In what has formed a major debacle in the public domain, Turkey’s efforts to shut down one of the country’s largest opposition parties drew a sharp rebuke from the President Joe Biden –administration, which warned that the actions by Turkish authorities could “unduly subvert the will of Turkish voters” reports said.
According to the reports, the warning came after a top Turkish prosecutor filed a case with the Constitutional Court seeking to dissolve the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party, or HDP, after accusing it of links to a Kurdish militant group. In another striking move, Turkey’s parliament in a recent development stripped Omer Faruk Gergerlioglu, a prominent HDP lawmaker and human rights advocate, of his seat.
Reports said the moves sharply accelerated a year-long government crackdown on Kurdish politicians while undermining recent pledges by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to strengthen human rights in Turkey, including freedom of expression, as his government seeks to mend tattered relations with the United States and other Western allies.
State Department in a statement by its spokesman, Ned Price called the move against Gergerlioglu “troubling” and said the United States was “monitoring” the push to dissolve the HDP — a move he said would “further undermine democracy in Turkey, and deny millions of Turkish citizens their chosen representation.”
According to multiple reports, President Erdogan’s government has long accused the HDP of links to the insurgent Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which is classified as a terrorist entity by Turkey as well as the United States.
Records have it that since 2016, Turkish authorities have jailed leaders of the HDP and removed or arrested dozens of party members who were elected to mayoral seats. Ultranationalist allies of Erdogan’s ruling party have recently stepped up calls to ban the HDP.
A recent Twitter post by Erdogan’s spokesman, Fahrettin Altun, said the “HDP’s senior leaders and spokespeople, through their words and deeds, have repeatedly and consistently proved that they are the PKK’s political wing.”
Meanwhile, the HDP has denied acting on behalf of the PKK and tied the government crackdown to the party’s repeated success during recent elections, after decades in which a string of Kurdish parties struggled to gain political traction.
It was gathered that the party, the third largest in parliament, has peeled away voters from Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party by advocating for greater political and cultural rights for Kurds, who make up roughly a fifth of Turkey’s population but struggle for recognition in a country that privileges Turkish ethnicity.
The party, in a statement said “Not having been able to overpower HDP ideologically, politically or at the ballot box, they are now aiming to eliminate HDP from democratic politics by means of the judiciary. Their aggressiveness originates from their deep fear”.
Several human rights groups quipped that the threatened ban posed significant peril to Turkey’s already battered democratic institutions. It also escalated tensions with the United States, a NATO ally, which has chastised Ankara over human rights issues several times since President Biden took office.
Reacting to the criticisms, in a statement, Turkey’s Foreign Ministry said “We invite those who are unbalanced and attempt to interfere with internal affairs to respect the judicial processes carried out by independent courts,” the statement said.
It was gathered that in the recent case filed against the HDP, Supreme Court Chief Public Prosecutor Bekir Sahin accused the party of “aiming to destroy and abolish the indivisible integrity of the State with its country and nation”.
In addition to seeking to dissolve the party, the indictment asked for a permanent political ban on more than 600 of the party’s members, in an apparent attempt to prevent the HDP from reconstituting itself under a different name.
