Turkish President Erdogan's War Against the Kurds

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

The Kurds are the largest ethnic minority in Turkey, comprising between 15 and 20 per cent of the population.

The 14 million Kurds are primarily concentrated in the east and southeast of the country, and their cities have for forty years been victimized by war. 

At least 3,000 Kurdish villages have been razed to the ground, and Kurdish place names have been changed into Turkish in an attempt to obliterate the Kurds’ national memory.

The teaching of Kurdish is banned in practice and naming a child after one’s Kurdish parents remains illegal. 

Even speaking Kurdish was outlawed until the ban was officially lifted in 1991.

The Turkish government has always seen the conflict in terms of a war on terror: a campaign to eliminate the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which it views as a collection of separatists and bandits. 

In the summer of 2015 two years of calm ended in another outbreak after the main political party of the Kurdish movement, the left-wing Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), dealt President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) a blow in that year’s parliamentary elections.

The AKP lost control of the legislature for the first time in more than a decade. 

Angered, the President sent in the troops shortly afterwards. Since then, the war against Turkey’s Kurds has intensified, with at least 4,000 dead. 

Yet the conflict has gone almost unnoticed, eclipsed by the civil war in Syria.

In June Erdogan was re-elected to another five-year term as president, with the sweeping new powers he won in a referendum in April 2017. 

Still, in the parliamentary elections held simultaneously, even though Erdogan gained a parliamentary majority, the HDP passed the 10 per cent electoral threshold to enter parliament, winning 67 seats. 

They managed this although many of their officials were jailed on terrorism charges. The HDP also claimed there was a media blackout on its campaign and it was a victim of voter suppression by the government.  

The main electoral vehicle for Kurdish aspirations, the HDP is a Kurdish umbrella organization that unites several different groups active in Turkey, including socialist parties, feminists, anti-militarists, environmentalists and LGBT activists. 

As a matter of principle, the HDP leadership duo comprises one candidate with Kurdish roots and another with a Turkish and socialist background.

What has made the electoral success of the HDP possible was a strategy that involved turning away from a struggle solely for more rights for the Kurds and instead calling for the democratization of Turkey as a whole.

In February, announcing they were choosing the “path of resistance,” the HDP elected parliamentarians Pervin Buldan and Sezai Temelli as co-chairs.

“We will not be a part of accomplice of this dark and lawless period in Turkey's history,” Buldan stated before being elected.

“No matter how much they try to isolate us, no matter how much they try to discourage us by force and oppressive policies, we will rely on the spectacular strength of our rights and legitimacy that shines like the sun.”

Buldan is a prominent figure in the Kurdish political movement. In June 1994 her husband, Savas Buldan, a Kurdish businessman, was abducted by unidentified armed individuals, tortured and then murdered during Turkey’s war against the Kurds during the 1990s.

Sezai Temelli is a former economics professor at Istanbul University who lost his job in the massive purges that followed the attempted coup in July 2016.

The current clashes between Turkish security forces and PKK elements in southeastern Turkey have put the HDP under immense pressure.

Erdogan regularly describes the HDP and its members as “terror collaborators” who sympathize with the banned PKK.

In early October, the HDP revealed that Turkish authorities arrested 140 of their members and local politicians in operations across several provinces in an ongoing crackdown.

Currently, 94 municipalities formerly run by HDP-affiliate mayors in Kurdish population centers remain under the control of Ankara-appointed bureaucrats and not the elected officials who the Erdogan administration has purged and jailed since 2016.

The repression has been extreme, even by the standards of the Middle East.