Kurds from Turkey run for office without knowing if they can take possession of their municipalities | Internationale



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This is not a threat to take in vain. Of the 105 municipalities controlled by Kurdish nationalists since the 2014 elections, Ankara has intervened on 94 of them (three of them, metropolitan councils, or more than 750 000 inhabitants) and has put elected in place of the elected mayors. Ministry of the Interior The government accuses since the consistories that the Kurdish nationalists financed or collaborated with the armed group of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which perpetrated numerous attacks against the security forces and civilians and included in lists of terrorist organizations. Turkey, the European Union and the United States.

It is true that during the so-called "ditch war" of 2015 and 2016, this journalist was able to observe, in at least two places, that PKK members had used municipal tools and machines to dig tunnels or build trenches. they justify that the material was stolen. His party, Co-President Sezai Temelli, denies links with the PKK: "We are the third largest Turkish party in terms of number of votes, we represent millions of people".

The strategy of the HDP before the elections on Sunday aims, in the east, to recover the town halls lost in offices and even to increase the number. In many localities of western Turkey, however, they did not nominate candidates where they thought candidates from other opposition parties would be more likely to be s & # 39; 39 to seize the office of the mayor of the ruling party, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its allies. the extreme right nationalist. Something has allowed Erdogan to denounce the fact that all the opposition is "serving the terrorists".

The campaign, of course, is not easy. The detention of HDP activists is ongoing and there are already 7,000 members of the pro-Kurdish group behind bars, including their former presidents Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yüksekdag, as well as 50 mayors and hundreds of municipal officials. And, according to an badysis by Transparency International, the HDP is virtually absent from public information, except as an object of negative news; Likewise, this happens in the majority of private television channels.

"We face many obstacles, they do not allow us to campaign in certain places or to enter public buildings", denounces Sirri Sakik, historical leader of Kurdish nationalism and mayoral candidate of the city of Mus after to have been expelled from the city. City Council of another locality, Agri. "The government has sent thousands of soldiers and policemen to our provinces, and town halls are now fortresses hidden behind barricades and access controls -" he laments during a telephone conversation. It should not be like that, the mayor is an elected official who must be accountable to the people, not hide it. "

An "undemocratic" imposition

A Kurdish journalist who does not want to give his name believes that in some cases, the listeners managed the local administrations even better than their predecessors, because they had the full support of the executive. But the majority of the population sees this as an "anti-democratic" imposition and an "attack on Kurdish identity," said a HDP colleague, Pervin Buldan, citing as an example the fact that the festivals have been eliminated by the Kurdish language and culture, replaced by the multilingual signs of these places by others exclusively in Turkish, a survey by the Center for Social and Political Research (Samer) corroborates this point of view: 53.2% voters from the regions of Eastern Anatolia and Southeast Anatolia declare themselves against the intervention of the municipal councils, while 31% support it.

What is not clear is how Erdogan intends to strip Kurdish municipalities of their mayors. In Turkey, in order to stand for election, it is necessary to obtain a criminal record certificate from the Ministry of Justice, as persons convicted of terrorism can not attend the elections even if they have served their sentence. "If there are candidates linked to terrorist organizations, the Electoral Commission must exclude them from the competition," says journalist Akif Beki. Karar and the former adviser to Erdogan, to whom he has now moved away. If you allow them to attend, if you allow citizens to choose them, under what pretext are you going to deprive them of their office? "

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