Turkey locks up Kurdish mayors

mis à jour le Vendredi 16 octobre 2020 à 18h51

Economist.com

Of the 65 mayors elected last year on a Kurdish party’s ticket, 59 have been forced out or detained

IN CITIES EVERYWHERE In eastern Turkey, this is no longer an unusual scene. The local mayor, holding a bag full of clothes and a toothbrush, the bare essentials for a long stay in prison, leaves his home before dawn, accompanied by a group of police officers, and disappears in a van . The scene most recently took place on September 25 in Kars, a town near the Armenian border, where police arrested Ayhan Bilgen, who was elected last year. A small crowd gathered to say goodbye. “Kars is proud of you,” the song began. Dozens of other members of Turkey’s largest Kurdish party, the People’s Democratic Party (HDP), including three former parliamentarians, were arrested on the same day.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan believes he is on the verge of burying the dream of Kurdish autonomy both inside and outside the country’s borders. The army took care of the Kurdish insurgents, known as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a series of violent blows. State prosecutors paralyzed Kurdish politics through the courts. Sixty-five mayors were elected on HDPticket to last year’s local elections. At least 59 of them have been forced to leave their posts or locked up, or both. Several former parliamentarians are also behind bars. “The government … is using the judiciary to try to neutralize the HDP and intimidate all the opposition, ”writes Selahattin Demirtas, the former party leader, from a prison in western Turkey, where he has languished since 2016. (Mr. Demirtas communicates with the outside world through of his lawyers.) “The situation that we and our recently arrested friends face has nothing to do with the law.

Officially, the charges against the HDP politicians gathered in recent weeks date back to 2014, when the party called for protests after ISIS forces besieged the mostly Kurdish-populated Syrian border town of Kobane, as Turkish tanks watched in hundreds of yards his hands. At least 37 people across Turkey have been killed after Kurdish and Turkish nationalists took to the streets. The government has now decided to hold the set HDP leadership responsible for violence.

 

His motives seem largely political. “They want to prevent the HDP to function and disrupt the structure of the opposition coalition, ”says Galip Dalay, member of the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin. As a de facto partner in an alliance led by Turkey’s main secular party and nationalists who broke away from a party allied with Mr. Erdogan, the Kurds helped propel the opposition to a string of election victories. last year, notably at Istanbul City Hall. . Mr Erdogan now hopes to cause a split in the alliance by exploiting the reluctance of his main opponents to openly align with the HDP, which many Turks consider to be the PKKpolitical arm of. (Turkey, America and EU Take into account PKK being a terrorist group.) “If the rest of the opposition criticizes the arrests, the government will say it is on the side of the terrorists,” says Vahap Coskun, an academic. “And if they don’t, they risk being separated from the HDP. “

The repression in the country went hand in hand with military interventions abroad. In the mountains of northern Iraq, Turkey has stepped up airstrikes and drone strikes against PKK fortresses. In northern Syria, he launched three separate offensives against the group’s offshoot, destroying his dream of a Kurdish state along the Turkish border. Mr. Erdogan is also involved on other fronts. It has troops operating in Libya and it is also deeply involved in the renewed conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the contested enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. After nearly two weeks of fighting in and around the enclave, a ceasefire is now in effect, although violations are reported.

Mr. Erdogan thinks he has the PKK and the HDP On the ropes. “We have completely destroyed the morale of the terrorist group,” boasted its interior minister last month. But the government has an intractable problem – the Kurds themselves. In every parliamentary election since 2015, the HDP was able to count on the votes of 5 to 6 million people, the vast majority of whom are Kurds. Even today, with its leaders in prison, the party votes above 10%, enough to make it the third or fourth group in parliament. Mr. Erdogan reigns on the battlefield and in the courts. But he has no answer to the Kurds at the polls. ■

This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline “Wearing a Different Chain”