Turkey’s Erdogan visits Diyarbakir, seeking Kurdish support

Turkey’s Erdogan visits Diyarbakir, seeking Kurdish support

Posted on April 2, 2017 by Editorial Staff in Kurdistan, Politics

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan in Diyarbakir, Turkish Kurdistan, April 1, 2017. Photo: Reuters

DIYARBAKIR-AMED, Turkey’s Kurdish region,— Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan described himself as a “guardian of peace” on Saturday as he called on Kurds in Turkish Kurdistan to vote ‘yes’ in a referendum in two weeks time on reforms that would grant him sweeping new powers.

Since July 2015, Turkey initiated a controversial military campaign against the PKK in the country’s southeastern Kurdish region after Ankara ended a two-year ceasefire agreement. Since the beginning of the campaign, Ankara has imposed several round-the-clock curfews, preventing civilians from fleeing regions where the military operations are being conducted.

Turkish Kurdistan (southeastern Turkey) has been rocked by some of the most intense fighting in three decades of conflict between Kurdish militants and Turkish security forces.

The UN accused Turkish security forces of committing serious abuses during operations against Kurdish militants in Turkish Kurdistan after a regional ceasefire collapsed in July 2015.

According to a United Nations estimate, about 2,000 people, mostly Kurds, were killed and up to a half a million displaced in the state’s conflict with Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants.

The pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), strongly supported in the southeast but cast by Erdogan as an extension of the PKK, was among the targets of the president’s ire during a rallying speech in the region’s largest Kurdish city Diyarbakir.

“These supporters of the PKK keep on saying ‘peace, peace, peace’. Does empty talk bring peace? Could there be peace with those who walk around with weapons in their hands?” he said.

“We are the guardians of peace, we are the guardians of freedoms,” he said as a crowd of several thousand in the city center waved Turkish flags.

“WALK TOGETHER”

The ruling AK Party, which Erdogan founded, also has strong support in the southeast. In a close race, pollsters say Kurdish voters, about a fifth of the electorate, could tip the balance in the April 16 referendum.

The HDP opposes the constitutional reform but its ability to campaign has been devastated by a crackdown which has led to the jailing of its leaders, a dozen of its MPs and thousands of its members on charges of PKK links. The state has taken over municipalities which the HDP had hitherto run.

The HDP denies direct links to the PKK, seen as a terrorist organization by Europe, the United States and Turkey.

“We are ready to talk, to walk together with everyone who has something to say or has a project,” Erdogan said. “We have one condition. There will be no guns in their hands.”

Erdogan says Turkey needs a strong presidency to avoid the fragile coalition governments of the past. His critics cite the arrest, dismissal or suspension of more than 100,000 teachers (including 11,500 Kurdish teachers), civil servants, soldiers, judges and journalists since a failed coup last July as evidence of his authoritarian instincts.

The PKK took up arms in 1984 against the Turkish state, which still denies the constitutional existence of Kurds, to push for greater autonomy for the Kurdish minority who make up around 22.5 million of the country’s 79-million population. Nearly 40,000 people have been killed in the resulting conflict since then.

A large Kurdish community in Turkey and worldwide openly sympathise with PKK rebels and Abdullah Ocalan, who founded the PKK group in 1974, and has a high symbolic value for most Kurds in Turkey and worldwide according to observers.

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