Discrediting political opponents as alleged PKK sympathizers is part of Turkish President Erdoğan’s basic election campaign strategy. Elections will be held in Turkey on Sunday and the AKP government is threatened with losing power after two decades. The Kurdish liberation movement and the Alliance for Freedom and Democracy, in which the second largest opposition party HDP has joined forces with other progressive parties, are supporting CHP chairman Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu in the presidential elections. The alliance is pursuing the strategy of ending the Erdoğan era and getting a strong representation of its demands in parliament with the Green Left Party (YSP) instead of the HDP, which is threatened with a ban.
As a fact check Deutsche Welle reveals that Erdoğan is using a manipulated video during the election campaign in which an alleged closeness between his competitor Kılıçdaroğlu and the guerrilla commander Murat Karayilan is suggested. The DW article “Erdogan shows manipulated video of Kilicdaroglu” published on Tuesday said:
Just days before Turkey’s parliamentary and presidential elections, seen by many as the world’s most important elections this year, a video has sparked controversy. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan showed it at an election rally last Sunday. First, Erdogan can be heard addressing the crowd and asking, “Would my national and local citizens vote for these?” Then he gestures to a large screen behind him. There is what looks like Erdogan’s campaign footage main challenger, Kemal Kilicdaroglu. The opposition leader says: “Let’s go to the ballot box together.” After a few seconds there is a cut to a person in a military uniform. The sequence still appears to be part of Kilicdaroglu’s campaign video.
The second person is Murat Karayilan, a member of the Executive Council of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and commander of the central headquarters of the Kurdish guerrillas. The recording comes from an ANF video, the DW fact check states:
The video shows the PKK leader speaking about the start of the PKK’s armed struggle more than three decades ago, according to the website that published it – Kurdish news agency Firat. The article accompanying the video was published on August 15, 2021. In Erdogan’s manipulated video, Karayilan’s footage was likely taken from that video and taken out of context to give the impression that the PKK co-founder was supporting presidential candidate Kilicdaroglu.
The fact check concludes that at the campaign event, Erdoğan combined scenes from Kılıçdaroğlu’s campaign video “with an older video message from Karayilan and suggested a connection that does not exist” in order to garner votes from conservative and nationalist circles.
2023-05-11 02:29:07
#Erdoğan #ANF #video #campaign #manipulation
