Türkiye’s Kurds turn their back on Erdogan

First modification: 05/07/2023 – 14:47

“It’s time to change,” the resident of Diyarbakir, the unofficial capital of Turkey’s Kurds, told AFP. “To anyone who watches television, the Kurds are terrorists,” says Ali, who declines to give his full name for fear of reprisals. Without naming him, he explains that he will vote for Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP, social democrat), which heads a six-party coalition. “But I would be lying if I said that I fully trust him,” he says.

Kurds — about a fifth of the country’s 85 million people — were persecuted in post-Ottoman Turkey created by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the CHP. The modern republic denied the very existence of the community, depriving the Kurds of their rights to culture and language.

After coming to power in 2002, President Erdogan’s AKP (Islamo-conservative) party became popular with the Kurds, seeking an agreement to end the Kurds’ bloody struggle for autonomy. But the failure of these talks in 2015 led to the resumption of the armed conflict between the Turkish state and the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, an armed group described as a terrorist by Ankara and its Western allies.

Turkey’s main pro-Kurdish party, the HDP, has paid a heavy price for this new upsurge in confrontation, as it is accused of being linked to the PKK. Selahattin Demirtas, its main leader, has been jailed since late 2016 for “terrorist propaganda”, and the party is threatened with closure.

– ‘Open-air jail’ –

After lengthy negotiations, the HDP requested a vote for Kemal Kiliçdaroglu at the end of April, a support that could prove decisive for the opposition. Mehmet Emin Yilmaz will follow the slogans of the party, the third political force in the country. “I am Kurdish. The HDP defends my rights. If the police stop me unfairly, the HDP will take care of me,” says the 60-year-old man.

Although the day of the presidential and parliamentary elections is approaching, the streets of Diyarbakir seem oblivious to the electoral hustle and bustle. “People are under pressure, there are control cameras everywhere. If there are more than two people together, a policeman without uniform appears immediately,” says Erdem Unal, a local CHP official. “Diyarbakir became an open-air prison,” he says. Erdogan’s recent alliance with the far-right Huda-Par party has also reopened wounds.

Huda-Par is linked to the Kurdish Hezbollah movement — separate from the Lebanese Shiite group of the same name — which is made up of Sunni Islamists and was implicated in the killings of Kurdish and feminist activists in the 1990s. Some analysts see in the Kurdish Hezbollah a tool of the authorities to fight against the Kurdish insurgency of the PKK.

For Eyup Burc, founder of the now closed pro-Kurdish television channel IMC, Erdogan’s support for Huda-Par betrays his fear of losing votes even among the most conservative Kurds. “Polls show only 15% support for Erdogan in Diyarbakir and it’s still falling,” he says. Kemal Kiliçdaroglu’s CHP is all but invisible in Diyarbakir, but the 74-year-old candidate wins sympathy for his Alevi faith and his, albeit discreet, Kurdish identity.

Most Kurds call him “Piro”, which comes from “pir”, the Kurdish word for grandfather and also describes an Alevi religious leader. However, Kurds continue to have reservations about the candidate, who has supported incursions into Syria since 2016 by the Turkish army against armed Kurdish groups.

Abbas Sahin, whose Green Left party will represent HDP candidates in parliamentary elections to avoid a possible ban, hopes the double vote on May 14 will throw Erdogan into the “dustbin of history.”