HDP supporters including Selahattin Demirtaş marching to Cizre after thir convoy was stopped by police. September 2015. Wikicommons/Mahmut Bozarslan (VOA). Some rights reserved.At time of writing, it has only been a month and a half
since Turkey’s controversial referendum and the referendum has already fallen
off the agenda in Turkey.
Indeed, only a couple of days after the referendum, the Republican
People’s Party (CHP), the second biggest party in Parliament, had instead begun
discussing potential candidates for the presidency in the 2019 elections. The
CHP, which represents itself as the main opposition party, did object to the
election results and submitted an appeal against fraud to the European Court of
Human Rights. The party’s leader also stated his disapproval of protests taking
place in the streets and called on the crowds denouncing the election results
to go back home.
The party’s representatives now claim that their primary aim
is to get ready for the 2019 elections so that they can ‘take Erdoğan down’ and
replace him with another president who – like Erdoğan under the new
presidential system – would have the power to override parliament and issue
decrees.
In a country where prisons are filled with dissenting voices
(including MPs and elected mayors), where emergency decrees have increasingly
deprived hundreds of thousands of people of their jobs, and 83 elected mayors
have been replaced with government-appointed trustees, it would be naïve to
think that CHP representatives really believe that the 2019 elections will be
free of fraud and that Erdoğan would accept defeat. Why, then, did the
so-called opposition party, which launched a “no” campaign against Erdoğan,
object so meekly to the controversial election results and call its supporters
off the streets?
The HDP
challenge
Today, as the authoritarian tendencies and aims of Erdoğan’s
Justice and Development Party (AKP) have started to target ever larger swathes
of the population, including that segment which enjoys the privilege of being
Turkish in a nationalist and profoundly anti-Kurdish society, AKP polices have
garnered broader international attention.
Noting the policies enacted under the current state of
emergency and the enormous powers that will be given to the president after the
2019 elections, commentators have claimed that Turkey is undergoing a
historical transformation. While it is true that Turkey is going through a
historical process of change, this shift has not come about just as a result of
state-of-emergency policies which for decades have targeted Kurds and working-class
Alevis living in the urban margins.
No. For the first time in its history, in the elections of
June 2015 Turkey witnessed the electoral success of a political party (the
People’s Democracy Party, the HDP) emerging from the long criminalized Kurdish liberation
movement that includes the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), a Fanonian party which
adopts an anti-colonial resistance strategy against the Turkish State. Indeed, the
establishment of an umbrella party that brings Kurds, socialists, feminists,
LGBT activists, and critical Muslims together was an aspiration of the PKK
leader Abdullah Öcalan, and the HDP was successful in realizing this aspiration.
As a result of the election campaign carried out by HDP
co-chairs Figen Yüksekdağ, the former chair of the Socialist Party of the
Oppressed (ESP), and Selahattin
Demirtaş, a Kurdish politician and human rights activist, the HDP passed the
10% threshold in Parliament by receiving 13.12% of votes (six million in total)
and gaining 80 seats in the Parliament.
The party did not only gain the majority of the votes in
Turkey’s Kurdistan, where a significant percent of the population have voted
for Kurdish candidates for years, but was also successful in the peripheries of
the region and in western Turkey. Given the fact that Turkey’s ruling elites
have been waging a systematic war against Kurdish civil politics for decades –
a situation which Derya Bayır (2014) refers to as “politicide”[1] – a
systematic targeting of the Kurdish political leadership and its solutions to
the Kurdish problem, the HDP’s electoral success was tremendously significant
in ways that basic statistics cannot measure.
This success not only endorsed the Kurdish liberation
movement’s adamant insistence on civil politics in spite of the decades-long
lawfare and warfare waged against Kurdish activists: it also demonstrated the
possibility of the de-criminalization of stigmatized Kurdish political voices
in the eyes of the Turkish public.
Authoritarianism
Indeed, aware of the challenges posed by the HDP’s peace and
democracy block and seeing the party as an existential threat, the AKP
administration cancelled the June 2015 elections, refused to form a coalition
government and hastened to re-initiate the war in Turkey’s Kurdistan. According
to Turkey’s parliamentary system, if the party which came the first in the elections
cannot form a majority government, it has to form a coalition government. And, according
to the unwritten traditional rules, if that party cannot or does not form a
coalition government, the President must then hand over the authority to form a
government to the second biggest party in the parliament. However, Erdoğan did
not follow this traditional rule and instead asked for early elections.
Interestingly, the CHP leadership, who under normal
circumstances would be responsible for forming the government, did not
remonstrate against Erdoğan’s transgression of this rule. Actually, after the
June elections, the CHP leadership objections to Erdoğan remained simply rhetorical
and the party became partners with Erdoğan in the large-scale violence directed
against Kurds in Turkey.
