The scene summed up the plight of the pro-Kurdish
party that just three months ago broke the mould of Turkish politics but is now
caught up in an ever more vicious conflict between outlawed militants and the
state.
Selahattin Demirtas, joint leader of the People’s Democratic party or HDP, was on Thursday
stuck for hours on a barren hillside with several members of parliament
surrounded by armed riot police. The group were prevented from entering Cizre, a
town on the Syrian border at the heart of a battle between outlawed Kurdish
fighters and Turkish security forces.
Less than 12 hours previously, Turkish prosecutors had called for Mr Demirtas’s parliamentary immunity to be lifted, on
grounds that he had insulted the Turkish state and President Recep Tayyip
Erdogan and issued propaganda for a terrorist group, charges for which he could
face up to 19 years in jail.
It has been a hard fall for the party since its
success in June general elections, when it won hefty representation in
parliament, depriving the ruling AK party of the majority it had enjoyed since
2002. If the HDP manages to maintain its support in a November 1 revote, Mr
Erdogan’s days as Turkey’s undisputed leader could be at an end.
But in the meantime, the HDP is being attacked by
Mr Erdogan as in league with terrorists, while also effectively undermined by a
campaign of violence by the banned Kurdistan Workers party, or PKK, which has
claimed the lives of more than 100 security personnel since it ended a
ceasefire in July. The military in turn says it has killed more than 1,100 PKK
fighters. Meanwhile, violence has spread to Turkey’s largest cities, with mobs
torching HDP offices and attacking ethnic Kurds. On Thursday, a body allied to the PKK called
on Kurds, who account for perhaps 15 per cent of the country’s 77m population,
to “rise up” against the Turkish state.
Mr Demirtas faces problems on all sides. “The
PKK’s military commanders are unwilling to hand over the leadership of the
Kurdish movement to the HDP, while Erdogan also wants to curtail the HDP’s
success,” says Henri Barkey, director of the Middle East
programme at the Woodrow Wilson centre in Washington.
“But for Erdogan this is a lose-lose situation: either
the elections produce the same result and people will say he has created this
escalation for nothing or the HDP will fail to get into parliament and the
cities will blow up.”
Some analysts fear the violence in Cizre could
foreshadow further urban fighting to come. Amid a 24-hour curfew, the
government says at least 30 alleged terrorists have been killed in Cizre;
people in the town itself say they have had to keep the bodies of family
members, including a 10-year-old girl and a 53-year-old mother of seven, in
freezers and cold stores. Prevented from entering the town, Mr Demirtas and his
delegation have been unable to discover first hand.
Meanwhile the government shows no sign of letting
up in its campaign against Mr Demirtas and the HDP. “If you stand beside
terrorism you must be ready to pay the price,” Mr Erdogan declared this week.
That there are links between the HDP and the PKK is
not in dispute — the HDP openly acted as a go-between during the two years of
peace talks between the government and the PKK that preceded the June election.
Since then Mr Demirtas has made repeated calls for
the PKK to halt its attacks and for the Turkish military to allow the militants
to pull out of Turkey.
Despite the pressure, recent opinion polls show his
party holding strong at around the 13 per cent it scored in the June polls. The
AK party’s hard line also appears to be bearing fruit, with support apparently
rising between 3 and 4 percentage points over the 41 per cent scored in the
June poll — not quite enough yet to regain its majority.
Still, no one mistakes the situation for a stable
one.
“The government is trying to destroy the HDP and
that is the craziest thing from a national security perspective,” said Asli Aydintasbas,
an Istanbul-based commentator. “The HDP are the Kurds who wanted representation
in Ankara and envisioned their future in Turkey. But now they are facing all
sorts of problems: with this clampdown in the south-east how are they going to
get their people to vote?”
September 10, 2015
David O’Byrne in Istanbul
FINANCIAL TIMES
