Turkish police began an operation on Tuesday to arrest 150 people in several cities in the southeast of the country. Among those detained are renowned politicians, lawyers, journalists and artists associated with Kurdish leftist political formations. The Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), the main Kurdish formation and third force in Parliament, pointed out that it is an operation to harm his party days before the presidential and parliamentary elections on May 14. “On the eve of the elections, for fear of losing power, they have resorted to arrests again,” HDP MP Tayip Temel said in a tweet.
The bar association of the city of Diyarbakir, where most of the arrests are concentrated, declared that at the moment there are 126 detainees and that the operation continues. Its president, Nahit Eren, warned that it is an “attempt to intimidate Kurdish voters” and that this operation cannot be separated from the “political agenda of the country.”
According to the public television channel TRT, the Prosecutor’s Office accuses the detainees of “recruiting”, “financing” and “propaganda” of the Kurdish guerrilla PKK, considered a terrorist organization in Turkey, the European Union and the United States.
Among those detained are the owner of the Mesopotamia (MA) news agency, Ferhat Çelik, editors of the Yeni Yasam newspaper and a journalist from Xwebun, the only Kurdish-language newspaper in the country. In a similar police operation, around twenty Kurdish journalists were arrested in October last year.
Several members of one of the main human rights organizations in Turkey, IHD, several jurists from the Association of Lawyers for Freedom (ÖHD), and a dozen theater actors have also been arrested in today’s operation.
The Diyarbakir Bar Association stated that the police operation is continuing and that the authorities have prevented them from contacting the detainees for at least 24 hours. For its part, ÖHD called the operation an “attack against democratic institutions before the elections” and indicated that they plan to appeal.
THE HDP, MAIN OBJECTIVE
The HDP party declared that the majority of detainees are senior officials of their party or members affiliated with the formation. The party has suffered in the last decade a great judicial pressure and of the Turkish authorities, under the accusation of ties with the Kurdish guerrilla PKK. At least 60 of the 65 HDP mayors have been seized by the government and their mayors arrested and replaced by trustees affiliated with the ruling party, the Islamist AKP. In addition, the HDP leadership has been in prison since 2016 for various legal cases related to the PKK, including its former leader and former presidential candidate, Selahattin Demirtas.
Due to a legal case to close the party, the HDP will contest the parliamentary elections in May under the name of the Green Left Party (YSP), to avoid the formation being affected in a possible closure during the electoral campaign. The YSP participates in a coalition with five other left-wing parties.
“The AKP government tried to exclude the HDP from the elections with the pressure of its closure and now it carries out a police operation 19 days before the elections. This is the fear of losing. Democratic politics cannot be chained”, said Ercument Akdeniz, leader of the EMEP Labor Party, in coalition with the pro-Kurdish formation in the elections.
The polls indicate that the Kurdish vote will be key in the parliamentary elections, where neither the government alliance, led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, nor the main opposition coalition would obtain a majority in the chamber. The HDP has remained stable in voting intentions since the formation appeared (2012), with about 10-12% of the votes.
In these elections he has not presented a candidate for the presidency, in a clear attempt to support the main candidate against Erdogan, the Social Democrat Kemal Kiliçdaroglu.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
