Extended analysis: Turkey’s attack on the HDP further criminalizes the Kurds and Democratic Opposition
The Emergency Committee for Rojava strongly condemns Turkey’s attempt to ban the People’s Democratic Party (HDP), as well as the recent wave of repression targeting party members and elected officials. The Turkish government’s efforts to criminalize the popular opposition, and the Kurdish freedom movement in particular, amount to a move from authoritarianism to fascism. We urgently call on progressive organizations across the globe to condemn these actions in the strongest possible terms. We also call on President Biden and the United States Congress to take concrete steps to hold President Erdoğan and the Turkish government accountable.
A wave of repression
On March 17th, a top Turkish prosecutor filed a case in the Turkish Constitutional Court demanding the formal closure of the pro-Kurdish HDP, as well as a five-year political ban on more than 600 party members. On the same day, HDP parliamentarian and prominent human rights advocate Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu was forcibly removed from the Parliament, to be imprisoned shortly after. These proceedings come just weeks after Turkey’s military operations against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in February, after which over 700 members and supporters of the HDP were arrested in a single day on dubious charges of “terrorism”.
The HDP is the country’s third largest party, receiving 6 million votes in the last general election. The party has faced escalating repression ever since it secured a place in parliament in 2015, preventing President Erdoğan’s AKP (Justice and Development Party) from maintaining one-party rule. Following the electoral success of the HDP, as well as the military success of the Kurdish forces against ISIS in Northern Syria, Turkey halted the process of peace negotiations with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and attacked the HDP and other Kurdish civil society organizations. In 2016, HDP co-chairs Figen Yüksekdağ and Selahattin Demirtaş were imprisoned on charges of “leading a terrorist organization”, and they remain in prison to this day, along with dozens of other former and current parliamentarians. Since 2016, more than 10,000 HDP parliamentarians, elected officials, and 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 state has also attacked the locally elected HDP officials, who have played important roles in representing the local populations’ needs and political will in the region. Out of the 58 locally elected HDP officials in 2019 elections, 49 have so far been replaced by the state-appointed officials called kayyums, who have aided the Turkish military in criminalizing HDP members and supporters. 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 more broadly.
Turkey’s history of state terror
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 the PKK’s insurgency against the Turkish military started in 1984, following the coup d’etat of 1980 that harshly criminalized all democratic forms of opposition including Leftist and Kurdish organizations, student organizations and labor unions. Many of the founders and early symphatizers of the PKK were imprisoned during the coup in the infamous Diyarbarkir Prisons, experiencing long sentences and dehumanizing forms of torture. In addition to violently attacking those active in the Kurdish and Leftist movements, the Turkish state criminalized the whole Kurdish region after the coup, even banning the speaking of the Kurdish language. These measures intensified with PKK’s insurgency, and in 1987 a State of Emergency was established, which the government used to exert extreme powers over civilian life in the region. The military and paramilitary forces dramatically increased, checkpoints were established all around the towns and villages, and people were deprived of their most basic rights. Repression and torture in the villages, unaccounted murders, detainment and torture in police headquarters, checkpoints, food embargoes, forced evacuations, and burnings of villages and forests became common practices against the Kurdish population of Turkey in the 1990s. This state terror against the civilians and the forced displacement of 2 million Kurdish residents made any other method of struggle for Kurdish civil and political rights unviable within the borders of Turkey at that time.
During the 1990s, Turkey used charges of “terrorism” as a tactic to criminalize the legitimate struggle of an entire people to win self-determination and human rights from a state which would not even acknowledge their existence. Human rights lawyers, activists, and journalists were especially targeted, some tortured to death, others imprisoned on charges of being a “front” for the “terrorist” PKK. The same discourse is used against the HDP today and should therefore be understood not as a factual accusation, but as a public message that anyone who supports the rights of the Kurdish people will be treated as an enemy of the state. The Turkish state has used this discourse against Kurdish progressives and the parties that represent them since the founding of the HDP’s first predecessor party, the HEP (People’s Labor Party) in 1990, which was banned by the Turkish Constitutional Court in 1993. Since then the Kurdish activists founded six new parliamentary parties, all of which were banned under the same label of “terrorism”. The HDP, the seventh party in this tradition, is facing similar false accusations today.
Criminalization of Kurdish, Leftist, and Feminist Opposition
Erdoğan and the AKP are particularly threatened by the HDP not only because of its electoral success, but because of its association with the Kurdish freedom movement, the growing alliance between Kurds and the Turkish left and counterculture, and the inspiring achievement of democratic autonomy in Rojava/Northern Syria. Taken together, these developments represent a threat to Erdoğan’s ultra-nationalist agenda and his ruling party’s grip on power.
Since 2016, the AKP has moved to consolidate its power through a formal alliance with the fascist Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), as well as its monopolization of the media and repression of popular movements — not only the Kurdish freedom movement but also movements of women, students, workers and the LGBTQ community — who together make up much of the HDP’s popular base. The HDP’s feminist co-chair system and its steadfast advocacy for the rights of women are a particular threat to the Turkish right’s chauvinist far-right agenda. Just days after the proceedings against the HDP, Turkey announced its withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention (an international treaty for the protection of women) and the Turkish police violently attacked women protesting the withdrawal. In this context, we see the attempt to ban the HDP as an attack on the popular democratic front against fascism in Turkey, the last hope for a return to peace negotiations between the PKK and the Turkish state.
Time for action
We have been sorely disappointed by the relative inaction of the United States when it comes to Turkey’s human rights abuses, both those at home and in its war of aggression in Northern Syria. While the US State Department’s recent statement is a welcome first step, what is needed is concrete action. The United States holds an enormous amount of potential influence over Turkey, for which it must take responsibility.
We hereby call on President Biden and the United States Congress to take the following actions:
Call for an immediate end to Turkey’s attack on the HDP and its restoration to full legal status, as well as the resumption of peace negotiations with the PKK and the release of all political prisoners.
Pursue further sanctions against Turkey if the above actions are not taken.
Push for a formal review of Turkey’s NATO membership based on its continued failure to meet NATO’s official criteria of “a functioning democratic political system” and “fair treatment of minority populations”.
Immediately halt all military aid to Turkey.
The need for international solidarity
In addition to calling on US officials, we also call on all those who support the Rojava revolution to stand in solidarity with those struggling for freedom within Turkey. We must look beyond borders to understand that Turkey’s war of aggression in Northern Syria and its repression of the Kurds and the pro-Kurdish left at home are not two separate phenomena but a single strategy of political extermination which can only be defeated through international solidarity and united action.
Resistance is life! Berxwedan jîyan e!
Emergency Committee for Rojava
Click HERE for our short statement on this topic