Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here. So I agree with most of the points that Dr. Danford put forward but, I again, would like to start with a summary of what’s going on, and then I would like to share my two cents on why this is going on right now and why what you might expect to happen. For the definition of the situation, as you both are put forward, the public prosecutor of the Supreme court of appeals filed this indictment at the constitutional card for the closure of the party, which is the third-largest parliamentary group right now. So even with those MPs who are stripped of their privileges, the HDP still has more members of the parliament than the nationalist party, the MHP, who is the ally of AKP.
The indictment is again, I would like to repeat, Danforth point here is returned on technical details, and it is indeed tortured to read these indictments, just like any other court documents in produced in Turkish courts. But, the center of the indictment is again ties with terrorism and propagandizing for terrorism. Everything that is cited in the indictment is based on the previous court cases and the talks and press releases, public talks, and press releases are made by the members of the party. So even under Turkey’s legal courts and rules, there is nothing criminalizing. However, we do know that this is political, just like all the other, all other legal actions against the members of the Kurdish party. So thinking in the realm of law or the legal field is meaningless. But what the indictment asks is serious in terms of asking for five years of the political band for 687 members of the party, some of whom are deceased, this is one of the reasons why the indictment is returned to the prosecutor right now. But as I said, we know that this is political. We intuitively might know it, of course, but not just that. Right at the moment, when the prosecutor sent the indictment to the constitutional court, the people close to Erdogan made declarations, right? Even his director of communications said that it’s obvious that HDP has ties with terrorist organizations, It should be closed down, but the courts is going to make the decision. So this is of course, part of a larger crackdown on Kurdish politics. The HDP releases reports on human rights violations against the members of the party. Even they do not know the exact number of people who are detained in prison right now, right? It’s, it’s even hard to keep this record for the party because what’s going on is very large-scale and extremely arbitrary. Since 2015, over17,000 people who are members of the party affiliated with the party, they are detained. And around 4,000 people are in prison right now. We know that since municipal elections, now there are forty-eight municipalities that are governed by appointees, the trustees by the government. And this was also a policy in the elections before. The Biggest source of legitimacy for, of course, any group in power, but especially for AKP and Erdogan was that, they’re being elected there, but they never have that same respect for others who are elected. And there’s the other part where some members of the parliament are stripped of their immunity most recently, is Gergerlioğlu just put in jail. And The European court of human rights made the decision for the release of Demirtas, and there’s still no action under that. Now, of course, we don’t expect that to happen either.
So why is the government doing good right now? The short and obvious answer is to prolong their time in power. Maybe they’re even getting ready for the next election. And I honestly don’t think that they have a big major plan that they are playing out one by one, they’re testing the grounds.
This has been their strategy for over a decade right now. Creating spectacles is one of the major strategies of the government. And through those spectacles dominating the public agenda, right, controlling the topics to be discussed in the public space and also coming up with these mega projects and whatnot, but something foundational is also going on, the economy is in trouble. In addition to that, Turkey is in a big democratic backsliding it’s been going on for so many consecutive years right now that the country score is going down, and down is actually one of the worst right now. But the economy was working, it was operating on cheap labor. Most of it is cheap Kurdish labor, right? And it’s so troubling right now that it has become hard to control with the devaluation of the currency, especially against the US dollar and the uncontrollable interest rate, the rates on the high unemployment, and the real inflation rates, right? The figures declared do not reflect the real numbers.
So taking all of these together, the thresholds of Erdogan himself and AKP by itself, aren’t decreased, it isn’t declined. This is why they had to rely on these alliances with the nationalist party. This might give us some ideas about their religious woo but also how they govern the institutions. I think one of the main reasons for trying to ban HDP right now, which is something they do not even need because the party is most incapacitated, right? Their members are in jail, the leaders are in jail. It’s hard to take any political action on the ground in Turkey, anywhere in Turkey right now, because there is no official right to assemble. You can not hold a demonstration. So it’s hard to even organize on the ground, which the Kurdish people and the Kurdish movement has a lot of original ways to overcome these restrictions because they are experts in this right now. But still, the oppression is not on just the Kurdish opposition, but all fields of opposition right now is really harsh. Everyone has to deal with their own problems because everybody is in jail. So this is hard but I think they are not just trying to contain or limit the Kurdish politics itself, but also by making this another spectacle, trying to motivate their own election base on the basis of inciting nationalist sentiments. So this will be another way to hold their electoral base together or not to lose some part of it. That’s one of the main reasons I think it’s part of the no-controlled oppressive policies that we are dealing with right now.
So I will like to conclude by saying what might happen in the long run and in the short term. In the longer, of course, all of these are in wait, there hasn’t been a case in history, in politics, and even in the world that, you can just win by sheer operation. It’s impossible. This has been going on for over a century right now. But if you look more closely since the sixties, seventies this struggle between the Kurdish movement and the Turkish state, is not resolvable on this ground. We know that even if you put everyone in jail living if you ban all the parties three more, you cannot really erase this issue completely. Complete assimilation is impossible from this point on. So in the long run, we have all the reasons to be optimistic, but in the short run, I think we should be concerned and I am concerned. Nobody can really expect the immediate consequences of what might happen if HDP is banned right now, even, I don’t think the judiciary body or Erdogan himself, or the government can guess the immediate consequences. The sentiment with people, the sentiment of people on the ground IS more like this had happened before. in the 1990s, it was just natural, it was just an ordinary thing for the Kurdish parties to be banned.
every time it was banned a new party reemerged. Yes, this was the case before in the 1990s, this could happen again, of course. The Kurds always have a backup organization because they know what is to come, but I think the rapporteur of the government is also changing, right? The conditions are not really similar to the 1990s in a lot of aspects given also the tremendous, no socioeconomic changes throughout the Kurdish society, not just in Turkey, in general. So the analogy, the 1990s is meaningful in a lot of senses to give hope to people, but also the setting is a bit different. So the Kurdish organizations, the Kurdish political moment might come and I expect them to come up with another original way to deal with this as they did back in the 2000s to overcome the 10% threshold to nominate independent representatives for the parliament. And then once there was the power, even in the last elections, like HDP received 11.7 of the votes. So they have that electoral base right now to overcome the 10% threshold. But, but these creative ways to navigate the electoral system in Turkey can not be applied in the same way right now, because the parliament we know is not the same anymore. Since the 2017 referendum, I think it’s all different right now. So in the short run, I am concerned, but I also would like to be hopeful with the anticipation of what is to come in the long run.