As Aysel Tugluk’s Imprisonment Drags On, The HDP’s Prognosis Looks No Better
On October 15, Aysel Tugluk, former BDP/HDP MP for Van and Amed, was sentenced to 20 months in prison, in addition to the 10-year sentence she is currently serving, for allegedly spreading terrorist propaganda. Her party, the People’s Democratic Party (HDP), is currently on trial at the mercy of Ankara for unproven PKK ties and violence during anti-ISIS protests, and has another 10 MPs in jail, as well as thousands of members similarly imprisoned across the country, their municipalities confiscated, and more. It begs the question, what did the HDP do to deserve all this?
In 2013, in spite of the war raging in Syria, Turkey looks to be calm, as the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) insurgency is years behind, and the peace process is in full swing. The Justice and Development Party (AKP) that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan belongs to is currently very friendly and negotiable towards the 15 million Kurds of Turkey — promoting their language, acknowledging crimes from the past (such as the Dersim genocide), and so on. Naturally, this extended to AKP’s cooperation with the PKK, in particular, direct negotiations between Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK’s imprisoned leader, and the Turkish state. All in the name of democratic reforms.
The HDP was founded in 2012, and spearheaded the negotiations between Turkey and the PKK. Aligned with the pre-existing Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), they visited Imrali where Ocalan was imprisoned, as well as the Qandil mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan to organize PKK guerilla withdrawals from Turkey to the Qandil mountain range. A disarmament letter from Ocalan to the PKK was even read in Amed, in Turkish and Kurdish, during Newroz celebrations in 2013, and everything seemed on track for a peaceful Turkey, where Turks and Kurds lived harmoniously and side by side.
Unfortunately, that was not to be.
In 2014, ISIS was gaining ground in Syria against all other factions, especially the PKK-aligned Democratic Union Party (PYD) and their militia wing, the People’s Protection Units (YPG). ISIS soon surrounded the Kurdish-held town of Kobane, on the Turkey-Syria border. By September, the town was completely besieged by ISIS, and by October, the terrorist group had captured two-thirds of Kobane and had, the YPG trapped in a few streets. The YPG held off the genocidal onslaught as best they could, but were quickly losing ground. External intervention, it seemed, was their only hope.
A hope which Turkey would not provide.
Erdogan has funded various terrorist organizations in Syria since 2011, including ISIS. Supplies flowed into the caliphate from the Akcakale/Gire Spi border gate, jihadists used Turkey as a hub to join ISIS, and oil from ISIS-controlled oilfields was piped through Turkey via the Ceyhan pipeline. Erdogan’s desire to see Syrian President Bashar al-Assad toppled, and replaced with an Islamist-aligned government in Syria, was the ulterior motive for all this.
As Kobane was falling to ISIS, Turkish security forces refused to allow Kurds from Suruc to cross into Syria and fight ISIS. Erdogan also refused international calls to do so, merely stating “Kobane is about to fall to ISIS”, and noting that Turkey would only launch a military operation against ISIS “if it was also against Assad’s forces.” This led to the Kobane protests among Turkey’s Kurdish population, which denounced Turkey’s lack of intervention against ISIS in Kobane. The HDP was a strong supporter of the protests, calling strictly for nonviolence, though some did occur. Regardless, with American intervention, ISIS was finally pushed out of Kobane by January 2015, and tensions temporarily waned.
Around this time, Turkey was preparing for its’ June 2015 election, and the HDP considered running. Previously, they fielded independent candidates to run, in case the 10% electoral threshold was not passed. Despite the risk, the HDP decided to run, with Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag, co-chairs of the party, as candidates.
In a landslide, they won 13.12% of the vote, far exceeding the parliamentary threshold, and earning 80 out of 550 seats in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, even denying Erdogan’s ruling AKP a majority for the first time. This was due to several reasons, namely, the Kobane protests, which were widely considered to have revitalized the Kurdish national consciousness in Turkey. Kurds saw themselves as Kurds to a much greater extent than before, and demanded greater rights against the domineering, near century-long Turkish rule.
Erdogan was outraged by this and called for a snap election that November in an attempt to regain a parliamentary majority after coalition talks broke down. Shortly after HDP’s electoral victory, though, prior tensions came to a flashpoint with the 2015 Suruc bombing.
On July 20, 2015, over 100 Kurds going to Kobane to rebuild the city were killed or wounded by an ISIS suicide bomber in Suruc. Turkish police, by all accounts, did nothing to stop the bomber and even deliberately neglected the security in the area. This, with many other incidents, led to the breakdown of the Turkey-PKK peace process, since Turkey, while supposedly “negotiating” with the PKK, left them to die at the hands of ISIS in Syria.
Thus, the PKK-Turkey conflict resumed: Parts of Amed, Merdin, Nisebin, Sirnak, Cizre, Silopi, Farqin, Dersim, Hakkari and other areas were leveled to the ground by Turkish bombs. Curfews were imposed, and Turkish forces committed war crimes, such as the Cizre basement massacre, and the deliberate destruction of Amed’s historic district of Sur — this, combined with Erdogan’s fear-mongering, led to AKP re-winning their parliamentary majority, as it relied on the PKK threat, which it itself was responsible for.
Once Turkey effectively defeated the PKK in early 2016, all eyes were on the HDP. Immediately, the HDP pioneering negotiations between Turkey and the PKK became their disadvantage, as they were immediately branded as “the political arm of the PKK” by the pro-government Daily Sabah. They came to this conclusion based on some of HDP’s statements supporting the PKK, though so too were AKP politicians making identical statements themselves! Thereafter, they targeted and arrested HDP co-chairs Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag. Hundreds of HDP mayors were replaced with AKP trustees.
On March 17, 2021, after countless HDP-affiliated persons in all levels of government were jailed, AKP-led voting fraud in HDP strongholds, as well as repeated slanders against the HDP, the Constitutional Court agreed to start the process to close the HDP, in an indictment accepted on 21 June. Though the HDP was recently granted more time for its’ defense, the upcoming verdict of the Kobane trials — with critics of them systematically silenced, — is clear.
So much for AKP’s “democratic reforms”, and pledge to resolve the Kurdish question. Instead, it’s clear that they have done exactly the opposite — and in doing so, proved that while in most of the world, justice is blind, in Turkey, justice is anything but.
Anonymous is an Anatolian Greek and Georgian activist for minority rights in Turkey and is strongly against Turkish propaganda and Turkification.
