We thank you both for joining us today. Before our guests’ opening remarks, I would like to briefly detail and describe the background of the People’s Democratic Party (HDP) and what brings us to our current discussion. The HDP, established in 2012, was founded with the goal of representing the interests and rights of approximately 20 million Kurds in Turkey, as well as other minorities; this was on the heels of five major Kurdish parties being officially banned in Turkey, dating back to 1990. In the 2015 elections, led by Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yüksekdağ, the HDP greatly exceeded expectations and gained over 13% of the national vote, easily passing the 10% threshold in the Turkish government. In 2016, following Turkey’s coup attempt, the Erdogan-led government initially focused their vengeance on the Gulenist movement, but turned their sights to the HDP soon thereafter. At Erdogan’s order, the Turkish judiciary began submitting HDP elected officials to anti-terrorism accusations. Following the Turkish Parliament’s decision to revoke immunity for several HDP politicians in May of 2016, Demirtas, the party’s co-leader, was imprisoned in November on bogus charges of spreading propaganda against the Turkish state and namely on behalf of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). This was only the beginning of the calculated efforts to dismantle the HDP. Since then, thousands of its members have been jailed; over 150 elected officials have been forcibly removed from office and replaced with government appointed trustees, and after winning in 65 municipalities in the 2019 elections, the HDP now controls only five small towns. More recently on March 17th of this year, a Turkish court’s chief prosecutor, following threats from the AKP and their nationalist allies, the MHP, filed a suit to officially and permanently close down and ban the HDP. On March 31st, the constitutional court returned the case for closure, citing procedural deficiencies. It claims that once the deficiencies are rectified, it will re-examine the file. There is little doubt that the AKP and the MHP will continue aggressively to pursue closure of the HDP by all means necessary. Now we will ask our panelists to provide opening remarks.
