Word 'Kurdistan' sparks debate at Turkey Parliament

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region (Kurdistan24) – The use of the word “Kurdistan” by a lawmaker of Turkey’s pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) sparked a heated debate at the Turkish Parliament on Sunday.

During a session on a bill changing the constitution to transfer a majority of the Parliament’s powers to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, HDP lawmaker Sibel Yigitalp said “civilian massacres and a pillage of nature had taken place in Kurdistan,” as Turkish troops fought the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

The debate followed the banning for three sessions of another HDP MP Garo Paylan for calling the 1915 systematic extermination and forced deportation of some 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman authorities “genocide.”

Yigitalp mentioned Kurdistan three times in her speech and said there was a “Kurdish problem,” according to official minutes of the session released on the website of the Parliament.

“Expressions about non-existent places are used from this platform. Always the talk of a Kurdistan. Where is Kurdistan? There is no such place as Kurdistan in Turkey,” objected member of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) Ahmet Mus.

Other HDP members suggested Mus to check out previous remarks by Erdogan in which he accepted the existence of Kurdistan.

In November 2013, during a high-profile visit by the Kurdistan Region’s President Masoud Barzani to Diyarbakir, Erdogan, a founder of the AKP and the then-Prime Minister, used the word “Kurdistan” in reference to the region.

After criticism, Erdogan defended himself saying the republic’s founder Kemal Ataturk himself employed the word “Kurdistan” in his earlier speeches.

Moreover, he added members of the First Parliament of Turkey in 1920 from today’s southeastern region were called “Kurdistan representatives.”

Ataturk’s administration banned the word after the 1925 Kurdish rebellion led by Sheikh Said.

In response to HDP MPs, Parliamentary head of the AKP group Naci Bostanci conceded Erdogan had uttered the word in a historical context of the state of affairs in the Ottoman Empire.

MPs from the AKP’s opposition ally, the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), meanwhile, rejected outright Kurdistan as a word, and geography in Turkey.

During his Jan. 8 visit to the Region, Turkey’s Prime Minister Binali Yildirim refrained from using the name in his joint press conference with President Barzani.

Notably, Turkey’s Presidency, Prime Ministry, and Ministry of Foreign Affairs websites, as well as the government-run Anadolu Agency euphemistically refer to the Kurdistan Region as “the Kurdish Regional Administration of Iraq.”

Editing by Karzan Sulaivany