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Former Pro-Kurdish Leader in Turkey Sentenced As His Party Faces Possible Ban
Selahattin Demirtas, former leader of Turkey’s pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party, in a 2015 photo. Demirtas was sentenced on March 22, 2021 to three-and-a-half-years jail for insulting the Turkish president, according to his attorney. (John Thys/AFP via Getty Images)

Former Pro-Kurdish Leader in Turkey Sentenced As His Party Faces Possible Ban

Prosecutor requests pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party be shut down as Turkish president’s Justice and Development Party declines in popularity

The former leader of Turkey’s pro-Kurdish party was sentenced to more than three years in jail on Monday as the country faces international condemnation for moving toward banning his Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), but analysts told The Media Line the government is unlikely to change course solely due to such criticism.

The lawyer for Selahattin Demirtas, who is already behind bars on other, more serious charges, tweeted that Demirtas was given a three-and-a-half-year jail sentence for insulting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The announcement of the sentence came a day after a lawmaker from the pro-Kurdish HDP, Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu, was briefly detained by police as the government intensifies its crackdown on the party.

The HDP has played key roles in major political losses for Erdogan, whose party has slipped in the polls during the coronavirus pandemic.

That has forced Erdogan to increasingly rely on his ultranationalist coalition partner in parliament, which more strongly opposes the HDP.

The HDP suffered two blows last week when Gergerlioğlu was removed from parliament and a Turkish prosecutor filed a case with the Constitutional Court to shut the party down.

The prosecutor also requested 600 HDP members be banned from practicing politics for five years over alleged connections to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a militia which has waged a decades-long insurgency in Turkey.

“[The HDP] move together with the PKK terrorist group and other linked organizations, they act as a branch of the organization with the aim of breaking the unity of the state,” the prosecutor said in a statement, Reuters reported.

The HDP denies any connection to the PKK.

Before he was removed from his seat, Gergerlioğlu said in a message to The Media Line that the party would regroup and any closure would not take away votes from the party, the third largest in parliament.

“Peoples’ Democratic Party is a party that speaks the most important words about Kurdish issues, and whether you accept its policy or not … (t)he solution of the issue is inevitable, not through conflict, but on political grounds,” he said.

Turkey received international backlash for the move.

The European Union said in a statement that shutting down the HDP would “violate the rights of millions of voters in Turkey” and add to the “backsliding in fundamental rights.”

It comes as the two sides seek to improve ties.

Reuters reported on Thursday that the European Union would withhold sanctions against Ankara after Erdogan signaled he was interested in a more cooperative approach.

Tensions between Turkey and Greece, a member of the EU, heightened last year in the east Mediterranean over competition involving gas resources.

Aykan Erdemir, a former Turkish lawmaker from the main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), told The Media Line that Erdogan believes the EU will not back up its criticism of the HDP case with concrete action.

“Today’s European Union has absolutely no leverage over Turkey, simply because its ongoing appeasement policy has undermined its credibility,” said Erdemir, the senior director of the Turkey program for The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

The US also criticized the removal of Gergerlioğlu’s seat, as well as the possible ban of the HDP, with the US State Department saying in a statement that it “would unduly subvert the will of Turkish voters, further undermine democracy in Turkey, and deny millions of Turkish citizens their chosen representation.”

Erdemir says US President Joe Biden has a better chance than the EU of swaying Ankara because he has a proven track record of making human rights a priority.

In an interview with The New York Times in December 2019, Biden said he would support Turkey’s opposition.

“What I think we should be doing is taking a very different approach to [Erdogan] now, making it clear that we support opposition leadership. Making it clear that we are in a position where we have a way …  which was working for a while, to integrate the Kurdish population who wanted to participate in the process in their parliament,” Biden said.

“He has to pay a price,” he added.

Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) saw the political risk posed by the HDP when it first entered parliament in 2015, leading the AKP to lose its majority.

Yusuf Sarfati, an associate professor of comparative politics focusing on Turkey at Illinois State University, said declining poll numbers has likely led the AKP to believe it must eliminate the HDP in order to get a majority.

While pro-Kurdish parties have managed to reform after being shut down in the past, Sarfati told The Media Line the potential ban on hundreds of HDP politicians makes such a task much harder.

“They seem to want to curtail the ability of the Kurdish movement to regroup and affect the future of elections, at least in the short term,” he said.

 

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