Nationalist backlash
Shortly after the elections in 2015, Turkish military forces
occupied Kurdish towns, declared curfews, took lives and left hundreds of
thousands of Kurds homeless and dispossessed. Throughout this process,
Parliament granted immunity to military personnel who were “serving” in
Kurdistan, while members of Parliament were stripped of their immunity with the
goal of putting HDP parliamentarians behind bars – a move backed by MPs
from the AKP, CHP and Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). As of today, thirteen
HDP parliamentarians, including its co-chairs, have been imprisoned on the
grounds of encouraging or supporting terrorism, and others expect to be
arrested as well.
Turkey’s long-suppressed Kurdish political struggle found an
opening during the brief “peace process” carried out between 2013 and 2015,
managing to become the second biggest opposition party in the country. It not
only gained the support of Kurds but also Turks who for a long time had turned
a blind eye to the various forms of violence inflicted on Kurds.
At the same time, the PKK and its affiliate, the People’s
Defense Units (YPG), took major steps toward building multi-ethnic and
multi-religious autonomous areas of governance in Syria (Rojava) and in Iraq
(Shingal), thereby becoming key actors in those regions. Yet, AKP, CHP and MHP
consider PKK and YPG success outside Turkey a threat to Turkey and they all gave
their consent to the Turkish military’s bombardment of the areas in Syria and
Iraq that are under the control of these two related organizations. Recently,
in April 25, 2017, for instance, Öztürk Yılmaz the Deputy Chairperson of the
CHP, argued that Turkey has every right to fight against the PKK inside and
outside Turkey, celebrated the AKP-led Turkish military’s air bombing of Derik in Rojava (Syria), and Shingal (Iraq
Kurdistan) and argued that the military should have bombed these areas earlier[2].
It should be noted
that the founding national(ist) ideology of Turkey has crafted a narrative in
which the Kurds, like other colonized peoples, are “uncivilized” and
“ignorant,” and therefore incapable of ruling themselves. This ideology, of
course, is not independent of the Turkish ruling elites’ treatment of Kurdistan
and former Armenian lands in Turkey’s South East as an internal colony[3] with
Kurdish “subjects.” The political success of the Kurds, hence the colonized,
has intimidated not just the authoritarian AKP and ultranationalist MHP but
also the nationalist, secularist, so-called social democratic CHP.
When the AKP appointed trustees to 83 Kurdish provinces and
jailed elected Kurdish mayors and MPs, the CHP drew upon such a colonial
mindset in its refusal to see those moves as a breach of democracy. The CHP
gave its tacit consent to large-scale violence in Turkey’s Kurdistan by not objecting,
instead adopting a stance of inaction, and choosing to be partners (in crime)
with the AKP in silencing Kurdish political voices and putting the elected
representatives of Kurds behind the bars.
It was through just such a colonial mindset – so entrenched
in the Turkish political imaginary – that a CHP deputy nevertheless had the
audacity to say, in an interview with a Kurdish journalist after the
referendum, that “Kurds’ biggest hope [for solving the so-called Kurdish issue]
lay with the CHP” — presenting CHP as the
future benevolent savior of the Kurds.
Nightmare
The AKP and the so-called opposition in parliament are
united in their enmity towards Kurdish political voices and practices that have
taken action so effectively in Turkey and its neighboring regions. The
political success of the Kurdish liberation movement both within and outside
Turkey has prompted in those parties a sense of colonial envy, which not only
drives them to devalue and criminalize the accomplishments of the colonized but
also to try to erase it from the scene. In spite of their supporters’ fear of a
non-secular and religious society, the secularist CHP’s alignment with an
Islamist party proves that enmity against and fear of Kurds, who do not require
their benevolence and already have an effective purchase on politics, is one of
the key constitutive nightmares driving Turkish politics and/or its political
imaginary.
Today AKP and its partners in the Parliament are determined
to deploy every means to suppress Kurdish political voices and being. Yet,
history has also shown us that in spite of the systematic war against the Kurds,
Kurds have been a major political force in Turkey over time and that violence
against Kurds has not been successful in ending the Kurdish political mobilization.
The residents of the cities and towns that suffered the most brutal forms of
military violence after June 2015 elections, for instance, did not hesitate to
vote almost exclusively “No” for the executive presidency.
That is to say Kurds will not give up their struggle for
democracy and their rights in Turkey and HDP will continue to attract social
democratic votes, making it an even stronger rival to the self-proclaimed social
democratic CHP. This rivalry, along with colonial envy, will make CHP a more
anti-democratic and pro-violence party in the near future. In effect, the CHP,
the biggest opposition party, will continue to legitimize and even strengthen
Erdoğan’s power.
A shorter version
of this piece was published at PoLAR Forum on May 11, 2017. I would like to
thank Mehmet Rauf Kesici, Barış Ünlü and Mehmet Kurt for their comments on the
earlier version of this piece.
[1] Bayır, Derya. "The role of
the judicial system in the politicide of the Kurdish opposition." The
Kurdish question in Turkey: New perspectives on violence, representation and
reconciliation (2014): 21-46.
[2]
https://www.artigercek.com/chp-den-sengal-operasyonu-aciklamasi-normal-ve-gecikmis
[3]Beşikçi, İsmail. International Colony
Kurdistan. Taderon Press, 2004.