Five more Kurdish municipalities seized by Turkish state on Kurdish Language Day
ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – On Friday, the Turkish state seized five more municipalities run by politicians from the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) on the same day Kurds celebrate the 88th anniversary of Kurdish Language Day.
“These include Siirt, Iğdır, Kurtalan, Baykan, and Altınova, the first two being city municipalities and the latter three district municipalities,” Feleknas Uca and Hişyar Özsoy, HDP-spokespersons said in a statement, received by Kurdistan 24.
“Turkish police have surrounded the municipalities with barricades; our mayors were detained in violent early-morning house-raids, and replaced with the so-called “trustees,” which we view as colonial officers, including those seized today.”
The ongoing government clampdown on the HDP started in 2016 after the now imprisoned former HDP co-leader Selahattin Demirtas garnered the support of 13 percent of voters in June 2015 parliamentary elections, costing the leading Justice and Development Party (AKP) a mandate to form a single-party government for the first time since coming to power in 2003.
“This morning, we woke up again to news of detained mayors of Kurdish municipalities, all democratically elected and now forcefully replaced by appointed trustees from Ankara,” Rosa Burç, a Ph.D. researcher of the Center on Social Movement Studies (COSMOS) at Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence, Italy, wrote on Twitter.
“I say ‘again’ because this has been ongoing since the govt’s de facto defeat in 2015 (elections). Where is the outrage?”
In October 2018, Turkeyish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan himself vowed to seize HDP municipalities after the local elections held on March 31, 2019.
The Turkish government has so far appointed trustees to a total of 45 HDP-run municipalities since the 2019 elections, when HDP won a total of 65 municipalities. Additionally, six HDP co-mayors who had won the elections were denied their election certificates.
“As of today, 21 Kurdish co-mayors elected in March 2019 remain behind bars and five of them are under custody. And dozens of our mayors previously elected in 2014, too, have been in prisons,” the HDP spokespersons said.
“Just like in the previous cases, there is of course no court decision for these new detentions and trustee appointments. These are all administrative measures of the Minister of Interior.”
The HDP officials underlined it “should be clear to the international community by now that these are groundless accusations exploited to justify the destruction of democratically won Kurdish municipalities.”
“As we emphasized before, we are fighting against two viruses simultaneously - COVID 19 and racist authoritarianism against the Kurds and their democratic will - both being severe public health issues.”
Earlier, Özsoy told Kurdistan 24 that Turkey is using the coronavirus pandemic to target the remaining Kurdish municipalities in the country’s southeast by taking down a few mayors “every couple of weeks”.
The goal of the government, he added, is to “further oppress the Kurds and the democratic opposition.”
The HDP finally called on the international community, including the EU, UN agencies, and Kurds internationally “to raise their voice and take action against these racist policies of Turkey’s government which are trying to establish the ‘trustee-regime’ as ‘the new normal’ in the country.”
The European Parliament’s rapporteur on Turkey, Nacho Sánchez Amor, urged Turkish authorities in a tweet “to stop removing mayors from office without court decisions. Local councils should have at least the possibility to appoint an interim mayor among its elected members! Credibility on fundamentals of democracy is at stake.”
Editing by John J. Catherine