Erdoğan hits out at the Kurds

By Alev Scott

Is Turkey’s war against ISIL really aimed at the PKK?

ISTANBUL — Less than two months after the Kurdish-rooted Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) entered the Turkish Parliament for the first time with a historic 13 percent of the vote, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has accused its representatives of having links to “terrorist groups” and dismissed the Kurdish peace process as “impossible.”
The HDP, widely viewed as the political arm of the armed Kurdish group PKK, has repeatedly declared its commitment to a peace deal between the Turkish government and Kurdish militants after decades of fighting, but has recently come under intense pressure in the wake of clashes between Turkish troops and PKK fighters in Turkey’s southeast region.

It is not possible for us to continue the peace process with those who threaten our national unity and brotherhood — Erdoğan

“It is not possible for us to continue the peace process with those who threaten our national unity and brotherhood,” said Erdoğan, the former Prime Minister during his Justice and Development Party (AKP)’s last 12 years in power, speaking before a trip to China on Tuesday.
He also advised that politicians with links to “terrorist groups” should be stripped of their legal immunity to prosecution, apparently referring to members of the HDP. In a dramatic live broadcast, which was not aired by any of the main news channels in Turkey, HDP co-chair Selahattin Demirtaş responded by saying that all 80 of his party’s deputies will collectively file a petition to pre-emptively lift their own immunity on Wednesday, which they did — an unprecedented move in Turkish political history. The petition will be subject to a vote in Parliament, requiring 51 percent to pass.
“It is a gamble, but a brave one,” says Gareth Jenkins, senior fellow with the Silk Roads Studies Program. “If the HDP MPs’ immunity is lifted and they are charged, then Turkey will be condemned internationally for persecuting democratically elected MPs. If the AKP doesn’t vote for their immunity to be lifted, then the HDP will have called its bluff.”
Jenkins also notes that the timing of Erdoğan’s attack on HDP officials is telling.
“The timing does not make logical sense — the HDP has been more critical of the PKK in the past few weeks than ever before, so this indicates that Erdoğan is trying to win back on the battleground and in the courts what he lost at the ballot box,” Jenkins says.
On Wednesday, it was announced that the deputy chairman of the AKP, Süleyman Soylu, would bring a case against Demirtaş personally in response to his claim that the AKP established a 3,500-strong “cheating team” to commit electoral fraud in June’s general elections.
After the June 7 elections, which resulted in a hung parliament, Turkey has a caretaker government comprising the pre-June AKP cabinet and is currently involved in coalition negotiations. On August 24, there will be a vote of confidence on the government proposed by Prime Minister Davutoğlu, who has remained in charge during the past week of escalating violence.
On Monday, a man later identified as an ISIL sympathizer blew himself up in Suruç, on the Turkish-Syrian border, killing 31 activists delivering aid to the nearby Kurdish town of Kobane in Syria. The incident resulted in Prime Minister Davutoğlu giving the executive command for Turkish jets to strike ISIL targets in Syria from Turkish airspace.
The strikes, which on Tuesday were given full approval by NATO, have also hit PKK targets in both Syria and Iraq, drawing the condemnation of Iraqi Vice President Nouri al-Maliki while strengthening a widely held belief among the Kurdish community and critics of the AKP that Turkey’s recent operations are primarily aimed at the PKK.
In the past few days, police have arrested 1,050 people with suspected links to ISIL, PKK and far-left anarchist groups in nationwide raids, the majority — around 80 percent — in the latter two groups. By contrast, a poll published Tuesday by research company Metropoll showed that Turkish citizens across the political spectrum consider ISIL a greater threat than the PKK in the border area, and 72.3 percent would consider an invasion of Syria to be detrimental to Turkey’s interests, compared to 17.3 percent who would consider it beneficial.
The PKK has claimed that Monday’s Suruç bombing was a provocation orchestrated with the knowledge of the AKP, which held a majority in the Turkish parliament from 2002 until the recent June election. Senior figures in the AKP and Erdoğan, who is nominally impartial, are widely rumored to be keen on early elections in the wake of the AKP’s disappointing June result.
“Continued PKK-related violence could drive many HDP voters (especially in the cities and among the non-Kurdish HDP voters) into “safer” parties as they perceive the probability of a judiciary crackdown on HDP increasing, whether it is eventually banned or not,” says Erik Meyersson, assistant professor at the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE).
“Meanwhile, AKP and [far-right] MHP politicians will be continuing their verbal attacks on HDP as the political wing of the PKK to further strengthen this expectation.”
The HDP co-chairs, usually restrained when giving public statements, especially during the last few weeks of precarious coalition talks, has backed the PKK’s theory that the AKP knew in advance about Monday’s bombing. Co-chair Fiden Yusekdag said that “nothing happens in Turkey without MIT [Turkey’s secret service]’s knowledge,” and Demirtaş described it as part of Erdoğan’s “dirty war.”
Demirtaş’ speech on Tuesday trod a fine line between denouncing the AKP’s stance and distancing the HDP from PKK actions. He described the murder of two policemen in Urfa last week as “dirty” and said that “blood cannot be washed away with blood,” an apparent condemnation of the PKK’s practice of recrimination. On June 22, he gave an interview in the Turkish daily Radikal in which he referred to his divergence of opinion with head command in Kandil, the mountain range home to the PKK, saying “we do not think the same on every matter.”

Demirtaş is undeniably in between a rock and a hard place — Erik Meyersson

“Demirtaş is undeniably in between a rock and a hard place,” says Meyersson. “To denounce terrorism, even from all sides, would be politically costly within his own camp. Notwithstanding the HDP members themselves who would oppose this, the PKK could see this as a betrayal and cause severe potential damage to HDP. For example, it could in principle demand that Kurds outright boycott the next elections, or it could create an environment where voting cannot take place for security reasons.”
Further suspicion of the AKP’s intentions has resulted from Ankara granting the use of the Incirlik airbase in south Turkey last week to U.S. forces for their strikes against ISIL, after refusing to cooperate for months. While the ostensible reason is that Turkey is taking a step forward in the fight against ISIL in the wake of Monday’s attack, there is speculation that a deal may have been struck concerning U.S. military support of the Kurds, who are historically Ankara’s number one concern in the southeast region. A New York Times article on July 23 quoted a NATO official saying that “the Turks always drive a hard bargain,” prompting questions of what exactly that bargain was.
In the light of Erdoğan’s recent statement on the “impossible” peace process and threats of prosecution of HDP deputies, the party’s future as the hope for a Kurdish settlement seems less bright.
“If the AKP prosecutes Demirtaş and [co-chair] Yuksekdağ it will send a clear message to Kurds: The political process has been rejected, go back to the mountains,” says Jenkins. “This would be a disaster.”
Despite its recent blow, Meyersson is hopeful for the long-term chances of the peace process.
“Despite its anti-HDP rhetoric, [the government] still needs the Kurdish electorate in upcoming elections and any possible future constitutional referendum. It knows beating the PKK militarily is going to be extremely difficult, very costly domestically, and that some form of negotiation will have to resume at some point