In Turkey, Constitutional Court bans pro-Kurdish party, ousts members of parliament

by Lou Ann Matossian

Published: Wednesday December 16, 2009 in Dateline Democracy: News and views from today’s Turkey

The logo of the the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP).

Minneapolis - Turkey's Constitutional Court closed the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) and banned 37 of its members from participating in a political party for five years, reported Today's Zaman on Dec. 11. The charge: too-close association with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

"The PKK is a result of the Kurdish issue and not a cause of it," declared the DTP's Washington office in a statement on the closure hearing.

"The state's evaluation of all identities and cultures other than ‘Turkishness' as ‘the other,' ‘enemy,' and ‘separatist' has caused many tragedies and created much pain since the establishment of the republic," said the communiqué. "Demanding closure of a party because it doesn't support the official state ideology and criticizes the state's policies is incompatible with any democratic perspective, morality or law."

"If the DTP is forced to close," Bugün's Gülay Göktürk had warned on Dec. 10, "there is an enormous faction whose actual size is unknown to us, waiting to demand their stolen rights and freedoms." Indeed, violence broke out in several cities, including Istanbul, in the wake of the party's ban.

Already on Oct. 27, the Human Rights Association of Turkey had expressed concern that the government's progress regarding democracy and human rights was coinciding with a "rapid increase" in violations of those rights, especially in Turkey's eastern and southeastern regions.

"If we turn away from a democratic solution to the Kurdish Question - the Republic's biggest project," stated Vice President Muharrem Erbey, who heads the organization's Diyarbakir (Dikranagerd) branch, "our country will be brought back a hundred years."

Armenians and Kurds: a historic parallel

"I see a very strong correlation not only regarding the solution but also regarding the origins of the Kurdish and Armenian issues," said Taner Akçam in a recent interview with the British blog "Changing Turkey in a Changing World." The interview appeared in the Armenian Weekly for Nov. 29.

In both cases, he explained, minority group demands for social reform and equality were repressed by the Turkish state as a threat to national security, resulting in an escalation of the conflict.

"If I may put it bluntly, the Armenian issue was the Kurdish issue of the 19th century," Mr. Akçam added. "Or the Kurdish conflict today is the Armenian conflict of the 19th century because in both cases the same mentality produced similar outcomes."

The historic parallel was apparently not lost on DTP deputy chair Selahattin Demirtas as he addressed the Turkish parliament on the Armenia-Turkey protocols on Oct. 21.

"During the last period of the Ottoman Empire, in 1915-16, the Union and Progress Party systematically pursued a policy of extermination of the Christians who had been the native peoples of the country for centuries," Mr.  Demirtas declared, as representatives of other parties shouted objections. "No national security considerations can be an excuse for the annihilation of a population by means of forced displacement and massacres."

Recognizing the systematic extermination of Armenians in 1915 "was a first for the Turkish Parliament," commented Ayse Gunaysu in the Armenian Weekly, noting that "it was a Kurdish MP who made this happen." [President Obama had addressed the issue in the same chamber on April 6, however.]

"The Kurds," she added, "some of whom actively took part in the Armenian Genocide, were also the first in Turkey to talk and write about the genocide of the Armenians and Assyrians."

Addressing the Assyrian association of Midyat in late December 2008, DTP chair Ahmet Türk apologized for the Kurdish role in "the events" of 1915, Turkish and Assyrian news sources reported at the time. (Midyat is located in the southeast, near the former Armenian Catholic stronghold of Mardin.)

"Probably we, as Kurds, have our stake in the killing of this [cultural] richness," he acknowledged. "Today, when we see Armenian and Assyrian brothers [sic], and look at them, we feel shame."

DTP to appeal

In a lawsuit filed in November 2007, Chief Public Prosecutor Abdurrahman Yalçinkaya had demanded that 219 members of the DTP, including Mr. Türk and several sitting legislators, be banned from politics, Hürriyet reported. Mr. Türk and MP Aysel Tugluk were expelled from parliament after the court ruling was published in the official gazette, according to Today's Zaman.

Having lost her parliamentary immunity from prosecution, Ms. Tugluk is to be brought to court "by force" next spring to be charged with membership in the PKK, an Istanbul court ruled on Dec. 15. If convicted in the seven ongoing cases against her, the 44-year old attorney faces up to 50 years in prison.

Radikal columnist Oral Çalislar maintained that despite the current impasse - or what he called a "sharp curve" - in Kurdish-Turkish relations, most people in both societies favor a peaceful solution. "It is not possible that death and war be the desire of the majority," he wrote on Dec. 9.

"If you go to Diyarbakir or any other place in The Southeast," Mr. Çalislar continued, "you will see that the demand of identity that DTP voices is the common demand of all Kurds - no matter what parties they vote for."