural guarantees, having decreed the secrecy of the proceedings and preventing lawyers from accessing the details of the accusations against their clients.

The HDP has described the arrests as a “new political coup against the May 14 elections.” “This is an operation against the elections and the popular will. It is a clear intimidation and a threat to society because of their political preferences. It is no coincidence that the targets are simultaneously lawyers, charged with protecting the ballot box against irregularities, journalists, charged with informing the public, and politicians fighting against the AKP. [el partido de Erdogan]”, denounces the Kurdish formation.

The main polls of the last two weeks place the intention to vote for Erdogan between 38% and 46% compared to his main rival, the center-left Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, who would obtain between 44% and 49%, so it would be necessary a second round of voting on May 28. The HDP has not presented its own candidate, giving its tacit support to Kiliçdaroglu, and it will not contest the legislative elections with these acronyms either. This is due to the fact that the Constitutional Court plans to issue a ruling in the coming weeks on a lawsuit by the Prosecutor’s Office that could culminate in its illegalization and the disqualification of hundreds of party cadres.

Instead, it will present itself under the name of the Green Left Party (YSP), something that will prevent it from appointing auditors at the polling stations as it is a formation without parliamentary representation. Of course, the polls predict that it will maintain the majority of the votes achieved in 2018 (around 10%), something that would allow it to have the key to the hemicycle, since the polls show that neither the government alliance nor the main opposition platform They will win an absolute majority of seats.

Kiliçdaroglu has promised that, if elected, he will try to resolve the Kurdish issue through parliamentary negotiations and that he will release former HDP leader Selahattin Demirtas, who has been detained for almost seven years, despite the fact that the European Court of Human Rights has ruled on his release. . For his part, Demirtas has promised that, if the opposition wins, he will call for the PKK to unilaterally lay down its arms or withdraw its militants from Turkey and that all negotiations on the Kurdish conflict take place exclusively within the parliamentary framework. Previous initiatives to end the Kurdish armed struggle (in 2009 and between 2013 and 2015) were carried out through contacts between the governments led by Erdogan and the PKK itself, with the participation of the HDP as a messenger, but in all cases the peace processes ended in failure.

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