Imprisoned Kurdish presidential candidate in Turkey holds 'e-rally' from behind bars

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – Selahattin Demirtas, Turkey’s most prominent Kurdish politician and a rival of incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Thursday held what he called an online rally on Twitter as authorities continue to keep him behind prison bars just two days short of elections in the country.

“Hello! I wholeheartedly greet everyone who came to the rally grounds from around the world. For the first time in the world, an e-rally is being held from a prison cell. In other words, we are now making history regarding the world democracy. I have to state this so that the Anadolu agency breaks the news,” Demirtas’ lawyers who were visiting him tweeted on his behalf.

His emphasis on the phrase “world democracy” was a cheeky rebuke to the public-funded but staunchly pro-Erdogan Anadolu news agency that last week announced Demirtas’  legally allocated 10-minute appearance on state TV as a “first in the history of world democracy,” apparently meant to praise Turkey for allowing him to speak in jail.

Anadolu Agency did not run a story about the Kurdish leader’s “e-rally.”

Turkish authorities keep Demirtas jailed while he stands accused of “terrorism and separatism,” for which prosecutors ask up to at least 142 years. Erdogan has expressed willingness to sign his execution should the Parliament reintroduce the death penalty.

The former Co-leader of the opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) then went on to condemn government-controlled state and private Turkish media’s “embargo” on him and his party during this election campaign for June 24 early polls.

Demirtas jokingly referred to a tea kettle he and other inmates use to make tea in prison, for it became a symbol because guards had searched his cell late last year but found nothing working on electricity but a kettle after tweets began to reappear on his official account.

“My beautiful people, this time when you vote you will either be choosing one-man dictatorship or democracy,” Demirtas said, warning against the prospects of the re-election of Erdogan who wants an even more powerful office.

Demirtas criticized Erdogan’s policy of total war on armed Kurdish groups in Turkey and Syrian Kurdistan. He said the current Turkish government’s approach was one based on spilling “youth’s blood.”

Following the 2015 collapse of peace talks with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the Turkish President argues that he has solved “the Kurdish question,” which he had promised to bring to a peaceful end a decade earlier in the unofficial Kurdish capital of Diyarbakir.

Demirtas said Erdogan came to power thanks to that promise “but now [he] tells people that there is no such thing as Kurdish question.”

Thirty-one tweets posted by Demirtas in the form of an election rally speech also focused on the situation of workers and farmers in Turkey, slamming government’s privatization of state-owned factories.

An administration under his rule would bring a secular, free education in mother tongue, he said.

Editing by Karzan Sulaivany